This is one that was snowed out in November and was worth the wait. Moe Jerant is drummer/percussionist in the LV. She’s is a 60’s band called Large Flowerhead but also runs drum circles at music stores, old folk homes and schools. She really takes her skills to the community and this is what I wanted to emphasize tonight. She brought out her bag o’ tricks and we started out making rhythm right away with tambourines on Shoo That Fly. I then asked her to show how she gets a drum circle going.
It was, alas, another small crowd but we banged along mightily. As I expected she had great skills in shaping our dynamics, tones through call and response, etc.
Dina was gracious enough to sit in with us and added a couple of songs. I played some Irish tunes (a reel and a jig) on mandolin, saying that these tunes taught me a lot about different time signatures. We got out boomwackers, I got out my rain stick and we created some sound scapes.
I got to do Jelly in the Dish and folks played along. It got funky, and became a nice surprise for the audience to the point one lady walked out at the end of the night saying she was going to sing it a work in the morning. I gave her a CD to reinforce it for her.
We finished up with Iko Iko, a good Bo Diddley beat to end on. The chat was engaging and we covered a lot of topics on community, increasing intelligences in adults and kids, creative use of percussion to build artistic vocabularies, and more.
Again, these nights are wonderful. I just wish the community at large would catch on how special this format is. Even with Moe’s large following with the circles and the band, it was pitifully slack in attendance. So it goes.