My Blog
Andalucia on Thursday October 5, 2006
It's 11:12am on Friday as I type these words. Last night at the Andalucía was kinda cool cuz besides the fact that I performed with Pam de Ocampo who danced beautifully. What was cool was that we had some new friends in the audience who came especially to see the show. One of them, Natalie, brought her camera and offered to take pics--but as you know, it's a challenge to get a good shot here at the Andalucía.In retrospect, I realized I should've invited her to come onstage and dance Sevillanas with Pam, but the restaurant was packed and the manager, Monica, asked me to start playing guitar a little earlier than usual--I think the entertainment is sort of a way to placate the customers while the kitchen catches up with the food orders.
Meanwhile, there was a major accident on 495 which seriously backed up traffic so Pam was running late, but I wasn't worried--I knew she would've called if she was going to be very late.
I was hoping to at least tell Pam the program for the evening but even if she arrived in the next few minutes I would be onstage already. The frustrating thing about situations like this is that I can't communicate with the dancers when they're offstage. Like for example, on Tuesdays when I perform at Las Tapas, I customarily start the show with some guitar solos while the dancers are upstairs changing. Occasionally they'll take longer than usual and I'll improvise an extension to my guitar solo until I see them coming down the stairs. I can remember one time though that I played for like 20 minutes instead of the usual 5 cuz one of the dancers was running late. I suppose I could just stop playing, leave the stage and go upstairs and ask what's going on, but that would break up the continuity of the show.
You get the idea. Thing is that years ago I remember when I used to do shows with certain dance companies and after a while I figured out why they asked me to play guitar solos--it was to fill-up time while the dancers changed costumes. Ugh. So nowadays I get annoyed when I'm onstage playing guitar before the dancers take the stage and they seem to be taking longer than usual to get ready.
End of rant. Anywayz, I blog about things like this not to be a whiner but rather to give you an insight into the reality of what it's like being a full-time flamenco which is mostly fun of course. For the record, Pam arrived just in time to start the show and as expected, she won over our audience with her dancing, grace and charm.
Eighteenth Street Lounge on Friday October 6, 2006
It's 1:33am on Saturday October 7th as I type these words. Yesterday (Friday) it was rainy and cold and I was in the mood to go see a movie in the afternoon but a friend of mine invited me to join her and her friends for some drinks around 6:30pm at the 18th Street Lounge in Dupont Circle. I figured I could see the movie anytime and besides it's been more than a week since I last saw my friend so...First I had to drop off my sound system at Cabanas a little earlier than usual. I decided to go ahead and set up the sound and lights now so that if I ran a little late coming from Dupont all I'd have to do is grab my guitar, plug in my micropone and I'd be ready to start!
So I arrived at 18th Street Lounge around a quarter to 7--OK, so I made a quick stop by Julia's Empanadas to get some food in my stomach before joining my friends for drinks.
I ascended the stairs, nodded to the bouncer and wandered around to the more private back rooms where I expected to see my friends and there she was--just her and her boyfriend anywayz. Kiss, kiss, hug, hug, said our hellos and they scooched over a bit to make some room for me to sit on the well-worn but nevertheless very comfortable antique couch.
I can't even recall the music that was playing. Whatever it was, it nothing remarkable or musically interesting. But in a way it was perfect cuz it filled up the sonic space such that you had to raise your voice slightly to converse but it wasn't so overpowering that you had to strain to listen.
Did the usual small talk of catching up on what we've done since we last saw each other and somehow the conversation drifted towards performance anxiety. Turns out my friend was a hostess for several years in travel show on television. And despite the tons of experience she had in front of the camera, she still got nervous just before the camera started rolling.
Logically, you tell yourself, hey, I'm just talking to a camera but your imagination creates a picture in your mind that possibly milllions of people will be watching you and while the camera is rolling you all of a sudden become aware of every little detail of your physical appearance, pitch and tonal quality of your voice.
I can remember last year at the Taste of Bethesda. After the performance one of the dancers and I was approached by one of the local TV stations to do a quick spot where I did about 5 seconds of flamenco guitar music with my dancer friend doing palmas. Easy, right? Yup. But right after that we were supposed to say "Good morning, Washington!"
Now I know this sounds stupid, but everytime we did it, I ended up saying "Good morning, America!" which unfortunately is the name of another program on a competiting network. Not good. Well, it took us, actually, me, FIVE takes to get it right.
Man, you'd think that with all my stage experience I wouldn't get nervous doing a television spot. But I did.
