Whew! It was a busy, busy week filled with a lot of music making (always good).

Thursday and Friday, the kiddos (i.e. my middle school musical participants) staged their production of “Once on This Island.” We’ve been working with them since January and in that short time they learned — and remembered! — an amazing amount of acting, dancing and singing. By all reports, it was a success and the “kids sang beautifully.” (A compliment to me as the vocal coach for the program.) The 8th graders even finessed the a cappella number I arranged for them. They were so proud of themselves, we hardly needed to be proud of them. (But we were! Extremely proud.)

All in all, a really fun experience. Better yet, I get to go to the “cast party” this afternoon (smile).

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Then onto two Songtaneous events Saturday (small) and Sunday (big).

Saturday evening, I faciliated a private Songtaneous event. I arrived to find a circle of casually apprehensive women snacking and waiting for me in a circle of chairs. We chatted a little about how a singing circle works and then I got us singing with the Ituri Rainforest chant I sang in Ysaye Barnwell’s workshop earlier this month.

For nearly two hours, we sang, played language games, chair danced and laughed. I was touched by how readily these women integrated me into their circle. And the transformation that occurred in the group was powerful and amazing and gratifying and … you know, all the reasons I do this work. By the end, all of the women were singing enthusiastically and confidently. Even women whom I suspect showed up thinking they wouldn’t (or couldn’t *smile*) really sing.

I got lots of enthuiastic feedback and suggestions on how to talk about Songtaneous. (I always ask people who participate in Songtaneous sessions to tell me how they’d describe it to someone else. It teaches me about how Songtaneous impacts different people and what’s important to different groups.)

Some said I shouldn’t say singing circle. In fact, the organizer of this get-together said she was hesitant to send people to my web site. (I pointed out it was hard to describe Songtaneous without talking about singing. But I get it. Singing brings up a lot of fear for some people.) Another woman suggested I should use the description chanting (which, of course, was a total turn-off for another woman). Yet another woman thought I should emphasize that I teach African chants. Hmm … lots to think about.

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Sunday morning, I grumpily rose at 7:00 am (have I mentioned yet that I am NOT a morning person?) to get dressed, warm up my (by now) very tired voice and get in the car and on the way to the Kinoia Retreat Center for the Annual Assoc of Universalist Women’s Retreat closing ceremony.

In contrast to Saturday evening’s event, this would be a large group of women who had spent the weekend together chatting, dancing, doing pedicures and all other manner of community building. I was bringing Songtaneous here to enhance and celebrate a firmly established community. I’d had several positive discussions with the retreat organizers who thought Songtaneous “was perfect” for their event so I was excited to get to work with this large, enthusiastic group.

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The theme for the retreat was “nurturing our spirit gardens.” So again I started with the Ituri Rainforest chant. (Hey, improvisation doesn’t mean constant originality! Sometimes it’s about choosing what works.) It seemed appropriate to sing the chant given Ysaye Barnwell’s comments about how its original singers sing it to emulate the rainforest in which they live. And that in doing so, they are striving to emulate the divine.

Next, we created a vocal garden. I asked the women to toss out words to describe the soil and what things would grow in our garden. Using their words, we created musical representations. Then we added wind and sunshine and even some rain. We started our garden song standing in a circle but spontaneously began circling the room as our “garden” grew.

To close, I told the story behind my song “Rooted and Reaching” (we’ll save that for another time – this post is already much longer than I planned!) and taught it to the circle. Spontaneous singing continued to break out during the remainder of the closing ceremony. And, yes, I led some of these outbreaks, but not all.

I drove home from the retreat full of compliments, my complimentary lunch and lyrical and musical snippets from a weekend of Songtaneous big and small.

Sweet Honey in the Rock

As you know, a few weeks ago, I attended a free community workshop presented by Sweet Honey’s Aisha Kahlil. Here (finally!) is my account of that workshop and my brief meeting with Ms. Kahlil.

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Improvising with Aisha Kahlil

The workshop took place after a program celebrating the culmination of a poster design contents at Center for Independent Artists (www.c4ia.org) and included performances by several youth groups. The Sankofa Drummers who opened the program with African drumming were joined later by their dancers — a talented and highly energetic group of young ones from kindergarten to middle school. Voices of Truth and a student gospel choir (sadly the name of their school escapes me) rounded out the pre-workshop performances.

Aisha Kahlil moved the audience quickly and fluidly into a large singing circle and then assigned an (improvised?) pattern to the circle. She deftly added multiple parts and had the whole room (even the deaf and hard of hearing attendees) participating.

(Both Kahlil and Barnwell practice the method of getting people singing promptly. It’s a supportive combination of expecting and assuming that groups are willing and able to sing communally. Diving right in also can be an effective way to avoid the BBHoF.)

