For Bronx School’s Dancers, the Moves Are Irish

NYT
March 14, 2008
For Bronx School’s Dancers, the Moves Are Irish
By ELISSA GOOTMAN

Taja Garnett’s parents are from Belize, but her nickname is “Irish girl.”

Ever since Taja, 10, joined the Keltic Dreams, the Irish dance troupe that is the unlikely pride of her Bronx elementary school, she has been so consumed by high kicks, heel clicks and treble hop backs that she practices “on the street, at the bus stop, sometimes at the train station, in the living room, on the bus when I’m standing up and there’s no seats.”

Oh, and also in class. In class? That’s right, with her fingers, she explained, demonstrating the way her index finger acts as the left foot and her middle finger as the right.

“I look at the teacher,” Taja chirped, her eyes gleaming mischievously behind wire-rimmed glasses, “and do it at the same time.”

With a student body that is 71 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black, Public School 59 does not seem an obvious home for a thriving Irish dance troupe. And when Caroline Duggan first arrived from Dublin at age 23 to try her hand as a New York City public school music teacher, it wasn’t. Many of her students had never heard of Ireland. Why, they wanted to know, did she talk funny?

Then, to stave off homesickness, Ms. Duggan hung a “Riverdance” poster in her fifth-floor classroom, and one thing led to another. The children pointed to a long-haired dancer on the poster and asked if it was her. No, she laughed, but I could show you a few steps. The impromptu lesson grew into a wildly popular after-school program and, for the first time last year, a trip to Ireland that still inspires dreamy looks among those lucky enough to go.

“The grass wasn’t like ordinary grass,” recalled Nyiasha Newby, 10. “It was like sparkling and stuff, because the water was on it. It was, like, fresh.”

On a recent afternoon, as cars blaring hip-hop music rolled past P.S. 59, on Bathgate Avenue near 181st Street, and neighbors called to one another in Spanglish, the school auditorium swelled with the soaring sounds of drums, fiddles and uilleann pipes.

Sixty growing feet laced into clunky black shoes spun, kicked and hop-1,2,3’d their way across the stage, in routines that Ms. Duggan, now 29, had choreographed, infusing the traditional Irish dancing she was reared on with elements of hip-hop, salsa and African dance. Toothy smiles mingled with the bitten lips of deep concentration. The Keltic Dreams were at it again.

“It kind of took on a life of its own,” marveled the principal, Christine McHugh.

There was Anna Perez, 10, her hair pulled back into a tight bun, who wants to be a professional Irish dancer when she grows up. There was Alice Olom, 11, rehearsing alongside third-graders even after having moved on to middle school herself.

“There are some people in here that are very, very shy, so I’m here to let them know that shyness is not an option in Irish dancing,” Alice said, her long braids pulled back in a ponytail. “You have to be confident in everything you do.”

For years, Ana Sotomayor, 47, had tried to teach her son, Angel Perez, 11, the salsa moves she had learned growing up in Puerto Rico. For years, she recalled, he had shrugged her off, saying he didn’t like it and couldn’t do it.

But there Angel was, center stage, hands on his hips and baggy jeans flapping as he began a routine with a short solo.

“Every time I see him in a show I cry, because I’m very proud of him,” Ms. Sotomayor said. “He’s very shy, but then when I see him dance I see another Angel, very secure in what he’s doing. He’s very different.”

Parents agree that the dancing has filtered into other aspects of their children’s lives.

“She knows that she has to do good in school to keep up with her Irish dancing,” Maritza Rosa, 42, said of her daughter Karilis Javier, 11.

Ms. Rosa was taken aback when Karilis first mentioned her new hobby.

“I thought she would do, you know, the Latin dance, the merengue, the salsa, the English music that’s here in the Bronx,” she said. “I said, ‘Irish dancing?’ And then I said, well, something different, something new for the kids.”

Now, Ms. Rosa said, she finds herself experimenting with steps. “You see your child perform,” she said, “and you get into it.”

It has not always been easy. In the months leading up to last year’s trip to Ireland, Ms. Duggan had a window into the difficulties in her students’ lives. In her quest to obtain passports, which only a few children had, she navigated tricky immigration issues and helped track down a number of fathers who had not seen their children in years.

