Ah, my friends, some weeks just aren’t meant to be written about. So I’ll write about some other things instead. This week could be summed up succinctly as I’m-sick-&-it’s-raining. As somebody quipped in an email – it sounds more like RI than RIO. It’s cold & I didn’t bring warm enough clothes. Last year I had to rush out & buy tank tops & flip flops as I had no clothes for hot weather. This year I have only tank tops and flip flops and tiny summer sweaters and I long for a long-sleeve shirt, ah, well…
Monday, 3-31, I was in a head-cold coma most of the day. Took a short walk to sit in a glimpse of afternoon sun that peaked through briefly & came home exhausted. Tuesday I was faced with Monday’s work undone, so I spent 6 straight hours at the computer catching up on grading and emailing my 100 students & advisees. But all day long I kept encouraging myself with the reward of going to Trapiche to hear choro that night – for the first time this trip. And so I did, meeting Romulo & Mariana by plan and Jesse by coincidence. 5 of the 7 regulars were out, but the subs were great and included Thiago Sousa – Ronaldo’s son – on bandolim. & Rogerio Caetano nailed down the kitchen with an iron stake – wow can that man play 7-chord! Left early coughing…
Wednesday I recovered from Tuesday. It is such a drag to be sick! But at least it isn’t dengue. Dengue is the word on everyone’s lips & the spector hovering over the slightest sniffle. It’s a tropical disease and the symptoms start as flu-like and escalate. It’s known as “break-bone fever” because of the severe body aches added to fever, headache & rash. It’s transmitted by one type of mosquito, there are 4 types of dengue, and getting one type makes you immune to that one, so I guess 4 is the maximum number of times you can get it. If you have it and are lucky you just feel terrible for 10 days. If it turns serious it can result in internal hemorrhaging and death. Brazil is in a complete uproar about it now as it has hit Rio and other cities – not just rural areas–and the deaths usually occur in poor children and it happens more or less every year at this time & there’s still no vaccine, so there’s much hand-wringing and finger-pointing, and how-could-we-let-this-happen-here in every newspaper. But, no, I do not have dengue, just a bad but regular cold.
Thursday the week seemed to be rushing on in a blur of nothingness but it stopped firmly here for my lesson with Joel. It is such an honor to be able to spend a 5 hour block of time with him every week. It is the best sort of lesson – some intense work, some chatting, some listening to him play, filming some of it, recording all of it. My portuguese comprehension has really improved and I can actually ask some questions now too. But most of what happens is that he is gradually transferring a tiny slice of Joel-ness to my music brain. This is often hard, as I don’t really know what is changing and he doesn’t really tell me. But by relentlessly drilling me on the tiniest nuance of phrasing or the exact best speed of a glissando or the specific micro-second alteration to the printed rhythm that to him seems best, he is subtly changing the way I approach choro. This can be enormously frustrating in the short term – right now I’m in limbo between my old and new again and sometimes the music just gets stuck and comes out in graceless chunks when I play in rodas or rehearsal. But sometimes it’s amazing, and a beautiful phrase or fast fill run will just appear, like it did at band practice Saturday, and my boys all laugh and say yep, she’s channeling Joel. Culture in music is such an interesting and indefinable thing.
When I get home from my lesson the house is cleanclean, the table set, Marcelo is at the stove, and Mirian’s brother & his wife are expected for dinner. They arrive – Joel and Maizie – and we have great food & talk. Somewhere in the process I’m requested to play & do & Maizie decides my music would be perfect for the intro to the documentary movie she is making on ‘o maestro’ and long-story-short she’ll pick me up at 8:30 the next morning to go to Niteroi. I’m not quite sure what is happening or why, but Maizie is convinced and as I am in Rio – por que nao?
So we go. Maizie is the embodiment of a free spirit and everyone adores her and does whatever she wants with a smile. Quite amazing. We are back and forth between two schools in Niteroi and since I can’t meet o maestro until 2:00 I meet everyone else. I meet the new maestro (conductor), play for everyone (Santa Morena is Maizie’s favorite), tune way down to play Nazareth with the piano teacher on an out-of-tune old relic of an instrument, meet a film student of Maizie’s, Jorge, who has incredible English that he has learned from a 2-year course, but 
mostly from movies. I finally meet o maestro, who is ~75. He has been the high-school band conductor for 30 years and came to his job by an unusual route because of sheer talent. He was the 8th child born and the first one to live in his family and he carries that responsibility seriously. His mother died when he was 11 (she must have put all her strength into making sure that one baby would finally live) and since his father was a barber he was trained to do that.
But one day the head of the Marine Band appeared in the door of his shop and asked for the musician who played trumpet there, and he was drafted into the Marine Band and never looked back. The maestro is dignified, smart, matter-of-fact about his life. The video is good, and it’s agreed that I will play something behind a voice-over section in the beginning, maybe under the credits at the end (Maizie is determined to get Santa Morena in). The band is amazing too. I 
play w/ them later under the new conductor – transposing from the clarinet part & unheard in the noise of a brass band, but nevertheess, there. Afterwards Maizie & Jorge drive across the whole city in rush hour to take me up an incredibly steep & winding road to the city park for a great view back to Rio, and we take lots of pictures. I get home about 12 hours after I left, and there goes Friday… w/ no grading or practice for EPM tomorrow. ah, well… My life in Rio often has a mind of its own and I can only follow along.
Saturday is the regular non-stop music – EPM in the morning, Agua no Feijao rehearsal in the afternoon (working up new material for the CD in our own unique arrangements – how interesting it is playing w/ a bunch of Brazilian boys/men), & Mario’s roda in the evening, quieter this time so I can actually be heard. In the middle of Receita da Samba though my bridge collapses flat with a sound like an explosion, so I have to take about a half hour de-tuning, putting it back up, replacing a broken E-string. Joel said I need a thicker bridge so I will have to try to sort that out.
Sunday is the roda at Sao Salvador, smaller because of rain and so also quieter. Afterwards I hang around to talk & eat some Baiana food made in a stand there by a cool-looking woman in a red turban. It’s a kindof fritter made with a bean flour that is fried, then split open and filled w/ shrimp and a spicy green sauce featuring okra. & I buy a couple of CDs from Luzinho – who sets up a stand every week to sell CDs & drinks. I also find myself agreeing to go to a music event on Thursday – one I have been 
invited to many times by a really nice woman, and I still can’t figure out what it is, but I really have to go or risk being rude. Home to a meal w/ my in-house crew and then practicing my new by-heart choro for EPM and grading the RWU week #2 assignments until much too late.
And now it’s Monday. Cloudy, but not raining; and I still have a cold, but didn’t wake up coughing. So maybe things improve? I’ve got 3 more weeks in Rio so, por que nao? I have some free time this week because Joel has had to cancel my lesson as he is recording all week, and Marcilio – who I plan to take a lesson with to help me figure out choro harmony (so many substitute chords that do indeed make the piece sound more Brazilian) – is in Sao Paulo all week playing in a musical about the life of the great Brazilian singer Elizeth Cardosa (such beautiful music, he says with a smile…).
I will meet Paulo Sa on Wednesday and otherwise have many choro to learn – everything at EPM is now by ear and we have an incredibly-tough waltz by Pedro Amorim to learn for his class. And many hours will be spent online running my classes one student at a time. I’m actually very proud of how well they are doing with their presentations and online discussion. Some of them are showing me much more involvement than they usually do in a live class- an unexpected benefit of this online experiment. So it’s been a tough week, but not without interest, and I’ll just have to see what the next week will bring, keeping my fingers crossed for better health and better weather.
beijinhos
m
