March 4th 2016, live: "Murga de la tarde", "El dueño de los temas" and "Smile"

Apr 17, 2016 · 5 minute read · Comments

The genesis of that night in “Blackman y su cueva” has already been told.

Here you have three songs.

Great emotion: the instrument of Jorge “Negro” González was with us again, vibrating again, in the skillful hands of Pablo Motta. The nice surprise was due to Carlos Américo González, Jorge’s brother. And thanks to him, this time we also have a video recording.

I see I was often playing oriented to the side of the scene: that’s because from there I could listen to myself, the two main speakers where rather far to the sides of the scene, and fearing couplings I hadn’t almost been given any audible level from the monitor (they had been thinking I’d use in-ear monitoring, I was been told later). It was a little hard to play and keep in tune with the rest of the band, but I can not complain because I had arrived 20 minutes late at the sound check and had to install my stuff and check the sound rather quickly (I really needed a nap before leaving home, the dogs of various neighbours made it impossible, I wanted to try a little longer with no other result than arriving a little late… anyway, sometimes I get to have even less monitoring detail in places where I arrive early for the sound check).

“El dueño de los temas” by Marcelo Mayor, Argentinian guitarist, was part of the first half of the concert; “Smile” by Charles Chaplin (nice idea of Pablo) was the first song of the second part, and “Murga de la tarde” by Quintino Cinalli, *my favorite song of the band repertoire, was the last of that night.

Cuatrix:

• Nicola B. Bernardelli trumpet and flügelhorn
• Tomás Fraga electric guitar
• Pablo Motta double bass
• Quintino Cinalli drums

If you can set the player for HD, you get a better sound quality, YouTube streams better audio together with better video.

Murga de la tarde de Quintino Cinalli

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqXOdgoM_SY

El dueño de los temas de Marcelo Mayor

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV1ThLeVfGc

Smile de Charles Chaplin

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm3qorMzlSM

As this is a trumpeter’s blog, I’ll share some more thoughts…

At the end of the concert I was furious for some mistakes I had made. Listening to the recording, I realized they were not so bad, I even like one :)
I mean that face on the scene was by far worse than the mistakes to which it was due, I don’t think that even Miles Davis ever showed such an expression on the scene <:D

Jorge used to say “That doesn’t matter, the albums of the greatest players are full of those mistakes!”. Oook… but when it happens, with all the concentration one is putting into it, it hurts. Well, I have to learn to laugh and let go, as a trumpeter friend of mine, when he missed a high note during a concert he could just laugh and say… “almost”.

Of course I’d like to be more invulnerable to the eventual lack of detail in monitoring. Singers suffer from that too generally, but that’s no surprise, the less you can listen to yourself the more “blindly” you are performing.

With brasses, that is trumpet, flügelhorn, trombone and all that kind of “resonators”, part of the problem is very difficult to elude and has to do with the tuning of the instrument: if it is tuned more towards the low frequencies and I’m wanting a frequency which I have in my head correctly tuned with the other musicians but which is at the moment against “the roof” of the resonance slot of the instrument, it’s possible that the instrument resonance stabilizes into the superior harmonic. It’s the typical mistake at the very beginning of a song or restarting to play after others’ improvisation… Sometimes there’s no mistake and one simply thinks “hey how cold I am now!” but in reality it’s the instrument which hasn’t been kept warm enough, or one forgot to compensate by tuning it higher, by shortening it (colder => lower frequencies). To pass from one instrument to another can also give surprises. Of course many other variables come into play, the embouchure itself involves various “parameters” and “knobs”, “we are flesh, that can not be reproduced exactly, and the mistake is always lurking” used to say one of my teachers. Another made a positive value of mistakes, like spontaneously painting by splashing paint to the canvas, it can be very beautiful, but it depends on what you are playing and in which style.

“Live”, once the mistake is there, it’s there, there’s no other take :D

Pilots say “you learn from each single landing”, and in this context you learn from each single gig.

Recording: Zoom H2n with the built-in mics, mixed with Sony FDR AXP33 video cam
Processing: Ableton Live Suite
Image: Inkscape, GIMP, Blender

I also used the sound recorded by Carlos’ video cam because being out of the scene it captured from the speakers more harmon muted trumpet than my recorder.

In “El dueño de los temas” there’s only the sound recorded by the video cam: I forgot to start my recorder, and only realized after the first half of the concert :-/