One student had a tearful reunion with her father in the back of the school auditorium. Another, an 8-year-old, showed up for rehearsal clutching her passport just weeks before the trip; after months of trying, relatives had finally managed to contact her father in Puerto Rico to get his needed signature.

Ms. Duggan had long feared she would never be able to raise enough money for the Ireland trip. That changed two years ago, after she met Tim O’Connor, then the Irish consul general in New York, who put her in touch with a network of Irish-American New Yorkers. She eventually raised $70,000, enough to take to Ireland 32 students and 19 chaperones, among them Mrs. McHugh, who had never been overseas.

The group performed on Ireland’s “Late Late Show” and at the official residence of the president, Mary McAleese. They were filmed for a documentary, “A Bronx Dream,” which is scheduled to be shown on Irish television on Monday, St. Patrick’s Day.

One of Jesely Salcedo’s favorite memories, though, is of the visit with Ms. Duggan’s mother, who hid foil-covered chocolate leprechauns in her backyard. “We even had our own little treasure hunt,” Jesely, 11, recounted.

Now, Ms. Duggan is struggling to raise money for this year’s trip to Ireland and preparing her young charges for another big day: The St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan on Monday, in which they will march for the first time.

Ms. Duggan has outlasted most of the young teachers she met when she first came to New York, who, like her, had been recruited from overseas to fill shortages. “The administration wasn’t supportive or they didn’t like their school or they missed their family,” she said.

She credits the people of P.S. 59, from Mrs. McHugh — who welcomed her for Christmas Eve dinner in Riverdale one year when she could not afford a ticket home — to students like Jesely, who have embraced Irish dancing as though the culture were their own. Which, in a sense, it now is.

“As I get older I’ll even show my kids, so that way they, like, can spread it around,” Jesely said. “Cause I think like the whole world should know about it.”

In New York, With Beliefs That Still Challenge Cuba

New York Times
March 10, 2008
Citywide
In New York, With Beliefs That Still Challenge Cuba
By DAVID GONZALEZ

Carmen Peláez is a liberal with a deep laugh and a great sense of the absurd. All of those qualities are tested when she encounters fellow New Yorkers who still admire Fidel Castro.

Ms. Peláez, a Cuban-American actress, was born in this country and raised in Miami. She came to New York in 1993 to study acting. In the mid-’90s, she traveled to Cuba to explore the world of her great-aunt, Amelia Peláez, a noted painter who died in 1968. All those experiences pulse through “Rum & Coke,” a one-woman show in which she channels relatives on both sides of the Florida Straits and weary Habaneros stuck on an island forgotten by the outside world.

The play was her retort to the fascination with Che T-shirts, solidarity tours to Cuba and the endless praise of the revolution’s twin pillars of health and education.

“When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn’t know what was happening in Cuba,” she said after the show closed its monthlong New York run last week. “But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don’t care.”

She was reminded of that last month when Mr. Castro finally stepped down as president after nearly 50 years in power. The move prompted wistful reflections from old rabble-rousers and praise from some politicians. Representative José E. Serrano called Mr. Castro a “great leader” whose retirement ensured the future of the Cuban system and its achievements, which he said enjoyed “a broad base of support” on the island.

What really stumped Ms. Peláez was how the Bronx congressman’s only brickbats were against the “twisted policies” of the United States government.

“They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship,” Ms. Peláez said. “I had somebody come to me after a show and say, ‘Don’t ruin Cuba for me!’ Well, why not? They’re holding on to a fantasy.”

This city has long attracted Cuban artists and intellectuals in exile. Many of those who now live here thrive on the city’s culture, its mix of people and even its weather (four seasons, instead of hot and hotter). Perhaps the greatest Cuban exile of all, José Martí, lived and worked in 19th-century New York as he rallied his countrymen in the fight for independence from Spain.

Exiles and refugees are still coming to New York, having decided that life in Castro’s Cuba — the only life they ever really knew — was not worth the sacrifice of personal freedoms. This month, some of them will observe the fifth anniversary of the Cuban government’s crackdown on 75 dissidents, independent journalists and librarians, who were sentenced to as many as 28 years. Most of them are still in prison.

Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University who has written critiques of the American left and Cuba, said the plight of these recent arrivals does not strike the same chord here it once did for those who fled the Soviet bloc.

