I learned to play the zils (in 1976) by listennig to Ibrahim Farrah's zils on the old Eddie the Shiek Kochak records -- lovely and varied. The other thing I did that really did it for me was that I played air zils for about 18 hours on a bus from Ithaca NY to Durham NC. For whatever reason, that long obsessive session got my fingers to where they would do the thinking and come out with the rhythms and variations. But I play zils very unscientifically and instinctively -- I can play with nuance and lots of rhythmic variation when I dance, but if I'm trying to do set zil patterns with students or in a class, I mess up all the time. The rhythmic possibilities are always too enchanting.
In retrospect, I think one way the air zils helped me when I came to actually putting the zils on and moving to the music, is that for layering, at least one of the things you layer has to be automatic. Lots of air zils, or for that matter and even better, lots of real zil playing, will get it to be automatic. You can't be thinking about your zils when you dance, it has to come out your fingers on its own.
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"I am not contradictory, I am dispersed." (Roland Barthes)
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