I'd stumbled into a workshop Sandy gave at the Seattle Folklife Festival, where she'd invited me to come out to the G-Note, so I did. Once there, I learned that The Gyppos' rule: anyone could get on stage and play, but only the Gyppos got mikes. The rest of us sat behind them and hung on.
I had no idea what I was doing. None. Zero.
Nor did I have any idea what a good thing I'd stumbled into. Like a Spanish immersion course, I was learning how to play dances from native speakers.
Five or six years later, I went out to Boston for a week, for work. Dave Taenzer, an anglo-concertina player, and I had brought our instruments, and we'd sit around at lunch and play. One of the locals, a relatively new whistle player, started joining us.
At that point, Dave and I were the core of the Boulder Irish Session and had, as Dave explains, "gotten kicked out of every restaurant and bar in Boulder," so if the whistle player named a tune he knew, we could already play it better than he could.
Friday, he invited us to a dance that his local Mega-band was playing. We asked, "Could we bring instruments, too?" He went off to make a phone call, came back, and said, "No. Only people who've come to the rehearsals can be in the band. You can come listen."
We demurred.
The following evening, Dave had flown home and I was casting about for something to do. I called a number someone else had given me and asked if the woman who answered whether there might be a jam anywhere that evening. I wanted to play.
She said, "You're from Colorado? Do you know Dave Brown?" I allowed as how I did. She said, "Want to play a dance tonight? Paying gig." Why yes, I did.
Guess how good she was.
Anybody who's really good will invite you to play along. When I play dances with Joel Hayes and Ron Sommers, we're hardly the Gypsy Gyppos, but as often as not, you'll see other locals on stage with us at some point in the evening. If someeone's sitting next to me and he's not having a problem keeping up, I'll even offer him my mike. If the beat's there, the dancers won't care. The guest musician will care enormously.
I had not. It would not even occur to me to bring it, hoping to get up and play with Eric. But you can imagine how good his asking made me feel.
Was Eric trying to flatter me? Of course not. Would I have made Eric sound better? Don't be silly. Was his invitation sincere? Yes, indeedy. Eric was doing what comes naturally. He's a never-ending lesson to us all.
I can trot out more stories like this, but you get the idea. If you're playing a dance, invite folks to play with you. It's precious little skin off your nose, it's polite, and it shores up your community.
I except rhythm players. A bad drummer will kill the dance. Do not let someone play bones unless you're certain he can keep up. Ditto for guest guitars and pianos.
I don't, however, except non-musicians. I will, from time-to-time, look out on the dance floor, see a new dancer sitting out a dance, and I'll walk over and invite him to come sit it out on-stage. Occasionally, I think "These people could be axe murderers," yet so far it's always turned out well. Their eyes open to what's happening on the other side of the mike, and they're more likely to come to future dances. A single set, watched from the stage, changes how you see from the floor.
Each person you share the stage with shores up your community.
During the first few months that I went to the G-Note, one of the Gyppos' fiddlers, Bob Naess, was off somewhere, way back east in Colorado. The night he finally re-appeared, I was standing in the back, barely keeping up. Naess was in the front, at the mike, fiddling away and surveying the dance floor. Still fiddling, he turned his head, looked around the stage, and flashed me a huge grin. And he didn't know me from Adam.
I thought, "These are the kind of people I want to be around. I guess I really have to learn to play."