“Back in the ’70s and ’80s, some mathematician would come out of the Soviet Union and there would be a meeting of intellectuals to greet him,” Mr. Berman said. “That kind of human rights zeal just seems to have disappeared.”

Cristina Martinez came of age in the Soviet Union, were she was sent to study electrical engineering in 1985 after graduating from high school in Cuba. Her extracurricular lessons were unavoidable, watching as perestroika and glasnost swept through society.

“The press was starting to bring to light everything they had hidden during 75 years of Communism,” she said. “It was a lesson, that this was the future we wanted to go to. This is the light. We had all toyed with the idea of changing the Cuban reality, to criticize it, to make it better.”

But as walls fell and borders opened, Cuba clung to its way. Disillusioned, Ms. Martinez fled to Spain, where she taught at a university for six years. Her politics were leftist enough that her Spanish friends joked she was “the reddest person they ever met.”

Maybe not in New York, where she has lived since 1996, working as a computer systems administrator at an Upper West Side school. Though she still considers herself a liberal who favors the underdog, she is puzzled by the image of Cuba as an international paladin.

“The image is one of the defender of the oppressed and defender of just causes,” she said. “People who understand the Cuban reality know it is not like that. It is not something they would want for themselves or their own country. Or, they are opportunists who use Cuba as a symbol knowing full well what is happening.”

Although Enrique Del Risco knows what has happened on the island where he was born 40 years ago, he still gets odd looks from college students when he tries to explain Cuba’s reality. He left Cuba in 1996 and settled in New York two years later, teaching Spanish at New York University.

“I grew up believing in the system,” he said. “Quite a believer. My parents, too.”

He, too, thought there would be change during the late 1980s. Instead, he found himself slowly suffocating, with his writings earning him reprimands.

“I was more scared of surrendering than being put in jail,” he said. “I was scared that I would stop being myself. I was someone who thinks independently and expresses that.”

Yet to try and tell that to some of his students, he said, was like talking about extraterrestrial life. He knows to expect a dual riposte — yes, but what about universal health care and education?

“At the root of that is a great belittling of Cubans,” he said. “It’s like we are some sort of little animals who only need a veterinarian and someone to teach us tricks and we’ll be fine.”

He is dismayed by the way Cuban officials deflect questions from university students who wonder why they cannot travel overseas or stay at Cuban hotels, which are essentially reserved for tourists. Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, told one such questioner that when he was a diplomat posted in New York during the 1960s and ’70s, shopkeepers would eject him the moment they learned he was Hispanic.

“There is a fear of the future that comes from control of information,” Mr. Del Risco said. “You can see that in what Alarcón said. You can only dare say what he said in a country that is disinformed.”

Mr. Del Risco’s New York is welcoming.

“I feel more at home in New York than in Madrid,” he said. “From the first day you get here you feel like you are from here. There is not that distance or someone asking you what you are doing here.”

He loves the variety. The rush. The chance to do it all. Or do nothing at all.

“I was always in love with New York,” he said. “Even when I was an anti-imperialist, I was pro-New York.”

Saudi Rappers Compete in Dubai Hip-hop Contest

Washington Post
'An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us'
Beyond a Disapproving Kingdom, Untested Saudi Rappers Find Transformation and Victory, of Sorts, at Hip-Hop Contest in Dubai

By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008; A11

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Even before they stepped onstage at the MTV Arabia competition finale, members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men knew they would not win.

The contestants were to be judged on their lyrics, stage presence and performance, but Dark2Men had never performed in public because of strict social and religious codes in their native Saudi Arabia that ban nightclubs, concerts and theaters. The seven other finalists, from the less restrictive Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, had rapped live for years.

But backstage before the show, one of the show's co-hosts told the contestants something that made Dark2Men's impending loss seem like victory, the members said. "He said no matter what happened in the competition, we would go down in history when they wrote the book about Arab hip-hop," said Hani Zain, 27, who raps in Arabic for the group.

An Egyptian won the competition, which is being broadcast this month, but the three men of Dark2Men said their lives had been transformed by the experience in ways they had not imagined.

"It was an earthquake that shifted the world around us," said Tamer Farhan, 24, who raps in English. "It gave meaning to all the hardships we faced to get here."

Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest shrines, follows a stringent form of Islam that prohibits alcohol and the mingling of unrelated men and women. The conservative kingdom does not allow the study of music in schools, and many Saudis consider careers in acting, singing or dancing as shameful.

But the advent of satellite television channels such as MTV Arabia, which was launched in the Emirates in November, and social networking Web sites have made it easier for young people to pursue interests deemed contrary to the country's tradition and culture.

The Dark2Men members, for example, met up on a rap Web site and compose their music using online programs. They have posted several songs on YouTube and have a Facebook site.

But even as they rap in praise of Islam and their mothers, and against the war in Iraq and terrorism, their biggest hurdle has been convincing family, friends and Saudi society that they are not simply trying to imitate a decadent Western lifestyle.

Since winning the MTV Arabia hip-hop audition in January, they have struggled with fiancees unhappy about the attention garnered by their television appearances broadcast across the Arab world, bosses angry about their extended leaves from work, and fathers worried that their sons would leave stable jobs and become entertainers.

For a week last month in Dubai, they forgot those pressures as they danced until dawn at nightclubs, stared wide-eyed at a fancy restaurant's glass-enclosed cold room full of wine and champagne bottles, and learned how to move onstage.

Maan Mansour, 25, who sings in Arabic and English and had never traveled outside of Saudi Arabia, said he developed a passion for performing. "There's this unique feeling you get right before you go onstage that's fear and excitement," he said. "Then as soon as you put your foot on that first step, it's as if a cascade of cool water washes over your chest, and it's amazing."

Zain said a highlight of the MTV Arabia experience was spending time with Farid "Fredwreck" Nassar, a Palestinian American music producer who has worked with American rappers 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.

Zain, Dark2Men's main composer, said he pestered Nassar while he was producing the group's song, asking questions and looking over his shoulder, but was told several times, half-jokingly, to leave the room. "I learned more in two days with Farid than I did in years in Saudi Arabia," Zain said.

Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician, and Farhan, a human resources assistant at a hospital, went back to work a few days after they returned to their home town of Jiddah. But Zain resigned from his job as a bank computer programmer.

Zain said he needed time to concentrate on his rap career and wanted to be available in case the contestants were asked to tour after a CD of their songs is released next month.

Farhan, who now spends an hour a day answering fan mail, sat with his laptop at a coffee shop during his lunch hour last week and sighed as he read a notice from a fellow contestant, Emirati rap group Desert Heat, announcing a performance at a nightclub in Oman, with tickets selling for $26.

"If I could make money rapping like these guys, I would have left my job," Farhan said. But there's nowhere to perform in Saudi Arabia, and leaving his job would mean that Farhan and his family would be without health insurance, a risk he said he was not ready to take.

Farhan has had to postpone his wedding because things are still in flux. Last year, "when I got engaged I was just a normal guy working at a hospital," he said. "Now I'm succeeding at rap, suddenly everybody knows me. Suddenly I'm always busy."

Farhan said his father has made peace with his choice. "He voted for us and made his friends vote, too" in the competition's people's choice award, conducted by text message. The results have not yet been announced.

But for Farhan, the most gratifying part of the experience has been inspiring others. "Young guys come up to us and say: 'We thought that pursuing a dream in Saudi Arabia was impossible. You guys made it in hip-hop with everyone against you. That gives us hope that even here, anything is possible.' "

Dark2Men has met with several advertising and production companies seeking sponsorship and studio space to record a CD. But until that happens, the group is recording a mixtape with aspiring rappers.

During breaks while recording his segment at a local studio, Zain talked to the other rappers about organizing an underground concert to make money.

"I've given myself till the end of March," Zain said. "If I'm able to make some money on this, I'll keep going. If not, I'm going to have to start looking for a job."

Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan

NYT
March 4, 2008
Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan
By JEFF LEEDS

LOS ANGELES — Since being released from its major-label recording contract last year, Nine Inch Nails has joined the growing ranks of prominent artists who are navigating the digital wilderness on their own. Like another independent-minded act, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails has responded to the wash of free music on the Internet, but with its own tactic: the band has uploaded tracks from its new album directly to an unauthorized file-sharing network even as it offered more elaborate versions for up to $300.

