I played at a friend’s Vintage Holiday Market weekend event
this morning in Staunton, VA. I had one
of the three hour-long slots for local musicians.
I really haven’t done much of this, and it has been a good
long while since I coffee housed it.
Last time was about 15 years ago in northern VA in a church-hosted
coffee house type setting.
I’d forgotten so much about standing up in front of a
crowd. Actually, the first thing that
slipped my mind was the issue of pre-performance jitters. I remember clearly, from that long ago coffee
house gig, feeling those butterflies onstage, and being distracted enough while
at the microphone as to loose my place in the tune. But in this instance today I sort of forgot
how to be jittery, and what I should worry about. I eventually figured it out, and went on to
worry about nearly everything. The
chair. The weather. The dress code. The “audience.” The venue (my friend’s store).
Mary, my wife, seeing I was preoccupied about the gig, asked
me, rhetorically, what I had to worry about.
Performance anxiety? I had, she
said, spent the last 20 years in the Pentagon, performing on a daily basis
before our country’s highest level defense and security leaders. Why would playing the banjo be nearly as
unnerving as briefing Donald Rumsfeld?
That sort of put it in context.
But there were clearly things that I should have thought
about more, or be more thoughtful (or wise) about in my planning.
First, this was an open air market, and Staunton is
beginning to see the first bit of winter.
Morning started out at 28 degrees, and by the time I took the catbird
seat it had warmed up to 33 degrees. I
should have hauled along my warmer banjo.
Dressing in layers keeps the body
warm. Wearing a hat cuts down on the
consequences for one’s scalp in a wind tunnel-like open market area. But there doesn’t seem to be much in the way
of clever articles of clothing that will keep the fingers warm and
flexible. Biker’s gloves are fine if one
is concerned with keeping one’s palms warm.
But my fingers were cold enough to start walking off the stage before I’d
finished each tune.
Second, being out of practice, I fretted a lot about how to
fill up an hour with tunes. When I play
for the Banjo Hangout Tune of the week, the Youtube Videos I cobble together
generally run about 90 seconds. How does
one fill an hour without drawing some of these tunes out so that they’re being
played too long, or jamming so many tunes into the mix at the risk of taking on
too much of a program. I decided to
make up a list of about 15 G tunes, and 5 Modal or Double C tunes, and play
them each for about three minutes – the average time of each tune on some of my
favorite Dwight Diller CDs. That worked
out well – in theory.
In practice, things were a bit different. The Third point is that once you list a tune
on your program, you have to go about remembering that tune. Between the hubbub of the market, the impact
of the cold weather on my mind and body, and the distraction of seeing so many
lovely little kids decked out in inventive Halloween costumes I found myself
loosing altitude on some tunes even though I jotted down a snippet or two in
“tab” on my list alongside of the tunes I thought I might forget how to kick
off. When that happened, I found myself drifting to
an unscripted moment, noodling around quickly until I came to a tune more
deeply rooted in my memory bank than the one I had selected for my list. While I would not say my performance was
seamless, I would say that not many people noticed these few moments of hesitation.
And that brings me to the Fourth point. Playing in front of an audience at a concert,
or a coffee house, is far different than being the “background noise” in a
market-like setting. My friend the
market owner seated me in the midst of about 8 tents for the various vendors,
in the foot traffic pattern of customers milling about the large open parking
lot in which the event played out, but I ended up being (very comfortably)
invisible in spite of being at Ground Zero for this little event. Playing as background noise allows the
protection of anonymity, and the only slight disadvantage is when a gaggle of
shoppers decide to stop and chat with another clutch of market visitors right
in front of the banjo player’s lonesome little chair. The up side is that it is sort of like
playing comfortably on one’s front porch, protected by hanging vines and
foliage – and one’s aggressively protective hounds. The down side is that one can drift toward
playing in that quiet, intimate way – low, slow, tuned down and under the radar
scope to the point that not many will hear the banjo. I had
to keep all this in mind sand periodically adjust my projection power to match
the decibels of the market goers.
I’d say “yes” to a return performance, but I’ll spend a lot
of time hoping that such an event might take place in the warmer weather of
spring.
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