wandering off the staff
So, in the last couple of weeks, I took a couple of musical steps outside my comfort zone, and I survived.
First, thanks to a certain musical director catching my absent-mindedly warming up my fingers on the guitar one evening, I ended up playing a big fancy improvizational flamenco/surf guitar cadenza during a neat little orchestral piece based on the numeric intervals of the first hundred or so digits of π. It was a really neat piece, and those that played and heard it thought things sounded really great, although I thought my little solo (not just a normal “solo” – I was literally the only one playing for close to a minute) went on too long, but that’s probably just me, my impostor syndrome, and the fact that the longer I go on with one of those things, the closer the probability of my royally screwing it up approaches 1:1.
Secondly, on this past Friday night, I sang the national anthem at a local minor league baseball game. Sure, it was me and 103 of my closest friends as part of a choir, but I sang, did it publically, and sang harmony as part of the bass section. I learned a bit, and had some fun with the jokers in my section, and we sounded, as far as I’ve heard, pretty good. I might even do it again.
Still, it was a lot of stepping out of my established niche; there’s a little stress there. I’ve been doing a lot of that over the last couple of years. Luckily, I have a couple of regular old bass gigs with the Humdingers coming up, so I can settle into comfortable low-end anonymity again.