The plan, which was announced on the Nine Inch Nails Web site, nin.com, on Sunday night, is the latest in a running series of experiments that counter the music industry’s typical sales and marketing tactics. Fans can obtain digital downloads of the first nine tracks from the 36-track instrumental collection, “Ghosts I-IV,” and a bundle of graphics free from the band’s Web site or through online sites using BitTorrent technology, where users can share unauthorized music and other media.

The band, which is led by Trent Reznor, described file sharing in one online post as “a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

Mr. Reznor also afforded fans freedom in another way. The band decided to offer the music with a Creative Commons license, a new type of intellectual-property copyright. It allows creators to reserve certain rights and, in effect, authorize various unpaid uses of their products. In this instance the band is allowing virtually any noncommercial use of its music. The band is also testing a tiered pricing system that could add a new wrinkle to the conventional wisdom on how to attract fans in the music business, in which a slump in sales has prompted Wal-Mart and other retailers to pressure record companies to cut their wholesale prices. The Nine Inch Nails plan also expands upon a model that had been tested by a handful of other acts, like Radiohead, which offered its latest album, “In Rainbows,” online in a setup that allowed fans to name their own price (including nothing) or pay roughly $80 for an expanded version.

Nine Inch Nails is offering a digital download of the entire 36-track “Ghosts I-IV” collection for a flat $5 from its site and Amazon.com. The band will offer a CD version in a two-disc package for $10, with sales through its site or through record shops starting April 8. (A $39 vinyl version will be available the same day.) For particularly enthusiastic — or deep-pocketed — fans, there are two more extensive collections: a $75 version will include the music on two CDs, and a DVD will contain data files of the multitrack recordings of the 36 songs, allowing fans to remix and alter the music as they choose. A $300 deluxe version — the band said only 2,500 will be made, all with Mr. Reznor’s signature — will include the discs, the vinyl set and additional material.

Jim Guerinot, the manager of Nine Inch Nails, suggested that the band’s plans are not “a reaction to what doesn’t exist today. I think it’s more just like, ‘Hey, in a vacuum I can do whatever I want to do.’ ” Referring to Mr. Reznor, he said, “His appetite is such that: ‘I want a little bit of everything. I’m not content with just a singular experience.’ ”

One option Mr. Reznor is not offering fans is a way to obtain the entire collection free. Last year he produced an album by the rapper and poet Saul Williams, which was offered online free or for a $5 contribution in a test of whether people would pay if given a choice. Mr. Reznor wrote on his band’s Web site that he had been disheartened by the lack of paying customers.

Musician turns to fans for help with new disc

CNN
Musician turns to fans for help with new disc

* Story Highlights
* Jill Sobule asks fans to contribute towards making new album
* For $10, you get a CD; for $10,000, you can sing on the record
* Sobule best known for mid-'90s hit "I Kissed a Girl"

NEW YORK (AP) -- In making six CDs, singer Jill Sobule has worked for two major record companies that dumped her and two indie labels that went bankrupt beneath her.

Now she's turning to people she can really trust -- her fans.

Sobule, whose witty and poignant writing first attracted attention with the song "I Kissed a Girl," has set up a Web site asking fans to donate money so she can make a new CD. She set a goal of $75,000 and, in a month, she's made about $58,000 as of midday Tuesday.

She's another example of a musician taking control of her career as the business crumbles around her, and doing it with a unique sense of humor.

Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing -- we can fix that on our end."

For the $500 "gold level," Sobule will mention your name in a song, maybe even rhyme with it. The $750 "gold doubloons level" is "exactly like the gold level, but you give me more money."

Sobule is surprised at how empowering the whole experience has been.

"The old kind of paradigm, where you've always waited for other people to do things, you'd have your manager and your agent," she said. "You'd wait for the big record company to give you money to do things and they tell you what to do. This is so great. I want to do everything like this."

She set the $75,000 goal because she wanted to do things right. Well-known producer Don Was has agreed to work with her, and she expects friends like Cyndi Lauper and John Doe to sing with her. She also needs to pay for making and distributing the CDs, and promotion to publicize it.

Sobule even wrote to explain all this to some snarky Web sites that pointed out that someone can easily record music for $500 in their basement these days.

"I wrote, 'Don't you understand, it's not just the recording budget, it's also my gambling debts,' " she joked, "and they became my best friends."

For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.

Besides the studio album (recording starts next month), Sobule also wants to record a live CD and a collection of new tracks with just her voice and guitar, asking amateurs to take a stab at making their own arrangements around her.

