i got a fever, and the only cure is ... more cowbell
Last night another one of the profesoras - a bit of a deceptive term, since this one (her name is Concecao, pronounced con - seh - SOW) is only about 25 - from the school took us out to see some more local music. This time it was a percussion group made up of students and professors from the Universidade de Federal, which is supposedly the best of Salvador's 3-4 major universities.
One of the first songs was led by a professor who spoke very quietly (ironic for a percussion guy), was very thin, and dressed "like a beatnik" as one of my classmates observed, with a white flat golf hat, Lisa Loeb glasses and a black button down shirt and jeans. He started off playing waist-high bongo drums (or something like that - I don't know what the correct name for them is) and a few minutes into the song there came this roar of big bass drums from the back of the auditorium. Everyone turned around and around 10 kids with various sized drums, from large bass to smaller snare and bongo-style drums, marched down the main aisle with broad smiles. The sound was amazing. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
But ... once everyone got onto the stage and behind the professor, guess what he picked up? That's right, a cowbell. And he used it to lead everyone else with this unbelievably good percussion conversation, where he would hit the cowbell in the direction of a particular part of the band and they would answer back with some either simple or very complex response. So, basically the glue that held the whole thing together was none other than ... the cowbell.
A lot of what they played sounded like it could have been made up (oh, sorry, "improvised") on the spot, but after taking a step back I realized it had to take an incredible amount of skill and patience to be able to play this kind of music, and to get good at it. There were so many minor parts where one or a couple of musicians would wait essentially the entire song to hit their drum once or twice at the end, or in the middle, and for these people I'm not sure how they didn't fall asleep before it came to be their turn. A lot of them were clearly superior musicians, though, and it looked like they played percussion in addition to a number of other non-percussion instruments.
One particularly interesting instrument is the barimba, which is essentially a bow (one you hunt with) that gets held at the bottom, and the string gets struck by a stick (which presumably was originally an arrow) which makes a twangy, otherworldly sound and which has an amazing range of available tones. There's also a hollow shell, something like a coconut, attached to the bottom which when struck either close to or away from the player's chest can make a number of different percussive sounds.
And lastly, there was this hollow, tube-like horn that was made from a tree trunk, about 5 inches in diameter and probably 5 feet long. It sounded like one of those huge horns that Tibetan monks use and sort of sing through in this incredibly deep way, which makes them sound sort of like frogs. I'm sure my description is not doing any of this justice, but it was another one of those experiences that could happen only here and which I'm sure I'm not appreciating nearly as much as I should.
One of the first songs was led by a professor who spoke very quietly (ironic for a percussion guy), was very thin, and dressed "like a beatnik" as one of my classmates observed, with a white flat golf hat, Lisa Loeb glasses and a black button down shirt and jeans. He started off playing waist-high bongo drums (or something like that - I don't know what the correct name for them is) and a few minutes into the song there came this roar of big bass drums from the back of the auditorium. Everyone turned around and around 10 kids with various sized drums, from large bass to smaller snare and bongo-style drums, marched down the main aisle with broad smiles. The sound was amazing. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
But ... once everyone got onto the stage and behind the professor, guess what he picked up? That's right, a cowbell. And he used it to lead everyone else with this unbelievably good percussion conversation, where he would hit the cowbell in the direction of a particular part of the band and they would answer back with some either simple or very complex response. So, basically the glue that held the whole thing together was none other than ... the cowbell.
A lot of what they played sounded like it could have been made up (oh, sorry, "improvised") on the spot, but after taking a step back I realized it had to take an incredible amount of skill and patience to be able to play this kind of music, and to get good at it. There were so many minor parts where one or a couple of musicians would wait essentially the entire song to hit their drum once or twice at the end, or in the middle, and for these people I'm not sure how they didn't fall asleep before it came to be their turn. A lot of them were clearly superior musicians, though, and it looked like they played percussion in addition to a number of other non-percussion instruments.
One particularly interesting instrument is the barimba, which is essentially a bow (one you hunt with) that gets held at the bottom, and the string gets struck by a stick (which presumably was originally an arrow) which makes a twangy, otherworldly sound and which has an amazing range of available tones. There's also a hollow shell, something like a coconut, attached to the bottom which when struck either close to or away from the player's chest can make a number of different percussive sounds.
And lastly, there was this hollow, tube-like horn that was made from a tree trunk, about 5 inches in diameter and probably 5 feet long. It sounded like one of those huge horns that Tibetan monks use and sort of sing through in this incredibly deep way, which makes them sound sort of like frogs. I'm sure my description is not doing any of this justice, but it was another one of those experiences that could happen only here and which I'm sure I'm not appreciating nearly as much as I should.
posted by n10471 at 8:10 PM
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