Made it, I’m done until next year! Only had to play those dang christmas songs four or five times this year. I had 4 gigs in December before Christmas, all with different players. These aren’t bands just groups of musicians playing “casuals”, as my musician union guy calls them. He doesn’t care what you call them, actually, as long as he gets paid which is better than I do.
It was four different venues. I played; a winery, an assisted living home, a group called “Sunday Friends” that supports under privileged kids in San Jose and in a contra dance band for a Google club. The leader of each of these groups thought that we needed to include christmas carols in our set, both the popular kind and the traditional ones
So what’s my beef with these tunes? I’ve known them all my life just like most of the rest of us. Here’s the rub. These songs are just melodies to me and I don’t play much melody on my bass………mostly because I don’t know how, oh and I have tin ears. I’ve told you this before about me. In order for me to play these tunes I need chords and while most of the repertoire was the same. The keys were always different which I understand as the singer needs a key they can be comfortable with, and some of these tunes, particularly the traditional ones are not necessarily easy to sing. I can work with that but what I was struggling with is the chords they gave me to play were all different and frankly…wrong.
Real musicians could argue that I should know or hear the changes and in most cases I do and can but it seems what I know is not what the guitar player or the mandolin player knows. Another important piece to this is that it was fiddlers leading the groups for these events. That is important because in my part of the county it seems that fiddlers are as clueless about chords as I am with melodies.
Surely, I exaggerate some. The christmas songs aren’t that difficult at all. I suppose only getting to play them for 3 or 4 times a year, so never quite learning them is a part of the issue but I guess I’m just not a Christmas / Holiday kind of guy anymore. Putting on a red Santa hat to play old time music doesn’t work for me. My general rule on this is; no funny hat gigs. But try as I might this doesn’t seem to work. The person leading the gigs shows up with funny hats and starts passing them out and forces the issue. I either put the funny hat on or my union guy doesn’t get paid.
It does seem that I have a scroogy attitude about the holiday season and I reckon that is true to a degree. (Although the dancing kids at the “Sunday Friends” event might have thawed my demeanor some.) However, my attitude really turns around when I see the smile on my grandsons face when he opens presents. He is a year and half old and just beams when we play our instruments for him when he visits. Linda and I bought him a ukulele for Christmas. I’m pretty sure this uke has never been to Hawaii but we didn’t buy it from toy store. His parents say he carries it around all day.
Now that can get a bass player into a funny hat and playing some christmas songs.
