July 29, 2013
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The Old Time Songbook

When I started learning button accordion there were limited online resources available to help me out. Instead I went out and found a teacher. It was an unusual situation. I found a fellow who played piano accordion and piano and guitar but wasn’t exactly a button accordion player. Yet he had an idea about how to go about teaching it. We talked about it and agreed we didn’t know how well this was going to work but we could give it a try. John taught me a variety of music but I really wanted to learn how to play some of the traditional Portuguese tunes I had heard around the neighbourhood. We were living in a very Portuguese neighbourhood. John is an Italian fellow from Argentina who was teaching Portuguese kids how to play Portuguese folk music on an instrument he didn’t play. This was right up my alley. As it turned out, he was a perfect teacher for me. He gave me charts of the notes pushing and pulling air through the bellows and let me struggle learning them while at the same time I worked on improving my rudimentary reading skills. When I started into the Portuguese folk tunes, he would let me work on a tune for a while and then put on his piano accordion and say, we play it something like this, and he would play it through a few times so I could get the feel. I remember when I was learning to play a couple viras. Viras are like fast waltzes. In a way they are like the oberek, the Polish dance in which the dancers swirl in circles. Harder on the first beat, he’d say, harder, more, and I’d work on getting the feel right until my shoulder and  arm ached.  Another time, I was working on a tune I picked up from sheet music John provided. I thought I was doing really well with it. Again, John picked up the piano accordion and said, we do it more like this. I was playing it as a song and he played it as a fast dance tune. I wasn’t even close. It helped that I liked John a lot. I can’t imagine having a teacher who you don’t get along with personally. I haven’t seen John in ages. I hope he’s doing well.

When I started learning the banjo, back at the beginning of this year, it became clear very quickly there were a LOT of online resources available for the duffer banjo picker. It seemed like there were dozens of people shopping DVD teaching sets by publishing YouTube lessons free as teasers. I found those videos were helpful to me at the very start as I started learning to strike strings and do hammer-ons and pull-offs and slides and drop-thumbing and so on, but after a short while I mostly stopped watching them.

The other thing I learned quickly was that banjo pickers seemed to have dispensed with sheet music in the standard musical notation sense, replacing it with tabs that diagram what finger to do what with where. There are a lot of banjo tabs available – many of them free, and for a few bucks there are scads more available. Moreover, YouTube has performances at your fingertips of just about anything you can think of from the Old Time songbook, and many of those tunes are recorded by ordinary people (I mean that in the non-professional musician sense) recording in their living room with the video feature from their aim and shoot digital cameras. When I start learning a tune, I like to listen to a few different performances of it, and usually these are just a few clicks away. That is a fantastic learning tool.

One of the interesting things to me about clawhammer banjo and the Old Time songbook is that most people who play know most of the same tunes. Moreover, many of those tunes are often played in the same tunings. There are stylistic and regional differences of course but there is also a remarkable amount of consistency. I like to listen to a few versions if I can find them and that gives me a good idea of how the song feels or how it could feel. I find it really helpful to listen to a tune many times until I have the whole melody in my head.

Now it’s hard for me to imagine learning to play clawhammer banjo without consulting Youtube regularly. I’m going to end this post by sharing a nice version of a tune I’ve recently started to play, Grasshopper sitting on a sweet potato vine.

July 28, 2013
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Computer Chess

This afternoon Tuffy and I and our friend Toni trundled down to the Bell TIFF Lightbox to see a movie called Computer Chess. It’s a film set in the early 80s about a weekend tournament in which computers play one another at chess. It is a very odd film, but not without its moments. I confess I wanted to like it a lot more than I actually liked it and I think it lulled us to a state of collective semi-consciousness at one point. I think it was a comedy (I hope so), and parts were indeed very funny, particularly a strange sub-plot involving a therapy group, as well as a number of unexplained shots of various cats residing in the hotel hosting the tournament. There are some interesting ideas in this film, but it suffers from being too slow and clunky. I know, it tries to be slow and clunky. Don’t you get it, silly? Ya, I get it.  Parts of this oddball film are strangely compelling, but just not enough parts of it.

