cut the frabba-jabba

After I came back from Country Bordering Thailand, I jumped right into my next project. I played in the pit orchestra with a New York-based touring company of West Side Story.

By the time they got to Bangkok they'd been on tour for several months. They had been all over Asia and Europe, and Bangkok was their last stop before going home.

The way that these companies usually operate is, they hire a cast, a conductor, a few key stage crew members (I don't know enough about it to tell you their job titles), and a few core pit musicians (in the case of West Side Story, a bassist, a drummer, a pianist, a concertmaster, a lead trumpet player, and three woodwind doublers). Then they fill out the orchestra and the crew by hiring locals in each city they come through. It's cheaper for them, and at least in major cities in the U.S., there are musicians who make a living just by doing these kinds of gigs.

So the rest of the pit (and by today's Broadway standards it's a HUGE orchestra) was filled out by my colleagues and members of the orchestra I used to play in. I played clarinet, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet in the show. It was my first experience with doubling outside of a symphony orchestra, which is a whole different ballgame, and my learning curve was steep. After a rehearsal or two, though, I was doing about as well as I was going to do. Until.

In several of the numbers, I had to play all three instruments with very little time to change. I'd have the bass clarinet leaning on my shoulder, the B-flat clarinet in my hand, and the E-flat clarinet on a peg, waiting to be grabbed. I would keep a mouthpiece cover on instruments I wasn't currently using, to prevent the reeds from drying out/getting smacked and broken by me or the guy sitting next to me. Well, in rehearsal, with the bass clarinet ready (on my shoulder) and the B-flat clarinet in my hand, I made a quick change. I picked up the E-flat clarinet...pulled off the mouthpiece cover...and watched in horror as my ligature came off with it. Once the ligature is off, there's nothing holding the reed on, so the reed slid off...and into the bell of the bass clarinet.

This is why I'm not a freelance musician in New York City.

I missed the E-flat entrance, of course, and then my next bass clarinet entrance (only a few seconds later) because I was so flustered, but I made my next one, which was B-flat. For the rest of the number I sat out the E-flat entrances (no time to put on a new reed), and crossed my fingers while playing the bass, that the presence of an E-flat clarinet reed INSIDE THE INSTRUMENT wouldn't affect the sound too much. When the number was over I horrified the guy sitting next to me by taking apart my bass clarinet to get at the reed that had fallen into it while he was too busy doing his job to notice.

Now I want to tell you about the guy sitting next to me. He, and two others in the show, are woodwind doublers. This is a really specialized profession, useful only in this type of musical and in certain jazz situations. These guys can play anything. In this show, one of them played piccolo, flute, clarinet, and alto saxophone. Another played piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, and baritone saxophone. And the third played piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, and bass saxophone. They were making fast changes just like I was, but they were doing it on six instruments instead of three, and the instruments they were playing were not nearly so closely related as mine were.

("Cut the frabba-jabba" is a line from the show. They say it twice, and it's just such a funny line--what does it mean, anyway?-- that it stuck in my head.)