{"id":593,"date":"2015-11-04T13:03:04","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T13:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegaijinchronicles.com\/?p=593"},"modified":"2015-11-04T13:03:04","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T13:03:04","slug":"tgc-live-hand-flute-vs-hand-saw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/?p=593","title":{"rendered":"TGC Live! Hand Flute vs. Hand Saw!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to The Gaijin Chronicles Live, where I come up with a loophole for my normal insistence upon posting things in chronological order and instead talk about something that happened that day. \u201cBut Curtis,\u201d you may say, \u201cit doesn\u2019t have to be in chronological order, we won\u2019t know.\u201d I\u2019ll know, and I must follow my rules, because if I don\u2019t, whose rules will<\/em> I follow? My reports are of high scientific importance, and as such, must adhere to a high standard of accuracy. I\u2019m not here for your entertainment (you don\u2019t really wanna mess with me tonight). I\u2019m here to record my travels, and to inform the masses (and also to try and mess with them by getting songs stuck in their heads. If that last one didn\u2019t work, I\u2019ll just try again later). So, live from Tsu York<\/del>, it\u2019s TGC night!<\/p>\n

After teaching my first class, the teacher told me that there were jazz musicians playing for the 9th<\/sup> graders in the music room and that I should go watch. I went up not really sure what to expect. It was a three man group from Tokyo called Super 3 (something three, I forgot). One was on the piano, one on various wind instruments, and the third on the drums. They started out with an original jazz flute song, a la Ron Burgundy, then moved to other instruments. First the lead musician, who looked just like the rolling heads<\/a> from Spirited Away (and was even called Daruma<\/a>-chan by his bandmate), asked the students about playing the recorder in elementary school. Then he performed his first miracle by making me listen to a recorder song without losing the will to live. It was actually really good. While he did this, the piano player switched to a pianica (piano with a tube that looks like a breathalyzer for your car). Well, one hand switched, the other kept playing the grand piano. After that song, the piano player came up front and played Amazing Grace on a saw. That wasn\u2019t a typo, he pulled out a hand saw and a violin bow, and by bending the saw and rubbing the bow along the backside of the saw, and he played an actual song. It sounded a lot like a Theremin (the instrument that makes the spooky oooooOOOOOOooooo ghost sound). Next Daruma-chan switched to the trombone as they played another song, during which he was able to make sounds that in my years of learning never heard anyone do. He somehow seemed to play two notes at the same time just by adjusting his embouchure (mouth position). Afterwards he asked who played the trombone. Most people were surprised when I raised my hand (likely both because they didn\u2019t know I played and because I actually understood the question). He then repeated the trick, and I have still have no idea how. After that was a song on the hand flute (cupping your hands together and blowing into them). He pointed out that the word they use was a foreign word and had them repeat \u201chando fuluuto.\u201d I wondered if I should correct that when I taught them later. I used to be able to do it, but only as a crappy bird call, never as an actual instrument. He played Somewhere Over the Rainbow, then taught the other kids how to do it. I was able to repeat it a little, and so were a select few other kids. The percussion guy then asked who played drums. Surprisingly, it was only one girl. He took out some kind of bongos and played them, then asking where they were from (Cuba in this case, he also had an African drum). He got a volunteer to come up and play a little rhythm on the drums. The kid got really into it and was bobbing his head up and down with the rhythm (Night at the Roxbury<\/a>\u00a0style), which the musician found hilarious (it was). He got another kid to try, though to less success, and then had the two do a duet together. After they took their bow, he held up some maracas and asked what they were. A kid in the back enthusiastically yelled out \u201cMascara!\u201d So close. The girls all thought it was hilarious, as did most of the guys who likely had sisters. Then he got a volunteer to play them, and another for that jagged wood block you scrape with a stick. Much like us white folk, the Japanese are not known for their sense of rhythm. After trying to repeat a more complex pattern, the kid with the maracas just gave up and started randomly shaking them and his butt, which is basically what I would\u2019ve done. For their finally (I think, I had to go teach class during this part), Daruma-chan performed his second miracle by making my listen to It\u2019s a Small World without losing the will to live. They started with an American-jazz style cover, then switched to a softer, smoother Bazilian-jazz (I think), then finally (for me), mambo style. I think it\u2019s either the singing or the repetition (or both) that makes that song so unbearable. For those of you who haven\u2019t been to Disney lately and think, \u201cmaybe it\u2019s worse in my mind than it actually was,\u201d I was na\u00efve, too, once. I thought, \u201cHey, it can\u2019t be that<\/em> bad, can it?\u201d It can, and it is. It has to be one of the longest rides in all of Disney, during all of which it plays that accursed song. I\u2019m convinced those singing dolls are like dementors, sucking out peoples\u2019 happiness as sustenance so they may one day become real children. The lyrics even contain hints of the rides demonic origins. \u201cIt\u2019s a world of laughter (of Satan), a world of tears (of everyone else). It\u2019s a world of hopes (that it will end soon), a world of fears (that it never will, also of the dolls).\u201d Disney even thought, \u201cHey, it\u2019s not fair that only English speakers get that song drilled in their head,\u201d so about halfway through they begin to play it in every language so that no human is safe. It wouldn\u2019t surprise me to learn that as you pass the dolls, their hands spell out the lyrics in sign language. I know none of that has to do with the Jazz group, but I\u2019m bored and I really hate that ride. As a wise man (lion) once said of the song, \u201cNot that! Anything but that!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to The Gaijin Chronicles Live, where I come up with a loophole for my normal insistence upon posting things in chronological order and instead talk about something that happened …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Today I randomly got to go watch a small jazz band play during class, here's what happened in a new piece I call TGC Live.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,4,6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home","category-jet","category-tgc-live","tag-jet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgc.kaatissensei.pizza\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}