The First Rehearsal - Apr 26, 2008

Before the rehearsal I'm antsy, wondering whether I've committed musical mayhem. Will any of this stuff sound remotely good or is it a heaping helping of idiocy?

Fortunately, I'm in good hands. FivePlay is me (Tony Corman) on guitar, Laura Klein on piano, Dave Tidball on reeds, Alan Hall on drums, and Paul Smith on bass. Today we've got Bryan Bowman subbing on drums and Noah Schenker subbing on bass, so I'm in good hands.

Andoni, the reciter, drives in from Gilroy, bless him. We haven't met. Very nice cat, probably half my age, as are a lot of people. I'm really impressed that he's memorized 45 minutes of poetry. This guy is not afraid of work, and that means a lot to me. He's also clearly a natural performer, with a strong desire to be out there, up in front doing it. That is not me - I enjoy the audience and seem to need to perform, but it's always mixed for me with nerves and the sense that it's not good enough, ("it" being my own offering). This guy wants the spotlight, in the nicest way, and that will be essential for the performance. The poem is not for the faint of heart: it's explicit, joyfully profane and frank, and must be dispensed with full conviction.

New for me: the distortion box. I've been a jazz guy, plug the single-pickup archtop guitar into the amp, maybe turn the tone knob, and play. But some of the more apocalyptic moments of the music really require that nasal, buzzy, thin sound, so here goes.

We plunge into the music, and I learn several things: (1) I'm playing with four terrific musicians, (2) Andoni is going to be totally easy to work with (he's a musician himself, so slides right into rehearsal mode, and he's got his stuff down), (3) the parts need more verbal cues and (4) I need to figure out how to kick into time in three or four places I hadn't adequately considered. I also found out that I wrote some passages that are really hard for me to play. I can see what I'm going to be shedding this summer.

The good news is that, at least for now, I'm OK with the music, the notes and rhythms. I think they're doing what I want them to do, so I don't expect to have to rewrite much. I recorded the session and will need to crawl through the recording with the score in hand to figure out how to put more context into the notated parts. In the rehearsal, I needed my guitar part, the score, and a cued version of the poem to know what was happening. I've written for big bands (and small), but the requirements for this type of performance are different. I'm not surprised or disappointed; I figured I'd need to revise.

Overall, it's a good beginning. We're unavoidably off until September, at which point we plan to buckle down and see whether we can mount a performance in November. It's gotta debut in Berkeley, I think: the poem was written here (Caffe Mediterraneum)! while Ginsberg was living on Milvia Street, about five blocks from my house.

After the rehearsal, I'm a bit depleted. it took a lot of energy to run the whole thing down in two hours. But also elated, because the music is a lot less stupid than I feared. I'm especially happy about the 3/2 section behind the passages extolling the joys of homosexual anal intercourse.

I've got another posting or two to write, but it's probably going to be kind of quiet here this summer. Nonetheless, fans of jazz and poetry, keep watching this space.