First Post-Orchestra Rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday November 2, 2009 – First Post-Orchestra Rehearsal

Filling in… load out from Raft Island was entirely uneventful, which is to say it was a complete success. Everyone who needed to get to the airport got there. Everyone who needed to get to town got there. The camp was cleaned and restored in record time, and we were on the road well before noon.

A get-together at my place Saturday night, which happened to be Halloween. Fifteen or twenty of us, including several out-of-town guests, decompressing. The evening remained pretty low-key until about 11, when the registrar took charge of iTunes and pulled up some Prince, and suddenly dancing broke out, which continued until we were all falling down.

While strolling down Market Street on Sunday afternoon, giving some of the folks still in town from the course the nickel tour of NW Seattle – Vera’s for breakfast, the Ballard Sunday Farmer’s Market, Ballard Locks (complete with at least one salmon in the fish ladder), Golden Gardens, and Fremont – Jaxie called. She had a pretty clear sense of a direction for this week’s show. Told her she should run with it.

All in, plus one, for tonight’s rehearsal, although Igor was going to be a little late. Tony sat in. We began with a bit of circulating in the “plus two minus one” form, which was surprisingly difficult. Don’t know if we were just all still a little hammered from the course, or what was going on.

Jax then laid out some of the things she was seeing for the show on Thursday. At first there was a lot of what I read as non-responsiveness, a kind of shoe gazing, but which turned out to be simply pondering. Once the discussion began to open up, it was very apparent that much of what she was describing was also on a lot of minds, not to mention a whole lot of other germs of ideas. All in all, a very fruitful discussion. After a short, and late, break, we kind of hammered out the general shape and strategy for Thursday, incorporating some of the myriad ideas that had been aired. It is going to be an interesting one. Suffice it to say, there will be no setlist insert in this week’s program (one joking suggestion was to print up an insert reading “this page intentionally left blank”).

Ran several small group pieces, and a couple of the large group pieces that are definitely going to be played, and called it a night.