For nine years or so, back in the early 2000’s, I was a regular volunteer at CBA music camp, and I did a couple of Walker Creek Camps as well. There was always a sense of happiness in the air at those camps, and of common purpose — all these people excited about music and learning from each other and the instructors.
I got a little whiff of that feeling the last two weeks when I enrolled in a bluegrass jam class, Level 2, at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. I signed up in an attempt to re-learn how to play my mandolin, which went inactive about 20 years ago when I developed psoriatic arthritis in my hands. My fingers swelled up, and although large doses of naproxen sodium helped a lot, I couldn’t position my hands to get the chord shapes the mandolin requires.
Later, I found a rheumatologist who prescribed a weekly dose of a drug called methotrexate. It takes the edge off the immune system (which is attacking your own body, causing the arthritis) and over a period of time my fingers got nearly normal.
But by that time I was playing banjo in a band (the neck is bigger and the banjo chord formations never proved to be a problem) and the mandolin remained in its case.
Recently I’ve been looking at that case and remembering how much fun mandolins are. Gigs have been slow in recent months for my band, so I decided to try the jam class both to get a little more music into my life and reacquaint myself with the mandolin.
Bill Evans, not only a great banjo player but one of the most enthusiastic human beings on the subject of music I have ever met, is the instructor/facilitator. There are nine of us in the class: two fiddles, a Dobro, a banjo, three guitars and my mandolin.
The material is pretty classic — tunes most bluegrass fans know like “Little Darling Pal of Mine,” “Banks of the Ohio,” and common fiddle tunes like “Old Joe Clark.” One thing I hoped would happen, did, in fact happen: I started practicing almost every day. There’s a parking lot next to the Bay where the Richmond Ferry to San Francisco arrives and departs. Several parking spots there are reserved for public shoreline users and it is a beautiful place to sit and watch the boats go by while playing “Red Haired Boy” over and over.
It is traditional at Evans’ classes for the group to walk to a nearby bar/restaurant after the second class for a snack and/or a beer. We did that Tuesday and I found that the people on my end of the table, at least, are an impressive group. One is an engineer who designs water systems, one a software person who works on sensors that can detect any kind of electronic signals in an area. Another wrote software that was on board the Mars rover!
A very cool crew, and all, along with me, chasing the goal of making more and better music. I’m so pleased I signed up. I can’t recommend it too highly.
