In attendance: Rick McCarthy, Brad Hogg, Dev Ray, Chris Paquette.
Dev and Brad arrive from their drive south to find Chris and Rick waiting patiently with a pot of coffee and cakes of taste waiting in the fridge. Our training being what it is, and opportunity being a working point for some this week, we all seize the moment and dig in.
Post-mastication, up to the loft (yes, there's a loft here, too), where we arrange ourselves and take a moment to begin the meeting. An opening circulation, and a call is made for a warm-up. Bicycling to Afghanistan is suggested, attempted, and understood to be a pretty ballsy warm-up. A call for something a little less demanding leads to Flying Home. Still a bold choice, but the virtue is assumed to completion. Following this, a short discussion and resolution regarding an issue that has come up about the final show of the season at Spontaneous Celebrations, to be held a little over 3 weeks from today.
We begin work with the Eb Major Pentatonic scale that we were working with the other day. A quick review of the scale (3rd Primary style, at the 3rd fret), and we proceed to work with rhythm in circulation: in 8th notes with different players on the beat and off, in triplets while shifting the "pole position" around, and in 16ths with shifts in pole. We seem to get a lot of really good work out of the triplets, and choose to go for broke and work with quintuplets. This is quite difficult, as a five-note division naturally goes against the grind of most Western divisions in music, and we have four players to play these. This leads to some curious overlaps that really throw some wrenches into the works. But this gives us some useful challenges to work with. After about 15 minutes of this, Brad admits to being fried, and we take a short break.
Following the break, Chris asks to work back in the triplet mode again. Here, we are no longer in Eb Major, but in F minor. This is a real-time test of an adjusted arrangement of Opening, to be introduced once the season has ended. Some good work with this, and quite instructive.
We choose to close the meeting with a free circulation, accompanied by (or rather existing alongside) exuberant singing from one of Rick's daughters, followed by a difference of opinion between the pair of daughters. A moment of silence, followed by some short discussion of what will be following over the next week, and Dev, Chris, and Brad all take their respective exits.
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