I've got a "much music weekend" coming up. Not the first time, but this is a good one, and for the first time in a while, I'm actually feeling just a bit of anxiety about it, to the point where I had a pretty wacky dream/nightmare last night. That's how I know I'm feeling anxiety, or at least what other people must feel as anxiety, because I never know myself. I just do whatever needs to be done, and in this case there's much music that needs to be made!
This Saturday is band practice, same as every other Saturday. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Four new songs on tap, plus run through some of the older ones, whichever ones John has picked that he thinks need some work.
Friday night, however, is the first rehearsal of a one-off project that I'm involved in with Mike and Karen, the husband and wife team who not-so-coincidentally used to be in the band I'm in now. There's a charity gig on the 21st, and Mike and Karen are involved with the charity and offerred to put a band together so there would be live music at the event. Cool enough. Six people, three rehearsals, one show. I can do that. Slight concern about rehearsing Friday night after working all day, then getting up Saturday morning to load up again and head to another rehearsal, but such is the life of a musician. I'll take a nap after I get home Saturday afternoon.
Then Sunday morning, singing with the church choir as usual, then afterwards we're rehearsing a recorder quartet. Never been in one of those before, but our director thought it would be kinda cool to do, so she found a book of flute quartets and picked a relatively easy one for us to do on recorders. It won't be anything mind-boggling, but it's one of those things where if everyone plays the right notes, it sounds pretty cool. Anyway, I have to remember to bring my recorder with me to church on Sunday. Should probably practice a bit after my nap Saturday, too.
Monday night, I got a call from Mike. He'd sent out the song list for the charity gig two weeks ago, and I spent a lot of time working on the tunes this past weekend (and also working on the tunes for my regular band), but now Mike and Karen have some concerns about some of the songs, how the message might not be really appropriate for the gig and stuff. Stuff they hadn't really thought about before. They were just picking songs they thought most people would know and which would work, not necessarily how well they'd go over at a gig for homeless people and the staff at the homeless shelter. "Put a Little Love in Your Heart", "Celebration"... yeah. So he bounces some other song titles off of me for a while, we chat a bit, and he says he's gonna send out an email along with a list of "possible substitutions". Okay. We get the email Tuesday, and now I'm wondering when we're supposed to work up the tunes individually, since the first rehearsal is Friday night. I Reply All to the email, wondering if we're just going to discuss these new ones, or try to run through them as well. Most of us don't have a lot of time during the week, you know. Plus, of the original 15 songs (we're only playing for "about an hour"), I've got the keyboards down, but there are three I'm playing sax on, and I haven't practiced them yet. I was planning on doing that with the little bit of remaining time.
The new list is 12 songs and somewhat heavier on keys, usually no biggie, except that these songs happen to have parts that are pretty well-known and really need to be played like on the record or they'll sound "wrong". Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, Rascal Flatts. I sat down to see which songs I already had mp3's of, and which I needed to download, and found I only needed two of them, so that was cool. But by then it was getting late so I didn't really have to time work on them. Plus it was Tuesday, and "The Americans" was on. Anyway, there's still a difference between knowing a song as in knowing what it sounds like because you've heard it for 40-some years and knowing it as in being able to reproduce it. I'm fortunate that that difference is not as great as it is for some, but I still have to at least play through the song a few times.
So last night, I dreamed that I had agreed to play in a trumpet quartet. I have working knowledge of all brass instruments, just as I do for woodwinds, but I don't profess to play brass because my embouchure doesn't cooperate. Still, if the part is simple enough and I have time to practice, I can probably play it, or at least I think I could. I have a cornet in the basement that I haven't touched for years, but I do have it. Anyway, in my dream, it's Friday night and my wife are driving to the church (weird crossover) for the service, of which the trumpet quartet is a part. All week, I've been trying to find some time to practice, and between being genuinely busy with my other musical projects and my feeling that I can probably just wing it, it just hasn't happened. I mean, within the context of the dream, it's Friday night, and I can remember specifically blowing off practicing on Tuesday and Wednesday, then I had choir rehearsal on Thursday. You know, the weird level of detail you sometimes get in dreams.
So we're there at the church, and it's the one I grew up in (which is about 500 miles away from where I currently live), and the service is going, and it's time for us to start getting ready for the quartet. I'm thinking Man, I better be as good as I think I am at this shit. Wait... where's my horn? I'm such a spaz, I left my cornet in the car. I go running down the stairs, and on the way down the stairs (two at a time), I realize Holy Shit, I didn't even bring it! I did not grab it when we got in the car because we were running late. I grabbed my choir folder out of habit, and I can picture the cornet case still sitting there by the front door (again, a weird detail, but I could "see" it there in the dream).
No resolution. I woke up at that point.
Anyway, lots of music this weekend, lots of stuff to practice, hopefully I'll at least remember to bring the various axes I'll need to wherever I'll need them.