Less than a week now before I jet off to sunnier climes, but before then there's the no-small matter of workshops and a performance at Donut - a highly successfully run youth programme for aspiring musicians, complete with recording studio. The emphasis is on edcuative development.
The link here is Dan, our guitarist and erstwhile bassist who was trained in sound recording there.
So this Sunday, we're running percussion workshops to show the young musicians how they might incorporate percussion themes of Latin American origin into their own music. You might be surprised to hear that I'm doing the congas bit. In the evening, there's to be a dance lesson followed by a performance by our salsa band.
Jeremy's really pulled out the stops and downloaded the tracks for our eight songs that we've recorded so far, and Dan's doing the mixdowns for us to arrange our melodics and percussion to. Hopefully, Jeremy will have a piano montuno track for me before I leave so that I can work out my inspiracion melodic lines for the ninth song.
When I get back we'll be experimenting with a shuffling of roles, with Dan on timbales, Nathan on vocals and congas, and me on backing vocals and hand percussion or tres. I think that I might have to travel more this year as Verdant's business develops, and it would be unfair to leave Cuatro de Diciembre in the lurch, so we're trying to build some redundancy into the system.
In some ways, I'd relish the opportunity to play tres and learn the instrument better. Let's face it, I'm an Eliades Ochoa wannabe. But it won't happen in this lifetime.
Loo Yen Yeo
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