Tuffy P, me and Toni just before watching Computer Chess

Tuffy P, me and Toni just before watching Computer Chess

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July 28, 2013
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Go Lesson

Go Lesson

Go Lesson

 

Our friend Toni is in town (from England). She enjoys games so this morning I gave her a Go lesson. Go wasn’t the only game today though. Tonight Toni and Tuffy P and I also played Quirkle, a deceptively simple game that can be a lot of fun when played strategically.

July 25, 2013
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Drinkin’ Wine (back in the day)

I found myself thinking about Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee today, and it transported me way back to the time me and a buddy saw them play at the old El Mocambo. We were teen-aged blues freaks I suppose, and this was a big deal. There we were, sitting at a table not twenty feet from these fantastic musicians, drinking watered down draft and taking it all in. We were very fortunate here in Toronto. A lot of the blues greats performed on town. Later, when I was in university, I saw Bo Diddley at a joint up in Markham somewhere, and then a long string of great players at Albert’s Hall, which was upstairs at the Brunswick House.

I was at Albert’s Hall for Buddy Guy and Junior Wells – twice in fact; Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater; Sun Seals; Sunnyland Slim; Koko Taylor; Hubert Sumlin, and more. At the Ontario Place Forum, we saw The James Cotton Band opening up for Muddy Waters, and then there was Ray Charles and even Willie Dixon.

Some zydeco performers also made their way up to Toronto. I recall seeing Fernest and the Thunders at the Horseshoe, and Terence Simien and the Mallet Playboys at Harbourfront. That must have been in the mid-80s sometime, or was it the early 90s?. And also for dancing, there was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on a sweaty night at the Horseshoe. Wasn’t that a time.

July 24, 2013
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It doesn’t matter when the election is…

…it matters that you get out and vote.

There is a provinical byelection coming up in my area. We live in a high profile riding, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, formerly held by Laurel Broten. We’ve been innundated by robo-polls and even robo-calls by one of the candidates. Two of the candidates are currently City Councillors. I’ve heard news reports predicting very low voter turnout because the byelections are being held during the summer.  Pshaw I say. Go vote.  Some of you, like me, haven’t figured out who to vote for yet. None of the candidates or parties for that matter are standing out in my mind. You might argue, well then don’t bother to vote. This brings to mind something I heard U. Utah Phllips say a long time ago – if God wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates. Although I’m troubled trying to decide on a candidate, I intend to cast a ballot and I urge you to as well. If you don’t like any of the candidates, you can always make a protest vote. It beats accepting the lame idea that it’s summer and it’s hot and I’d rather be at the lake or wherever.

July 22, 2013
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Some thoughts on music, learning and busking

It’s important to me to not stop learning. Music is one activity I started really flirting with after I turned 40 and I started playing the button accordion. How hard could it be, I reasoned. There are only 31 buttons on the right side of a triple-row button accordion. Never mind that different notes sound when you push or pull air through the reeds using the bellows. Never mind that there are two sides and you need to get your hands operating independently. Never mind that feeling somehow emerges through the bellows-work.

My learning on the button accordion really started to accelerate when I started busking. What a fascinating experience. The people around you are going about their business and there you are, busking, trying to capture the attention of passers-by. There are a few things going on. Among the first thing I learned was that the performance was as important as the chops. In other words, the most skilled musicians aren’t necessarily going to be great buskers. I learned to choose my audience and make eye contact, smile, nod and play for people as if they were the most important people on earth. Kids especially love buskers. When kids came around, I liked to squat down to their height and play something lively and danceable. I don’t know how many times kids would approach and want to press the buttons of my squeezebox and catch a second of the magic of making sounds come out. Parents would usually discourage this, but I never did. What a privilege to share the magic!