So my friend asked me, "Do you still get nervous when you perform every night?"
"Hmmm...I have to think about this." Thing is that when a performance is over, whether it was especially good or not so good, I"ll briefly look back and try to think about how I could improve it and then I forget about it and move on.
The good answer to that question is, "Yes, I do get nervous every time." The reason why this is a good answer is because the nervousness is an indication that you really care about the quality of the performance. And I do! Now if a student performer comes up to me and asks me that question, I'll probably give that student the good answer for educational purposes.
But the truth is that I don't get nervous anymore, well OK let's say 95% of time I am very confident, but for the 5% of time that I do get nervous, I quickly recover from it once I start playing.
You can call it a mind game, but when you allow yourself to be taken in by the music and the dancing, your mind is so busy that there's no idle time for it to get sucked into nervous territory.
Ugh...you get the idea. But if you want to explore this topic further, I highly recommending getting the book The Inner Game of Music. In fact, if you're serious about becoming a professional performer, this is required reading!
Anywayz, I made it back to Cabanas just in time for my show. The dancers were Ginette Perea and Sarah Hart. Good performance just as I expected. One of my most enthusiastic fans and a very sweet friend Katya came which made my night. Thanks for coming Katya!
OK, it's 2:19am now. I'm playing at American Dance Institute for the flamenco classes from 12:30pm to 3:00pm and Genoveva is teaching (subbing for Anna Menendez). It's been a while since I last played for Genoveva but I know it'll be fun. Just want to make sure that I get a good night's rest so I can be awake enought to enjoy it. hehe. Allright, enough blogging. Good night!
Juan del Valle workshop on Sunday September 24, 2006
It's 10:09am on Monday as I type these words. Good morning! So I had a pretty satisfying weekend. It wasn't wild in the sense of going out every night, in fact I didn't even go out at all, well OK I did hang out with my dancers on Friday and Saturday nights for a little while after the gigs but that's about it.Yesterday (Sunday), I was invited to play for a flamenco workshop taught by dancer Juan del Valle. It took place at Cindy's house where she has a beautiful dance studio, as you can see in da pics, plus she has a professional quality sound system that I of course happily used to the delight of myself and the dance students.
So what did we work on? Take a guess!
We touched on everything including technique and choreography but the focus was on flamenco structure and communication. The thing is that no matter who you study with, eventually you have to learn about the different sections of a letra and the different sections of the baile and how each of those sections function and how it's all put together.
It's a lot of information to digest and I imagine that most flamenco teachers all over the world probably just gloss over structure in the beginning stages for practical and economic reasons. Unless you grew up listening to cante, it's usually difficult to understand the different sections. And spending a class session talking about cante would probably scare away most dance students who, let's face it, are there to learn some cool moves and choreography.
Most dance students will not become performers anyway and that's OK. So the idea of learning about cante doesn't interest most of them. It's too bad though cuz while it does take a major effort to learn it, in the end a deeper more thorough knowledge of flamenco makes you appreciate the experience a whole lot more.
It's like the difference between looking at Van Gogh's Starry Night and simply saying "Oh look, how pretty!" versus being able to appreciate how his broad quickly applied impasto brush strokes, although washing out visual details in the representational sense, still captures all the emotional essence. Well, OK, I might still say "Oh look, how pretty!" but I'll have an idea about why it is visually appealing because I have a deeper understanding.
Acquiring this knowledge about cante is not for the sake of being an intellectual snob. Far from it. Thing is that people who were born and raised in the flamenco culture understand all this instinctively and therefore don't have to think about it. We outsiders have to make up for not growing up around flamenco by immersing ourselves in it as much as our busy lives will allow. So we listen CD's all the time, go to every flamenco show and party we can make it to, visit Spain etc. And if we're really fortunate, we go take workshops and learn about structure whenever they're offered.
But it's like music theory. Yeah it can be very very boring at times to learn theory but it gives you a deeper understanding and appreciation. And once you've internalized it, it becomes instinctive and you don't have to think about it, although subconsciously you still are!
Think about it. There are lots of very talented musicians out there who can't read a single note of music but the truth is that they have a deep understanding of music. They may not be able to verbally describe the difference between an Italian augmented sixth chord and the garden variety first inversion dominant, but they instinctively know because they can hear it. It's because they not only know have an understanding of music but more importantly, they can apply this instinctive knowledge to making music.
