Body Music Workshop featuring Keith Terry
2013-08-01
Joe Henderson Lab
SFJAZZ Center, 205 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA
4:00 PM, Thursday, August 1, 2013

• Keith Terry: leader, body percussion, vox.

I signed up for this workshop on a whim, figuring that it would be worthwhile to learn a little hambone – all the better for entertaining (or distracting!) small children.

About twenty of us were present at the start of event, though another dozen odd folks arrived as the afternoon unfolded.

After a brief introduction, Keith started us off with a sort of counting exercise – learning the components of the Balinese kecak, which is composed of three interleaved lines of chant based on phasing the same phrase differently over an eight bar measure. I'm sure my description is a little off, but it was great fun – and a real challenge too!

From there we turned to hambone – body percussion specifically derived from the African-american slave culture – and tried practicing a bunch of those techniques. More fun, but harder on the hands than I expected, and certainly good for reminding myself that dexterity and rhythm are skills to be practiced!

Following a sort of round-the-world survey of other body percussion techniques (inuit mouth music was an exciting new one to me!), we returned to another counting exercise. First Keith leading us through a series of short routines of increasing beat length (eg: 1 beat, 2 beats, 3 beats, etc, running up to 10). Next, he'd break up the class into groups, then set each group to playing patterns, such as one group playing 3 cycles of 8 vs. another playing 4 cycles of 6. As with trying kecak, it was a great challenge, and lots of fun trying to lock together with your own group while listening to the entire ensemble.

All in all, I thought it was a very worthy activity for a summer afternoon!