Third session with my
Fiddling Friend LJ today. He’s breaking
in a new fiddle, and managed to pair it with a bow that started breaking
partway through our two-hour session.
His bowing was more confident, a fact he attributed to the new
fiddle. I’m not convinced that was
it. I think it was that he spends a lot,
I mean a lot of time going at it, and the progress is just simply the result of
hard work. But there is a level of
surefootedness in his playing now that he ties to this new fiddle; he’s even dispensed
with the colored fingerboard markings that he pasted to the first fiddle to
help guide him. I’m not going to
disabuse him of this notion, especially if – subliminally – it is intended to
fuel his desire to acquire progressively better instruments over time. Who am I to quibble with the instincts that
send musicians to Bernunzio’s in the hunt for an “upgrade”?
We finally figured out
that we could rearrange our modest tune list so that I don’t have to keep
toggling back and forth between the banjo I keep tuned to G standard and my
short necked A scale banjo. Not terribly
long ago I might have tried to make the argument for keeping one banjo for each
tuning in which I played, and then worked to increase my range of alternative
tunings. And I appear to be getting ever
so slightly better at figuring out the keys in which LJ is playing, and the
tuning I need to be in to play with him effectively.
Here’s our tune list so
far, divided according to the banjo I reach for to play with LJ:
A BANJO
soldiers joy
old joe clark
cripple creek
buffalo gal
amazing grace
shortening bread
G BANJO
turkey in the straw
will the circle be
unbroken
wildwood flower
angeline the baker
shortening bread
LJ spent some time
since we last met learning fiddle “potatoes” and the “shave and a haircut” type
tune endings. He’s a little rough on
those, especially on the first few notes fiddlers saw on to set the pace for
the tune. I have never seen or heard a
banjo player jump in at that point of the tune, so I’m assuming that I don’t
need to start banging on the strings until he gets to the tune. LJ has also learned some fiddle vamping, and
that comes in handy when we’re trying to dope out a tune, to figure out the
right trajectory and the division of labor between banjo and fiddle. I did ask him how come he’s made such
admirable progress on the fiddle, always an elusive instrument for me. While he chalks it up to concentrated
practice over long periods of time, I think he’s got some musical genetic code
that’s cut in. His Dad played guitar and
harmonica and even appeared on a local North Carolina radio show 40 some odd
years ago. LJ remembers jamming with his
Dad to old country and gospel type tunes.
I think that helped imprint the path that got him to do some good
fiddling.
We came together on Angeline The Baker, a tune that I had
learned in an eccentric regional version and LJ had learned from a bluegrass
songbook. We spent about two weeks
trying to decipher our differences. LJ
was reluctant to learn “another version” of the tune, while I thought I heard the
basis for commonality in our divergent approaches to the tune. Today, he shifted and played the tune in G,
and I was able to find a firmer clawhammer footing. Interestingly, we started looking for a
meeting place on this tune with LJ consulting his music book for guidance. That just got us further and further
apart.
Finally, I did what
Dwight Diller did to me years ago. With
fiddle in hand, he pulled his chair up taut to mine, and sat forward looking
closely into my eyes. Locked in like that,
I couldn’t drift away from his glare, and I ended up looking at him as closely
as he was watching me, which prevented me from diverting my gaze to my banjo
fingerboard. That’s what we wanted, and
that’s how Dwight launched into Cluck Old Hen.
So today I drew down on LJ, pulled my chair close in to his, and we both leaned into the tune. LJ left his book behind. I left my way of doing the tune and we found a place to meet. We just played the first part of the tune over and over again, and then shifted our attention to the second part, and found the equation for pushing ourselves beyond our experience with any particular tune so that we might match up with one another and make music apart from our sense of how something ought to be played. That was a good moment.
So today I drew down on LJ, pulled my chair close in to his, and we both leaned into the tune. LJ left his book behind. I left my way of doing the tune and we found a place to meet. We just played the first part of the tune over and over again, and then shifted our attention to the second part, and found the equation for pushing ourselves beyond our experience with any particular tune so that we might match up with one another and make music apart from our sense of how something ought to be played. That was a good moment.
I know LJ would kill
me if he knew I was putting this little video out here on my blog, especially
since he was hoping I’d erase it before it saw the light of day, but he’s even
more IT challenged than I am so I doubt he will be able to hunt it down and
find out that it is still preserved in the electronic ether, memorializing this
first taping venture.
Here it is. We sought of fell of the way we cue one
another into finishing a tune, what with the added variable of the video
running – like having a prying, critical pair of eyes in the room as we muddle
our way through a tune. But I thought I’d
put it out here anyway in the hope that someone, somewhere might have some good
advice and guidance – even something as simple as tune your banjo better…
I labeled it “Soldiers
(Or Sailor’s) Joy because LJ wore a USN uniform during his service, which
included an all expenses paid trip to southern Vietnam in 1967:
We’re going to try to
add Irish Washerwoman and Red Haired Boy to the mix next time.
Play hard,
Lew
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