The Festival of Americn Fiddle Tunes 2008, Day Quatre (Four)

I hit my stride today.....after a good night's rest I was able to attend two classes and two band labs and learn still MORE tunes. I am starting to wonder if there is a limit to how many tunes can be crammed into my brain in one day. Fortunately some of them were review tunes.

Here is Andre Brunet's morning fiddle class (below). I was 15 minutes late, but he was 30 minutes late, due to a late night of fiddling! Nevertheless, he is beloved by his students, and a few of them pulled together and got everyone practicing two tunes that they had learned in days before. Also, one of the students had transcribed some tunes, and passed out copies to us. How very generous! 

The French Canadian classes get many students, and so get the big JFK building. Today, a student asked Andre to talk about his musical background. He's always been immersed in it, with his two brothers. His father played guitar and his uncle, fiddle. These two brothers married two dancers, so family get-togethers always involved music. He received an orange plastic ukulele as a child that wound up in the trash. When his mother asked about it, he said he wanted a fiddle instead! Sometime later, his wish was granted.



Andre has a wonderful spirit and sense of humor, and is a natural teacher. He gets a lot from his students and uses repetition effectively, knowing we need to play parts over and over, and then the entire tune over and over before we get it. Then he pushes us to play faster and faster! The energy of the music is so exciting!



Another joke!



After the 9:20 class, it's on to the 11:15. I went to hear Cedric Watson (below) of the Pine Leaf Boys play some more Cajun music. Cedric's playing is very expressive. Today he brought in a recorder/player with some music of Canray Fontenot, a Creole fiddler from Louisiana who passed away a few years ago, and who has played at Fiddle Tunes in the past. We learned a Fontenot tune, "Jolie Joues Roses."  Cedric is concerned that everyone gets the tune, and listens to us attentively. I also really liked how had us take breaks, and taught us some good stretching exercises for our hands and arms.



Cedric sings beautifully along with his playing



Before lunch I stopped in at the Fiddle Tunes store to see how T-Dawg was getting along. Here he is, directing traffic with two bows. On the left is proprietor John Hatton. He runs festival stores as "Cleff'd Ear Productions" at many events. What a complicated job! He has been doing it for a long time now, though. He is a fine old-time musician from Michigan and his band, the Rhythm Billies, is currently producing another CD collection.



I went over to the Commons to meet up with my fiddling friend Laurel to walk to Fort Worden Beach for lunch. It was kind of a cool day, but the walk felt good, the sand was warm and we enjoyed leaning up against a log to eat our picnic. Then we walked barefoot in the waves for a little while. Darn, I forgot to take some pictures!

I went back to JFK with Laurel to try out the French-Canadian band lab. This was again high-energy, and my shoulders and arms wanted to give out. I had to put down my fiddle a couple of times. But I was happy to learn some more tunes!

On to the 4:00 class. This was my second day with David Kaynor and the "Unplanned Band." David has been initiating the class into some Swedish tunes and one of his favorite contradance tunes, "Hen's Feet."
He asserts that it should be played at least once a day, lol! One of the Fiddle Tunes staff members came around to this class and asked if we were going to perform at the Participants' Dance. We had to take a vote and then figure out what to play, right then and there! We decided to play a Swedish waltz and a polska. Laurel attended this class with me today. We'll have a bunch of new tunes to play together!

Here is David Kaynor (on the right) playing one of our tunes for a bass player.



5:15 p.m. and it's dinnertime. I headed home, intending to return for the evening performance and dancing, but after dinner I crashed bigtime and fell asleep, and poor hubby and I didn't go dancing after all! C'est la vie!