Extracurricular group workout 5

A Tuning the Air Journal

Wednesday, September 21, 2011 – Extracurricular group workout 5

Regulars Mary Beth and Greg were unavailable today. However, Travis was successfully tempted into playing hooky for an extra long lunch and sit in with us for the first half of the session.

Travis and I are, effectively, the rhythm section for “I Am The Walrus”, and Chris and Carl the melody/vocals section. So we worked our way through the piece section by section. Travis and I came up with ways to blend our parts – he is covering the guitar and bass while I do the piano. Chris and Carl began to organize their phrasing. We made it through the piece several times and even came up with a bit of inspiration for how it might fit in the set.

On to a piece borrowed from the Solaris Project repertoire, “Vashon Ferry”. Travis, Carl, Bob and Chris have already put some work in on it (Bob and Travis play an electric arrangement in Third Law). Travis, Chris and Carl worked a bit on the parts. Travis’ thought was that there was a bass part necessary, at least in one particular section, and that will fall to me. We touched on it, but did not take rehearsal time to work out the details. I will spend some time on this before tomorrow night’s performance team rehearsal.

On to “Little Red Truck”. Travis’ part has not been fully established, so we focused our work on fleshing it out. Several good bits arrived that will add a lot to the arrangement.

Travis departed.

The three of us remaining dove into “Bicycling to Afghanistan”. Although it hasn’t appeared on any “official” lists of repertoire for the season, it seems to keep popping up. Carl has been working on Lead I, and I of course have the Bass Part ever at the ready. Chris has played Lead II, but it is the least familiar part for him, so we spent some time breaking it down, looking at the details, and running sections. By the end of the rehearsal we were managing rather raggedy but recognizable full runthroughs, so there is hope.

One or two more passes at “Walrus” before we called it a day.

After the team departed, I began posting the official announcements that this will be the final season of Tuning the Air.

[later that evening]

I was updating the Tuning the Air repertoire history document, and realized that "Bicycling to Afghanistan" has never been performed in a Tuning the Air show. A little surprising.