prolific performances

I never reviewed our Maha concerts from a couple of weeks ago, but they were great - at least the Saturday one was. Friday felt a little shakey in places... The venue, which we had had enormous troubles finding, was brilliant in the end - a blank canvas of a loft space that we decorated and lit with lamps brought from our houses and as much greenery as we could muster, both plastic and plant. And we certainly had the numbers - both nights had people sitting on the floor as we didn't have enough chairs! The pictures and a few little videos are here.


I've performed since then, too. The group of us who did the Quebecois folk song Ziguezon took it to a bar that has a traditional music jam last tuesday, a far noisier venue than we were used to, but it still went down pretty well, I think. We did Mouth Music too, while we had the floor, which is an Irish traditional piece that the whole choir had sung at our concerts. And were asked for more, but that was pretty much the end of our traditional repertoire!

And earlier the same evening a bunch of Maha members had met in a (rather beautiful) recording studio to record some backing vocals for friends of one of our members, which was also a fun experience!

And then my other small-group piece, Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man has been invited to perform at a show in a couple of weeks too. We're going to work on making it a little more dramatic (or maybe drag-atic), but the singing is fantastic as is. We ended up with a lovely arrangement for it - rather barber's shoppy in places, which is great. And I sing the tenor line, basically, which has lots of lovely tenor-y notes.

And finally, the marching band continues to perform reguarly - I can even play a few of the songs without reading the music lately. I still make a lot of it up, though... But I did get to perform on bassoon in a small gig we did for the Rhizome a week or two back! I was organising the gig (playing on the street isn't so hard to organise, really) to help support my Rhizome friends who have been having some neo-nazi type hassling in their area. I decided we had enough people available to do the gig, but realised that there wasn't a single bass instrument among them. So I borrowed Telyn's bassoon, printed out what I could of the music, and spent 15 mins before the gig remembering fingerings and reading through the pieces. For the actual gig I pinned the music to our drummer's back, and lurked behind him to read it. A little silly, but it worked! And I had so much fun playing the bass lines!

We also played for the May 1st march the other day - I'll blog that separately. And tomorrow we march with the "Solidarity Across Borders - Status for All" march in support of immigrants rights. This is the march the band was born for, two years ago, so we're making it a festive brithday march, too! It should be fun.

And then straight after that, I'm off to Quebec city for a couple of days of exploring.

So yay for performance opportunities! And this town seems to provide many of them! *Sigh*. I like Montreal!