jam reports

In which we have only four, count ‘em, four of us present for music; in which we break in a GBS song we haven’t done before; and in which we break in a new song of solarbird‘s as well. Songs: “Concerning Charlie Horse”, “Captain Kidd”, “Come to the Labyrinth”, “America in Amber”.

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I know I haven’t been properly keeping up with the last couple of Jam Reports, and this is me trying to get caught up on that! Since it’s been a while since the last couple of Jams, all I have to offer is brief notes on the actual songs we played, so I’ll go ahead and make notes of those here. We’re currently talking about when the next Jam will be, some time in December, and hopefully when that happens I’ll return to serious Jam reporting.

Songs for the 10/18/09 Jam: “Getting Away With It”, “Captain Kidd”, “Chickies in the House”, “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, “Elf Glade”, “Dancing With Mrs. White”, “Billy Peddle”, “Mari-Mac”, “Stars”

Songs for the 11/1/09 Jam: “Come to the Labyrinth”, “Pirate Bill”, “Elf Glade”, “Chickies in the House/Duncan’s Dance”, “Goin’ Up”, “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, “John Waits Polka”, “The Road to Lisdoonvarna”, “Brian Boru”, “Butterfly Jig”, “Nonesuch”

Some generally fun things to note here:

“Getting Away With It” is a newer one of solarbird‘s, and is a song about super-villainy! Which is of course appropriate, given that Dara is a super-villain.

“Come to the Labyrinth” was brought into rotation by request; it’s one of s00j‘s, and turned out to be fairly easy once Dara found the chords for it online. The guitar line is dead simple–all the interest here is in the complex layering of the vocals. When the group’s at suitable strength, thankfully, we have more than adequate vocal power to pull this off. We’ll be coming back to this one, I suspect.

Y’all may notice quite a bit of instrumentals in the last couple of rotations. This has particularly appealed to doragoon, who asked me for pointers to the various bits of GBS instrumental goodness, and I am of course all over that. But we also broke out my mandolin fakebook to give Dara and Molly both a quick and dirty introduction to how to play “Nonesuch”. I really do need to remember to whip that fakebook out more often; it’s a handy resource. It’s also chock full of all kinds of instrumentals that would be fun to explore in Jam.

On a similar note we also tried to make a serious run at playing through not only “Chickies in the House”, but also its companion pieces, “Napoleon’s Rant” and “Duncan’s Dance”. My eventual goal here is of course to be able to play the whole trio through without stopping, but I think it’ll be a while before we catch up with Tricky Pixie in our ability to do that!

I can also note of course that the last Jam’s pie, in favor of the holiday season approaching, was pumpkin. And as I recall, it was pretty darned tasty.

Watch this space for further Jam goodness, and very possibly, a special Solstice edition of a Jam report! Also? Now that I can play it, I am totally going to be bringing in “Concerning Charlie Horse”!