The most popular buskers were those who strummed a guitar and sang recognizable pop hits. In particular, I noticed that buskers who played “classic rock” always did exceptionally well. One of the reasons I took up the button accordion though was that I was tired of that material. I’m not being critical of it. I just wanted to learn about and play something different. I had a couple tunes in my busking repertoire that did get recognized. One was a squeezebox version of the old folk tune from the Bahamas, Sloop John B. Most everybody thought it was a Beach Boys tune because they recorded a popular version of it in the 60s (much like how many people think House of the Rising Sun is a pop tune by the British group The Animals). I was familiar with the tune from some field recording I had on CD of a group of spongers singing a capella.

Here are Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster performing House of the Rising Sun from 1933

The other tune I liked to play busking that was recognized a surprising number of times was a Newfoundland waltz called the Star of Logy Bay. People would come up to me and thank me for playing it and tell me it reminded them of back home. Here’s a video I’ve shared before – Candy Minx shot this footage of me playing Star of Logy Bay in front of Tom’s Place in Kensington Market.

A played a crazy assortment of material, including traditional Portuguese folk tunes, a Cajun tune or two, a Finnish polka, some Newfoundland tunes and even a Swedish schottische. One day I was playing at St. Lawrence Market and some fellow approached me and asked me if that was a Swedish tune I was playing. That was the only time that tune was recognized.

When you’re busking, many musical sins may be forgiven. Most people are walking past, not sticking around like at a concert. I learned to keep the rhythm at all costs. No matter what else happens, if your left hand is solid rock and the rhythm rolls along like the evening train, you’re fine. Mess up the rhythm and it’s a disaster. Sometimes I would be playing and something would distract my attention. Believe me, busking in a busy market there are many distractions. Something would catch my attention and suddenly the thought would percolate through my little brain that I don’t even remember what song I was playing. The experience is like those Roadrunner cartoons when the coyote finds himself running over the edge of a cliff. He doesn’t fall until he realizes there’s a problem here. I’m heavier than air. So what do you do? Play a chord that sounds like an ending and immediately start in on another song, just as if you planned the segue. I was amazed that when some disaster like this occurred and I simply carried on with all the confidence I could muster up, it appeared that nobody noticed my blunder.

I should have been satisfied to have developed some level of proficiency at the button accordion. I didn’t plan to take up another instrument. I blame banjos on my brother Salvelinas Fontinalis, who started quietly learning a few clawhammer banjo tunes (is it possible to quietly learn banjo tunes?) some time ago. How fascinating. I’ve long been a fan of old time music but it hadn’t occurred to me to try to play it until my brother started plunking away. Not that anyone has actually heard him play and made it out alive to tell about it. Then I thought, well hell, it only has 5 strings, how difficult can it be? And so, at 52 I’ve taken up the banjo.

I don’t have any illusions of becoming a great player, but on the other hand, I’m going about learning the instrument with vigour and lots of practice time, and I can hear my playing getting better all the time. As I’m learning more and more tunes (they are very slowly sticking to my brain….keeping a load of songs in my memory was a challenge on the button accordion too).  I’ve mentioned before that lately I’m starting to think that I need to find a fiddle player, and I can’t seem to shake that idea. I think I need to find either a fiddle player who, like me, is learning – or a player with plenty of patience for a guy who doesn’t have the entire old time songbook at the tip of his clawhammer fingers.

I like to try new things, and as many of my friends will tell you, when I start learning something, I tend to jump in with a lot of passion and enthusiasm. For me it’s a great joy to keep learning. I can tell you that learning clawhammer is easier for me than learning button accordion was. Maybe it’s because now I have some musical background and I’m simply learning a new machine. I hope that’s the case, because there are other instruments I’d like to learn too, such as the hurdy-gurdy or the clarinet. For now though, I’m concentrating on clawhammer banjo and I’m having the time of my life learning it. It’s easy to put in the practice time when playing brings you truckloads of joy.