One positive, unexpected result from her campaign is getting to know her fans a little, beyond just the faces that stare at her onstage. Many have written messages that are posted on Sobule's Web site and offer suggestions.

Sobule always let the business people do their thing while she concentrated on being the artist.

"I lived like that forever and this time, this is fun," she said. "This is creative."

Sign Language Concerts

San Diego Union Tribune
Singing with signing

Cuyamaca teachers, students treat sign language concerts as art form
By Leonel Sanchez
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

March 3, 2008


JOHN R. McCUTCHEN / Union-Tribune
Jennifer Smith and other members of the Cuyamaca College American Sign Language Choir performed "When You Wish Upon a Star."
When this choir is on stage, the performers are silent.

Instead of singing, they listen to a song playing softly in the background and interpret the lyrics and emotions with their hands and facial expressions. Their movements are choreographed, like a dance.

Every motion means something – in sign language.

They are the Cuyamaca College American Sign Language Choir, which is made up of hearing teachers and students who consider the visual language an art form.

“The choir allows us to express the beauty of sign language to a hearing audience as well as the beauty of music to a deaf audience,” said Kathy Nielsen, the choir's director and a sign language instructor at Cuyamaca College. Among the other sign language choirs in the region are the church-based Hands of Praise in Imperial Beach and the Signing Choir of San Diego, which performs at funerals, weddings, debutante balls, workshops and other events.

“I wouldn't say they're commonplace, but you're seeing it more just as the interest in learning sign language is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Pam Espalin, a client advocate at Deaf Community Services of San Diego.

Nationwide, American Sign Language is the fourth most studied language on college campuses, according to a survey by the New York-based Modern Language Association. The survey showed enrollment had increased nearly 30 percent since 2002.

Nearly 80,000 students were taking classes in 2006, including more than 20,000 in California, mainly at community colleges.

Most students who take sign language classes do it for one of two reasons: they expect to work with the deaf, or they are fulfilling a foreign language requirement. In the process, they learn about deaf culture and sign language as an artistic expression.

Signing as an art form “is not a new phenomenon,” said UC San Diego professor and poet Michael Davidson, who has written about deaf performers.

He said it goes back to when sign language came to the United States from Europe in the 18th century. There has been a resurgence of interest since the 1960s, when a distinct deaf culture began to emerge, Davidson said.

The Cuyamaca College choir was formed 10 years ago to perform at a graduation ceremony. Therese Botz, who founded the choir, said she was influenced by local sign language performers as well as the performances she had seen when she worked at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C.

“The idea was to get students who signed very well together,” said Botz, American Sign Language coordinator.

The choir was supposed to be a “one-time thing,” Botz said. But, then requests for performances kept coming in. They now perform regularly at campus events.

The number of sign language classes has increased from two to 16 since the early 1990s. The courses cover everything from finger spelling to deaf culture and signing for infants and toddlers. There is also an active American Sign Language club.

Many students enroll in the classes after watching the choir perform. “It's a huge recruitment tool,” Nielsen said.

Though none of the choir members are deaf and their audiences are mostly hearing, their routines are intended for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to understand and appreciate.

“I love to watch the ASL choir perform. It is beautiful. They are awesome,” Angela Gorges, a deaf student at Cuyamaca College wrote in an e-mail.

At January's opening of the college's Communication Arts Center, five choir members performed a medley of songs from famous movies, including “Grease,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Titanic” and “Dirty Dancing.”

Members extended their arms and pointed to the stars while performing a soulful 1990s version of the Disney classic “When You Wish Upon a Star” before a full house at the 360-seat assembly hall.

Members spent months translating lyrics into sign language and selecting the right signs to convey English concepts and practicing. Signs must be “on the beat so that a deaf audience can match it to the rhythm of the music,” Botz said.

“It is a challenge for one person to do this correctly. It is incredible to have a group practice to the point of unity. Think about synchronized swimming,” she said.

Jack Robertson III, 19, the choir's newest member, said he was nervous performing for the first time last month at the grand opening. Fellow choir members, though, reassured him he did just fine.

“I'm really a visual learner,” he said. “This makes sense to me.”

Who owns a band name?

