Listening to: Dave Grusin – Peter Gunn Theme

Well, I feel the brain juice coming back, but how I got it back is some story.

Today, I wasn’t feeling so jolly, but at school that promised to change. I started every morning in the school canteen, laptop booted up and running amok in BZPower, FanFiction, and the sort.

Well, I turned my morning tune to Enya tracks, lulling and ambient mood music selected to start my day on a positive note, then turned up some ‘good feeling’ pop.

To this writer, music is part of her fuel, other than imagination and a good deal of thinking and in-brain movie screenings.

So, when this girl realized that the lesson for today involved listening to a lot of music, good music as it was the lecturer’s personal collection of music, she was over the moon.

And when Henry Mancini came on with his Peter Gunn Theme, with a really sweet piano playing and a bass-and-saxophone ad lib that rocked my socks off, well, I was trying not to hop out of my seat.

Everyone agreed that Henry Mancini rocked.

After that was the lunch break, and when I returned to the lab ahead of my buddy I found techno music thumping out of the bass-boosted and superior quality speakers in the lab.

I was not the only one partying. Three girls from our class caught the drift, turned down the lights, used the rainbow-coloured screensavers of the Macs around us as strobe lights, and we bounced up and down for short periods of time before breaking down in laughter.

The DMAT girls were going mad.

When the lecturer returned, he blinked at us as we promptly halted mid-hop. The rest of the class poured in, eyes blinking at the four girls in the middle of the lab, but it quickly dissipated as the lecturer told us the next activity of the day.

We went to the studios (remember the pictures? They’re a page back) to learn about editing in a new software system.

Both lecturers had a knack of choosing songs.

The first song was commented by my witty lecturer as a song of tears. Why? The lyrics’ most distinctive line was ‘Baby, please don’t cry’.

And it was in Chinese. How my Thai-Portuguese lecturer figured out those words was all right, but if he knew how it was supposed to be portrayed, he would’ve known why most of us collapsed onto the floor in giggling fits.

The second song he chose was even more hilarious.

It was a recording of a fellow student, who was singing this in Chinese:

‘Who said that I don’t have a girlfriend?

Who said that I don’t have a boyfriend?

Who said that I don’t have a girlfriend?

Oh yeah, uh-uh, it’s you!’

And someone took the liberty of recording over the words with his own rendition, in English:

‘I feel like eating ice-cream

Because I feel like eating ice-cream

But right now I am fasting.

So I cannot eat my ice-cream!’

None of us had a poker-straight face.

There was a lecture coming up next so everyone headed off for their lunch – save I.

I was about to leave when I heard heavy metal blaring out of the next door studio’s control room, through the padded walls and doors.

I had to check out who was in there.

Madcap Joanne and her pal, Wan Yi were rocking away to someone’s song project and that person had made a rough and bleeding heavy metal (and two of the three madwomen who partied with me earlier on. Third one was Rain.) However, I was able to tolerate this onslaught of intensity. It sounded muffled to me, and it was at least a bit harmonious. In the adjoining room were three of the boys trying out the drums.

I noticed, somehow, that when one of them was smacking the drum set, it was in time and the same drum piece with the song.

Joanne noticed as well, and she piped up about her find – well enough that the other side heard it. All glanced up to see, and we three hid from view.

The next studio was occupied as well, and it turned out to be fellow friend Grace teaching two of my classmates Joshua and Chloe how to play the drums.

The grand piano was all for the taking.

So I sat down, and started to tinker a little. Hey, with electone exams just eight days away, I want to touch and play the black and whites a lot more now.

When I looked up, ‘a little’ had turned into a ‘long while’, and Mandric the ace pianist had come into the room.

He and Grace seemed to have agreed to a jam session, and it seems, by the way Mandric was looking at me, that I’ve been invited to jam with two of the best players in town.

I honestly felt like walking out, but the two of them started before I could say a word.

I was obliged, but it did not feel… comfortable with me. I did not know how to jam for nuts, for I didn’t know what key Mandric was jamming on the keyboard and Grace was going at an incredible speed.

Figuring out that the first key was a G major, I played something that made the entire jazz feel simmer away into a happy euro dance item, and it just sounded strange to me.

Neither of them was complaining. That was good.

Then Mandric changed the tune to a blues shuffle, and I tried to keep up. He was randomly tapping keys on the ebony and ivory, I could not figure out just what he was doing, and I was already smashing the grand piano.

I know it’s a sin to envy, but I envied Mandric and Grace for their skills at their instrument. They seem to have their timing and their skill naturally, while I struggled to sit into the jam without falling out of sync.

But he looked over to check, and highlighted to me that he was playing a blues key I did not know, and showed me the notes.

I learnt something new today.

When I got a hang of it, he struck a note and Grace did a drum roll, and I gingerly tapped a few keys on the ivory.

With a little daring, I played a trill, and it grew in span much to my delight.

For an hour, we three jammed. I jammed. I finally was able to jam.

When the lecturer popped into the studio and called us back, I was the first one out. Even if I was finally able to jam, I was not confident about my skill at it yet. I was always a solitary player, and felt more comfortable being one.

And all these happenings got my brain juice flowing back into my head. Add in the fact that I was able to blog about this entire day too.

I’m glad to say that I’m content.