TIP: look through your collection of flamenco CD's (what, you don't have any? tsk tsk tsk) and find one that has a booklet with the letras. Play the CD and follow along with the words in the letra and take notice of several things:
1. How many lines are in the letra?
2. Which lines, if any, are typically repeated?
3. How many compases does it take to sing each line?
4. Also carefully listen to music of the guitar that accompanies each line. Do you notice that it's basically the same for each letra with occasional variations?
This'll take some work but if you do this exercise a couple of days a week (or everday if you're serious), soon you'll start to notice recurring patterns and that's a sign that you're starting to hear the structure. Then you'll go to class one day and your teacher will decide to play a cante CD for the class and at one point will point out, "Everyone listen. This is the first line of the letra and this is the respiro," and you'll quietly smile to yourself cuz something just clicked in your mind cuz you now "get" what your teacher is trying so hard to make the students understand.
OK, end of lecture. Whew! Oh yeah, getting back to talking about yesterday's workshop...it was very very good. I like Juan as a teacher because he strives to provide a friendly learning environment.
At one point, some of the less accomplished students quietly excused themselves from the class when they couldn't keep up. But Juan encouraged them to come back and suggested that they focus on what they could pick up. For example if they were still struggling with the "mechanics" of flamenco technique, they could focus on one particular movement or two instead of wracking their brains trying to simultaneously memorize and execute a complicated routine.
What I especially liked was Juan's way of presenting the concepts of flamenco structure. Truth is that the ideas of the traditional structure are the same no matter who you learn it from--the modern and more advanced variations can be learned later, but it's like a journey in that you have to know where you starting from (i.e. traditional structure) before you can take off to a new destination (modern and advanced variations).
The important thing for the teacher to do is to present it in a way that the students can easily and quickly grasp the ideas of flamenco structure and Juan does this rather well. Well, OK, this is the only Juan del Valle workshop I've been to, but so far I was impressed. He knows his stuff and knows how to teach.
I'm not guaranteeing it'll happen every time, but by the end of the workshop some of the students were already able to hear the cues in the music. They also learned about giving cues to the singer and guitarist and it's just a matter of practice and internalization before they can confidently apply it in a performance situation. That's where I came in. Of course, having live music in the workshop allowed Juan to explain and demonstrate concepts about communicating with guitarists. So the dancers also developed a deeper appreciation for live guitar too. Thank you Juan!
Anywayz, all this blogging has made me work up an appetite. :-) Let's get some food, shall we? After the workshop, Cindy and family served us a smorgasbord of delicious home cooked food, yum!
As for tonight, I'll be at Cafe Citron as usual. See you there!
P.S. in case you're wondering, I didn't announce this workshop on my website cuz it was a private workshop. If you want to arrange a private lesson or a group workshop, contact Juan del Valle yourself.
Ice cream, pretzels and DVD's. July 20, 2006
It's 9:49am on Friday as I type these words. So much for gettin' to bed early last night. Yeah I got home at 4:00am, surprise, surprise. But I wasn't the instigator in this case. My ride insisted on watching DVD after DVD despite having to be at work at 7:00am and I wasn't the one saying, "Um...like maybe you should take me home now so you can enough sleep."Anyway, last night after my gig at the Andalucía, got da grand tour of the new house that my dancer friend just moved into yesterday--hence the nearly empty freezer. Beautiful and spacious (the house that is): perfect for a party, perhaps even a flamenco juerga once she gets the wood floors installed.
As we enjoyed our late night ice cream, pretzels and Coke, we talked about what it's like moving into a new neighborhood, walking into the nearest supermarket and thinking to yourself, "Wow, so this is where I'll be getting my groceries the rest of my life."
As I slowly savored each spoonful of Ben and Jerry's, I gave my fellow flamencos my theory of what makes gourmet ice cream better than the generic stuff. First off, if you feel little resistance as you dig the scoop into the ice cream, then congrats you've got premium quality. I think it's the fact that there's actually more cream which is soft and, well, creamy. Whereas the cheaper stuff has more water which of course freezes into hard ice and makes digging in a relatively strenous process.
So we watched a few DVD's including a non-flamenco selection titled "Be Cool" starring John Travolta, Uma Therman etc. Mildly enjoyable. I had seen this before and unfortunately it was the best selection available at the nearest Safeway.
Later, we segued into the flamenco portion of the evening and watched a DVD of José Galvan and friends.
