The calendar shows that the very minor festival day of Tu B'Av will be in two
weeks' time. This is the Israeli equivalent of Valentine's day; I don't know
quite why it's in the middle (or towards the end) of summer, but the 'Tu' word
means 14 - it will be in the middle of a lunar month and so there will be a full
moon - very romantic.
The female singer in our musical group has long wanted us to play at this
time, so as soon as we got our
previous appearance1
out of our system, we started suggesting romantic songs to be played. There
is, of course, a surfeit of such songs, but even so a few songs have been
suggested that I've never heard of before. This performance (which will be
brought forward from the Saturday night that is the Hebrew date to Thursday) -
or rather the list of songs - is unusual for us, in several respects:
- there are three or four songs in 3/4 time
-
there are a few 'acoustic' songs that might actually be played with one
acoustic guitar
- there are one or two songs during which I don't play
- I get to sing lead vocal on one song
The 'not playing' bit is because at least one of the songs is very delicate
and I feel that I don't have anything to add to it (and I don't want to make it sound worse). For another song, I feel a
bit like George Harrison in a very cringe-inducing scene from the "Let It Be"
film when he says to Paul McCartney something like "I'll play what you want
me to play, and I won't play at all if you don't want me to".
Referencing the Beatles is obviously subconscious, for the song that I am going
to sing is "I saw her standing there", the opening song of the first Beatles'
album. We've rehearsed this a few times, but at our last rehearsal, whilst
probably waiting for someone to get themselves together, I started playing it
at a very slow place, turning the song into something else. We continued to
play the entire song in this new arrangement, and at the end, I turned to the
others and said "Well? Maybe we could play the song like that - it will
certainly sound unusual". In the end we agreed that the first verse will be
slow and the rest fast, although I have yet to decide whether to repeat the
first verse at the fast tempo and simply to continue with the second verse.
I now have memorised almost all of the songs (or more accurately, the songs have wormed their way into my memory), but there's one where I am going
to play with the music on a stand - this has an instrumental, or more
correctly, vocalese break of something like 24 bars, and the chords for this
create a continually rising spiral with several diminished chords. It's not
something that is easily memorised, hence the sheet music. In fact, it took several
weeks to figure out the complete and correct sequence: although I have the
official sheet music for this song in a book published some 45 years ago, the
chords there are in a different key and use different symbols for diminished
and half-dimished chords. Not only that, I remember that I played it at a
wedding about 40 years ago and then I transposed the chords to a yet another
key that is not the same key in which we will be playing. So I had to figure
it all out again, by comparing the various chord charts and what I heard.
I must admit that I am less enthusiastic about this set of songs that I was
for our previous set. The performance will take place again at the kibbutz
pub; my wife insists that I should be in the front row of musicians instead of
lurking at the back. Obviously for 'my song', I'll be at the front but I don't
know about the rest.
The
octave pedal2
made its debut appearance. At first I was worried that it seemed to make a
great deal of noise when I wasn't playing, but this wasn't noticeable during
the two songs in which I used it. There is a third song that is in Cm that also requires the pedal; this is
quite a delicate song and I am worried that there may be too much noise. We
didn't play this song at our last rehearsal so I don't know what it will be
like. At the worst, I can use a capo.
Internal links
[1] 1923
[2] 1967
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