A Last of epic proportions

As promised I am reporting on many of my significant Last Moments, and yesterday I had yet another Last Moment of the most bittersweet sort: my last rehearsal with The Band and our first and last live performance as a group.

Since my second week in Israel I have been playing regularly with a group of four guys known to me as "The Band," for lack of a more interesting name (though we have kicked around a few ideas to amuse ourselves).  My involvement with them began in a moment of pure serendipity, and what started as a lead guitarist's enthusiastic snap decision became the basis of a family that reunited once every week to jam and bring Leonard Cohen, Jefferson Airplane, and Stealers Wheel to life in Israel.  (For the beginning of the saga, read here.)  

Every week (barring holidays or scheduling conflicts) we get together for about three hours to practice our repertoire and have some fun.  It's funny to say we're "practicing" because to me that suggests that we're practicing for something.  Yet in the time I was with these guys we never performed gigs, so our "rehearsals" were more like structured jam sessions that, without admitting it, allowed everyone to forget about anything that was going on in their week and just enjoy themselves with some good friends, good music, and a bottle of wine.

Not only did the guys open me up to a genre of music I've never really listened to all that much, but it opened me to a musical world I've only ever gazed at from afar.  I have always been involved in music - orchestras, concert bands, marching band, musical pit ensembles, quartets - but I've never been in a band.  I've never jammed with drums and bass, never really improvised, and certainly never sang into a microphone that wasn't connected to a monitor with scrolling words.  Nope, for all my musical involvement, I had never had the quintessential rock band experience until coming here.

But like I mentioned, The Band never did gigs, so maybe I was getting an incomplete rock band experience.  Well, we couldn't have that, now could we?  In the week prior to our last practice we suddenly all got an e-mail from our bassist saying that in honor of my last time with them, we were going to put on a short performance for friends and family.  Nothing too special, just something to celebrate and commemorate our hard work and to wish me farewell.

I should have assumed that nothing would go smoothly that night.  We got there late, started setting up, and when the guitarist asked me to tune for him first the top E string broke, then after quickly changing it and retuning it, the low E broke.  Go figure!  But with luck like that we were sure to have a good show.  And we did :)

More people than I expected showed up; we probably had around 20 audience members in the room, including about six from the Ulpan plus our director.  The show went great and the audience even called for two encores which had us playing for nearly 50 minutes, which is a lot for a short concert on a kibbutz at 10:00 at night.  

It was exhilarating.  I'm no stranger to performance, but like I said I've never performed vocally in front of a microphone (karaoke notwithstanding) and y'know what?  I like it!  I'm still not confident that my voice is anything worth applauding over, but boy was it fun!  And because I wasn't looking at sheet music I could actually connect with the audience in a much more personal way.  I didn't care if it wasn't perfect, didn't care if it was a little out of tune or if maybe we weren't perfectly together.  And when I played piano and messed up on one of the chords, big deal!  This kind of truly carefree attitude is something I have been missing from my classical training in which it's easy to lose the feeling amidst the perfection.  Oh, and I even got to improvise a bit.  (Wow, doesn't take much to excite a trained musician, does it?)

Parting from them at 1:00 in the morning was where the "bitter" of the "bittersweet" really came into play.  In the past five months I have not only played piano and sung with the guys, but I have become part of their group, accepted and loved, let in on the jokes, respected for my musical input, and, in short, become their friend.  I even wrote a song for them that unfortunately we didn't have time to play, so we pledged to hold onto it until the day when I come back to Israel.  Someday, somehow, I will find myself back in this country and when I do, I'll come back to Kibbutz Na'an on a Tuesday evening around 9:00 and probably find them playing the same songs we played last night.  And when I come back, even if it's only for that one night, we will jam together again.