We closed the evening with the video from the Pastora show which I was at first reluctant to watch. Don't get me wrong. I am very proud of that performance, but I usually don't like to watch videos of my shows--like any artist I would be hypercritical of every tiny little error and I'd end up thinking to myself "I should've done this...or that etc."
I wasn't as hypercritical as I expected myself to be. As you know, I have yet to write about the Pastora show, cuz I wanted to give myself some time to savor the many inspiring moments of that evening without cluttering my mind with self-critiques on the technique or interpretation. Of course as a professional performer I want to learn from my mistakes and improve myself each time. But as a flamenco and a human being, I just want to enjoy the moment. And as I watched each moment unfold throughout the video of my, I mean our, performance, I was very very pleased.
At 3-something in the morning, it was time for even a vampire like me to go home and get some sleep. I got a pretty exciting weekend ahead. After my show tonight at Cabanas in Georgetown (where I'll be performing with dancers Claudia and Micaela Moreno), I have an early morning train to catch going to Maine. But you already know about that since I've been mentioning it again and again in my blog all week long.
Anywayz, chances are, I won't be logging on again until I come back. Actually I'll be getting back into DC Monday with just enough time to setup my sound system at Citron and start the show. So I won't be able to blog or upload new photos again until late that night. Have a great weekend. Ciao for now!
Las Tapas. July 18, 2006
It's 10:57am on Wednesday as I type these words. Earlier I was kind of stressing out cuz I needed to find a good flamenco guitarist to cover for me while I'm in Maine this weekend. Thank God, Torcuato came through for me, whew! Now I got find some dancers...which will also be a challenge considering that there is also a dance workshop this weekend. Wish me luck! [UPDATE: just got dancers booked for this weekend, yay!]Of course, I'm going to tell you how awesome it was last night as I always do. It's not that I'm doing over-the-top PR and making each night sound better than it really was. I mean, yeah, I do have my occasional bad nights, but even on those "bad" nights, I eventually realize that I'm much better off than I was six years ago working in a day job that didn't really have any personal meaning for me (other than to fund my addiction to the drug flamenco).
Anywayz, as I was about to say, last night was awesome. :-) The dancers were Pam de Ocampo and Claudia de Baltimore (what I'm calling her for now until we come up with a stage name for her--any suggestions?). For the first set, we opened as usual with Sevillanas and Pam danced an alegrías for her solo.
Of course, we didn't have any rehearsal or discussion about Pam's dance--not complaining though. Actually I consider it a compliment that the dancers have enough confidence in my accompaniment skills to go onstage without rehearsing.
So let's see...the last time I performed with her was last Saturday in the Pastora show (which I'll blog on later this week) so moments before her dance, I tried to recall the overall structure of the choreography. Of course, Pam danced a different one entirely which was fine. I had to go into relax and pay attention cuz you don't know what's coming next mode. So as she executed each llamada, I instinctively would consult at lightning-speed my mental database of past llamadas and tried to find a match. Same for the letras. Same for the subidas. Same for the silencio. So far so good.
Lately, the trend among DC area flamenco dancers is whether or not to go old skool and do a castellana before the escobilla or skip it entirely. She went old skool. Then she closed the castellana and then I had to pay close attention again.
Another trend is whether to start off the escobilla section super slow (usually in sixteenths) and then a few compases later double the tempo without warning or just do straight ahead footwork. Pam doubled the tempo. The next thing I looked for was accents in the compás where I could play cortes. Anyway, you get the idea. Playing for dancers is an interactive process. The dancers give the guitarist subtle signals about what's coming next but you have to pay close attention to catch them. It's mentally stimulating for both parties when the guitarist and dancer know how to communicate with each other.
By the time it came to Claudia's soleá I was mentally warmed-up and I just relaxed and "jammed" with her (although subconsciously I was doing all of the above mental calculations). What was cool was that I able to rise above figuring out what she was doing and just relax and musically play around with the accents and harmonic progressions. Pure fun!
So it's 11:47am on Wednesday. My gig at Cafe Bonaparte was cancelled at the last minute (just for this week, though) so my schedule is now wide open sort of. I have to do a couple of errands related to my weekend trip to Maine. Can't wait! I'll be performing at the Harpswell Festival (www.harpswellfestival.org) with one of my favorite dancers, Ginette Perea, enjoying the cool beautiful weather, the gorgeous views of the bay, oh and of course, some of the best fresh seafood in the world, yum! Checkout da pics from last year www.dcflamenco.com/dcflamen...005.shtml