Monthly Open Circle and Performance Team Rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday December 5, 2009 – Monthly Open Circle and Performance Team Rehearsal

Ice on some of the roads this morning.

The final Open Circle of 2009. Due to a scheduling conflict we had to move it to a different location. A very pleasant and attractive room in a neighboring community center. Functionally adequate, but something less than inspiring; after attending one of these events in the Great Hall, pretty much anything else is a letdown. The heating system tended to drown out the playing when it kicked in. Nevertheless, a very good circle, well attended with a couple of new faces as well as one returnee who seems to be catching the bug. Looking for just the right material that would work for the absolute beginners, but still challenge the experienced players, was a little trickier than usual for some reason. The standards were not clicking as well as they generally do, so I had to try and then move on from a number of strategies before we hit our stride with a musical fragment that I haven’t pulled out in many years. In the end, kind of fun. These events are never the same twice.

The performance team went back to my place for rehearsal. The House Circle is working on one of Andrew’s compositions in preparation for recording it, and headed over to Greg’s place for that. Following on from last week, the sense continues to be that if everything is in the hat, our best strategy is to make sure that everything is always well practiced and ready to go. We began with a little circulating. Of course this is good for grounding a group, but honestly my primary motivation was to help me transition from the personal state I need to adopt for the Open Circle to being a player in an ensemble. Once again we simply called pieces and ran them, with the metronome, pausing if necessary to look at any issues that we might have noticed either in performance or in rehearsal, and then moving on. A little more structured rehearsal work on La Rueda when it came up, since it is our newest piece and we still haven’t quite achieved that level of command that makes it possible for us to execute it with reliability. We don’t have train wrecks with it, but the qualitative difference between being in the groove with it and merely playing it “right” is pretty significant.

Working on a big screen/good sound system viewing of the Jimi at Monterey dvd tomorrow night.