Hava Nagila

So my Americana/Bluegrass band, the Right Turn Clydes, played our first Jewish wedding aniversary party on Saturday. It was a hoot, but a tough gig!

First off, there was chamber music for about an hour by a classical quartet comprised of brilliant high-school students. We were, um, a little intimidated. It was definitely a hard act to follow, and with three of them playing violin or viola, you know I was feeling the heat on my fiddle playing, yikes! They were amazing! I wish I could go back in time and take lessons from three-years-old too!

Then we were on, after some serious technical difficulties with our PA. Finessing gear while you've got a bunch of hungry party-goers is never a good thing. We're supposed to take their minds off of the fact that food's not ready yet, and standing around saying "testing, testing" into the microphone for fifteen minutes doesn't help. And I now have nightmares about the faces people make when the sound guy finally gets everything working and oops! The volume's way too high! FEEDBACK! It's worse than watching a crowd of people hearing someone scraping their fingernails on a chalkboard... you'd think they'd all been physically attacked or something. I hate it hate it, but it comes with the job.

It was a pretty funny sort of technical problem though. Shaneo had bought this new doodad that was supposed to filter out feedback from our acoustic gear. It's got this crazy digital filter that looks for the high-pitched screeches of instrument feedback, and puts a tiny digital sound filter right over the top of that signal. Reading the directions it sounded great. Shane pops it in, we turn up the mic, no feedback, but no sound either. I'm saying, "testing, testing, Shane it's not working." He looks up, down, sidewise all over the PA panel and the feedback doodad. Then suddenly we hear -- "Testing, testing, Shane it's not working." There was a six-second delay. We never got rid of it. He tried and tried, but no luck. We had to go on without it, and hence the lovely feedback scene I described above. Oh well, at least we didn't have any other gear problems.

Before we started our normal first set, we'd been asked to play Hava Nagila, the traditional Hebrew song of celebration, while the party-goers, most of whom are not Jewish, will be taught to dance the Hora. If you're not Jewish, or very familiar with their parties, think back to any stereotypical Jewish scene you've seen in a movie or TV show. Are they dancing in a circle? To a strangely exotic sounding chanting song? There you go, that's what I'm talking about. Let me tell you this -- it was a helluva lot of fun.

We're playing the song, a bit warily at first. We're trying to go slow, because we haven't practiced it nearly enough, have never played with the singer who's leading us, singing the words in Hebrew, and because we want to give these folks -- some of whom are just a tad on the older side... I mean hell, it was a 50th wedding anniversary... a bit of a breather... ease them into the song. So we gradually crank up the speed, but we're fighting tempo-wise with the singer. Oops! Should've clued him in before we started playing! We're supposed to start really slow, crank it up a little, a little more, a little more, and then bam! Hyperspeed. Little old people getting knocked hither and yon, people collapsing in exhaustion. But we don't make it quite that fast... too bad. Oh well, the next time we play a Jewish wedding, we'll kill.

After that it was our normal party gig, but with more beer. This was mostly a wine crowd, so the keg was almost all ours. I swear the band drank 75% of the keg, and from that, about half was drank by the banjo player alone. Good times.