Last Week's Class Performance

Well last week I performed in two groups.  The John Fox Company performed to catch up from the week before, and The Pond Duck Trio had a surprise reunion.

I thought that the John Fox Co. went very well.  We had rehearsed the song "Crazy Bus," and it came out fine, aside from some issues with levels.  Ben came up with the lyrics, which reflected on a time when he heard WTOS broadcasting live from a fair in Maine.  The DJ was advocating that people come down, and ride the crazy bus there.  The DJ also said they had a guy there who could sing any song that anyone named.  It was a good prompt for lyrics.

The levels were a little iffy, but that is part of what comes with technology.  The Kaoss Pad has so many settings, that without any time to refresh my memory that day, I was getting a little lost in the circuits of the machine.  As unfortunate as that was, it also brought a fresh new sound to our song.  In fact the rendition of Crazy Bus that we performed sounded nothing like the one we rehearsed.  That is okay with the John Fox Company though.

We also did our experiment with the Chromatic Memory Game.  Quite a coincidence that that day we studied John Zorn, who also developed music performance/improv games.  I thought that the game worked out alright, but it was tough to make the transitions sound good.  I think if I used that game again, I would have the players play the game until the end, write the order of notes that they came up with on the board, and then improvise from those after the game was done.  Then we could spend more time on each note, and have someone call out when it was time to move to the next note.

The Pond Duck Trio performance was interesting anyway.  It was odd to play in that group again.  The three of us hadn't played together since December when we did Abbey Road (other than the night before to practice for class).  I think that since we were a little rusty, and our band intercommunication was rusty, it was hard to be satisfied.  Human nature allows me to remember only the best times, and I sort of just expected that our performance would be as good or better than those times we played together in the past.  It also didn't help that it was so early in the morning, and I was running on very little sleep.