LA Times

Who owns a band name?
The hair-metal heyday is long gone, but the fight for ownership of the groups' names (and the nostalgia-tour money to be made) goes on.
By Neil Shah, Special to The Times
March 2, 2008
STEVE RILEY is a survivor. At 51, he still plays the drums for L.A. Guns, a biker-themed hair-metal band famous mostly for once featuring Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose. Riley and first mate Phil Lewis, who sang L.A. Guns' only Top 40 hit, "The Ballad of Jayne," toured Australia last fall before joining Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil for a show in St. Paul, Minn.

But Riley and Lewis are finding life on the exurban nightclub scene harder these days. Promoters want them to play for less. That's because lately there have been not one but two L.A. Guns bands milking the nostalgia circuit -- locked in a mutually destructive price war and consequently dueling, like a growing number of their shred-ready brethren, over the band's name.

Guitarist Tracii Guns, who formed the band in 1982 and was the original "Guns" in Guns N' Roses, says his crew is the real deal since it includes one of the band's earliest singers, Paul Black. "Phil and Steve were not even the original members of the band," Tracii wrote in an online post after declining to be interviewed for this article. "Now they . . . say that I am not the 'real' version of L.A. Guns?"

The standoff persists because Guns and Riley each own 50% of the L.A. Guns name. Riley discovered in the mid-'90s that their manager had never secured the rights to "L.A. Guns." With the other founding members gone, Guns and Riley trademarked the name together.

But Riley says the guitarist forfeited the name when he left the band in 2002 to work with Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx. At the time, L.A. Guns was close to securing a tour with Alice Cooper, but still supporting lesser acts such as Warrant and Firehouse, which irked Guns. The band urged him to stay.

"We said, 'We got bills and families, we have to take jobs like this,' " recalls Riley, whose son is now 16. "He looked us right in the eye and said, 'I don't [care] about you or your families.'

"He shot us down completely."

It's the same old song sung in recent decades by members or affiliates of such early rock and R&B acts as the Drifters, the Platters, the Temptations, the Doors and the Byrds, a mournful tune that's been showing up with increasing frequency in the repertoires of the hair-metal bands of the 1980s.

Taime Downe faced a coup similar to that of L.A. Guns last year, but -- unlike his friend Tracii Guns -- he prevailed. Downe, who made a name for himself as the leader of late-'80s sleaze-rock group Faster Pussycat, sicced his lawyers on fellow founder Brent Muscat after the guitarist started touring as Faster Pussycat without him.

Without Downe's knowledge, Muscat had trademarked the name in 2002, after it had lapsed, Downe says. Threatened with a lawsuit, Muscat settled out of court last summer. (He could not be reached for comment.)

Downe says because of the dispute he had to put off 60 or 70 potential shows in the U.S., Europe and Japan, at $3,000 to $5,000 a pop.

Downe, 43, says he rejected an overture from Muscat to share the band's name. "It's my company. Someone from Starbucks is not going to go out and form another company called Starbucks."

When Downe won, Muscat, booked for last summer's four-day Rocklahoma hair-metal festival in Pryor, Okla., was booted from the bill. By the time Rocklahoma rolled around in July, his version of the band had folded.

It's a jungle out there

FASTER Pussycat and L.A. Guns aren't alone. Key members of White Lion have jousted for years, as have the guys in Welsh glam-band Tigertailz. England's Saxon, part of the new wave of British heavy metal in the early '80s, still has a doppelgänger. Even Ratt has been plural at one point.

So why all the fuss over band names?

Cold, hard cash, obviously. But these groups' bizarro melodramas also take something else for granted: the enduring power and profitability of the "brands" the music industry created for them back in the '80s and early '90s."I don't think [the hair bands] could do it otherwise," says Mark Strigl, co-host of "Talking Metal," a popular pod-cast and new fuse TV show. "They're still riding off that initial marketing push."

Indeed, many top-shelf acts are living on more than a prayer these days.

Poison and Cinderella grossed a healthy $6.3 million during their North American tour in 2006, selling almost 7,000 tickets per city on average, according to Pollstar editor-in-chief Gary Bongiovanni. "Of the top 200 touring acts [in 2006], they were 106," he says. "Right behind the Strokes."

Queensrÿche made more than $3 million that same year, finishing at No. 167 on the same list, while Styx raked in $5.6 million and came in at No. 113.

