Thomas jams with the Frenchies

Our loyal readers may remember that last summer (end of June/early July) Thomas spend 10 days in France (Paris, Lyons and some other places that he won't tell us about), traveling with his fellow FIM honors percussion quartet chaps, Rob (their intrepid leader) and the honors strings quartet and that group's leader. The plan was that these two tiny groups would work with the strings and percussion kids over their on various collaborative pieces. And now, eight months or so later, people from that same school (the Limonest conservatory) are here in Flint, continuing the collaboration. For this trip, they brought all their private percussion students and all jazz musicians. It's been a whirlwind of concerts and rehearsals for Thomas, all of which culminated this past Thursday (for him--for the jazz students/faculty the events continued up through last night) with a 2 hour percussion concert. Playing here are eight French students and seven Flinties (the four honors percussionists plus the best three private percussion students). This piece is for 8 musicians, so Rob doubled up the instruments (two marimbas, two bells kits, two drum sets, two bongos and so forth). The kid on the right of the screen playing the marimba is the Gallic version of Thomas. They are playing exactly the same notes together. This was their closing number, which they had to play twice because the French people in the audience demanded an encore (as they always seem to do--apparently French concerts typically start 2 hours late and extend into the wee hours, always well after midnight). They were told that the building closed at 9 to no avail. Indeed, being told that the building was soon to close only seems to make them get more rebellious.)

[Watch on YouTube, so the side isn't cut off.]

As we headed into the FIM these past two weeks there was always a cluster of French instructors outside enjoying a smoke. Thomas said he wanted to move to France to take up smoking.