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Last night I had a gig with my regular twmpath (barn dance) band, which was a lot of fun but not quite as exciting as the gig I had the Saturday before.
The main features of that gig which made it so exciting were:
To backtrack slightly, the reason I was playing for a twmpath in Hungary is that my friend Andy is getting ready to move over there soon to a farm he has bought near Szeged, and wanted to put on a social event for people in his church there. If nothing else, it was a great excuse for me to have a holiday.
Unfortunately due to the baggage restrictions on my flight I couldn't take my own fiddle with me, but I was able to borrow one while I was there. It was a lovely instrument, apparently locally made, with a slightly sweeter tone than mine. We also managed to misplace the only copy of the sheet music I'd taken for the dances, but they were all tunes I knew well anyway and Andy was able to busk along with the chords without trouble - in fact he probably did it better playing by ear than trying to read the changes, and it did allow some flexibility in making the tunes fit with the dances when they went wrong. The only other member of the band was Ben, who was playing djembe and completely unbothered by the lack of dots.
Originally I put together a list of about 12 dances to do at the event, with a few more in reserve. We only had time to translate about 8 of the dances and in the end we only actually used 4 of those, but we did them at least twice each. Given that none of the dancers or the callers knew the first thing about barn dancing, they did a fantastic job and, while we wouldn't have won any prizes (except perhaps the wooden spoon) in a competition, a great time was had by all.
More random posts about my Hungarian adventure to follow soon...
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