Kahlil has an extensive dance and vocal improv background and both these influences permeated her improvisational, high-energy workshop. She used an African drumming pattern to work on rhythmic singing and incorporated African dance moves (at which the Sankofa Dancers excelled and the rest of us happily flailed) into a routine to accompany the piece.

I enjoyed how Kahlil intuitively used the principle of the drum break to move the group between instruction and singing and back again. It cemented the purpose of the break’s function in a clever and practical way. Admittedly, when we were singing, we were never able to implement this quite as well Kahlil demonstrated. And, most of our Midwestern tongues tripped over the syllables and rhythms at first (and again later when we picked up speed).

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Aisha Kahlil (by Joe Beasley)

After the workshop, I pushed myself to go and introduce myself. I wanted to tell Ms. Kahlil that I planned to share her workshop here with you, my loyal readers and I also wanted to compliment her on keeping such a large group engaged throughout her presentation. Kahlil’s facilitation style is similar to my own and observing her direct this group was invaluable.

I would never have guessed that she was such a tiny person. It felt like I towered over her. (I’m sure this is an exaggerated impression, but I rarely tower over anyone!) And I’ve always experienced the Sweet Honey women as larger than life having seen them only in performance. On stage, Kahlil exhibits huge presence and charisma.

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Long story short (okay, not that short since it took me 3 weeks to write it all down), I met two of my a cappella heroines in one weekend.

AND … I got to sing with them. How sweet.

Photo by Sharon Farmer, 2007

Sweet Honey in the Rock visited the Twin Cities this weekend. And, as those of us on the mailing list were lucky enough to learn, the group offered FREE workshops over the course of the weekend. I attended 2 of these events, one on Saturday March 8, hosted by Ysaye Barnwell and a second workshop on Sunday March 9, hosted by Aisha Kahlil.

And … I met them! Both! (They were kind and very generous with their selves and their time. They even let me snap a couple of photos. *smile*) But, enough of that, let me tell you about the workshops!

Dr. Barnwell and me

Building Community with Barnwell
Ysaye Barnwell is the deep-voiced contributor and a frequent songwriter for Sweet Honey in the Rock. (My own a cappella group sings a lot of her arrangements.) Her workshop focused on “Building a Vocal Community” (how apropos!). The group was fairly large for singing at 10:30 on a Saturday morning and I ran into lots of folks from my singer community … Barbara McAfee, Ann Kay and other singer friends.

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I admit to arriving a wee bit late (I hadn’t planned to attend the workshop since I’d be hosting Songtaneous in the afternoon). As I arrived, Barnwell was running the group through some scalar warm-ups; getting people loose and moving them into that wonderful head space community singing creates — the space that holds the qualities of being light-hearted and playful yet mindful and focused simultaneously.

From the warmup, Barnwell moved us to singing a chant from the Ituri Rainforest. In my opinion, it was worth going to the workshop just to hear what she had to say about this chant and it’s purpose. She put so simply and clearly things that have been percolating in my subconscious about communal singing.

[This chant is] Sung to pull all of the members of the community into the center of the community. It can be sung for hours and, some people say, even days. If that’s what it takes to pull everyone into a like-mindedness.

She went on to say …

On the face, it is very simple; in its thought process, it is more complex and more involved.

What you will experience is that when we do it properly and all the parts fit together correctly, new melodies will be created. They can only be created by how the parts come together.

This tells us is that this can’t be done by one’s self, it has to be done with others.

And speaking to the spiritual nature (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the chant …

“Nothing can happen until it’s right. And one of the reasons nothing can happen until it’s right is because the people believe that the Rainforest that they live in is God. And so until they’re right with God nothing else is going to start.

So it’s a really an important thing, an important way of simply sitting and being with each other and being with the environment … of trying to emulate the sounds in the environment, in order to emulate God.”

Like the woman said, simple yet complex.

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Barnwell then taught us a poly rhythmic African chant to which she added words and a “boys to men” chant (not it’s actual name *wink*) out of South Africa. She was patient and kind as we strove to adjust our Western mono rhythmic sensibilities to these new challenges.

She explained about the following about drummers (and other players) of poly rhythmic chants. She gave a great analogy about trying to find the image hidden in the paintings made up of all the dots. The individual rhythms are the dots, but the melody is the spaceship. She advised us to “listen for the spaceship.”

What they’re listening for is different from what they’re listening to. What they listen to, is their relationship to each of the other drums. What they’re listening for is the melody [like] we heard in the first [Rainforest] chant.

We finished the morning of singing with some African American spirituals. All in all, a good morning’s play.

Up Next: Improvising with Aisha Kahlil