Rock 'n' roll feuds over names aren't new.

Early R&B heavyweights squabbled over names, usually after splintering into multiple versions of themselves. Flaps broke out over which members of the Byrds could use the name on tour. Mike Love is the only member of the Beach Boys legally permitted to use the group's name on the road. Roger Waters lost his battle with David Gilmour over which could call their latter-day groups Pink Floyd.

Like some of the early groups, hair-metal acts were often known by name more than by face, so it's hard to know what you're getting when you see a name on a club marquee.

But hair bands add a funnier (albeit, sometimes also sadder) twist to the story, since what's at stake is bubble-gum metal.

"There's never been another musical form like hair metal, that sold so much, and evaporated so fast," says Steven Blush in his 2006 book, "American Hair Metal."

For second-tier metal bands, there's enough cash out there (almost) to make a living, but not enough to warrant bringing in a bunch of expensive lawyers, who presumably could resolve the split ends.

"If you did a ton of coke back in the day and bought Lamborghinis, and [frittered] away every penny you made, and all of a sudden you're sitting there at 45, 50 years old, nowhere to turn, you certainly don't want to get a day job," says Eddie Trunk, a radio personality who hosted the Rocklahoma festival.

"You're going to put together some version of the only thing you ever knew," Trunk said. "That's all you know to survive."

It's a business

BUT rock's Dark Age also spawned stars who have been downright obsessed with making sure they don't spend their professional after-lives in legal limbo.

Consider Axl Rose. Most of the media coverage of Rose's comeback shows in 2006 was critical of his decision to call his band Guns N' Roses when it lacks prime-period members Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler.

Greed? Perhaps. But a more mundane explanation is that GNR is not just a rock band, it's a company, and Rose is its CEO.

In the mid-'90s, Rose pressured Slash and Duff, the two remaining GNR originals at the time, to sign a contract stating that Axl "would retain rights to the band name and was allowed to start a new band that he could call Guns N' Roses" if the band broke up, according to Slash's new autobiography, "Slash."

"I was naive about the whole thing," Slash writes in his book. "I didn't protect myself legally because I didn't think I had to. In my mind, what was the name without the players?"

Pop music and big business may be more obvious about their marriage of convenience these days, but rock bands are, and always were, just small businesses.

When a band signs a record contract, it often creates a limited liability company (LLC), divvying up cash from royalties, merchandise and touring based on specific percentages for each member.

Ideally, band members sit down and decide what happens to the name if various members leave.

But sometimes, that doesn't happen.

"I'm the kind of person who signs anything without ever looking through it," says Mike Tramp, the 47-year-old singer of White Lion, which recorded three albums for Atlantic Records before breaking up in 1991.

Donald Passman, an attorney and author of "All You Need to Know About the Music Business," has seen this movie a few times.

Passman says one of his cases lasted more than nine years and cost $1 million in legal fees. The band died over it. "Some bands don't have any agreements at all," he says. "They just start playing together, and everything's cool until it's not."

The few disputes consummated in court have revolved around who was more essential to the band's sound.

"If you go see a band you grew up listening to, whether it's Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Sabbath or anybody, the one main thing you really, really have to hear is that original vocalist," says Steve Riley, whose version of L.A. Guns performed at the Whisky in January.

Hair metal was never about innovation or art, let alone social commentary or politics, so why would it be about original members?

Quiet Riot was missing half its early '80s lineup when it performed last summer. Warrant's current front-man is not Jani Lane, but Jaime St. James, the former lead singer for C-list band Black N' Blue. Even '70s bands as big as Foreigner have outsourced most of their labor.

In a way, hair bands were always cover bands, an entire generation of rock musicians animated by the boyish dream of being Led Zeppelin or the Stones. What's more, many of these bands have always been revolving-door outfits: More than 30 people have cycled in and out of L.A. Guns over the years.

Perhaps today's culture of hair band "reunions" is something akin to what's happening with newer "collective" bands such as Canada's Broken Social Scene.

Both embrace the rock band for what it really is: an ever-shifting group of opportunistic individuals crystallized in our imagination as a fixed, organic whole.

A brand, in other words.

Battle tactics

TRACII GUNS and Steve Riley, though, are still doing the same old song and dance.

Riley's team has been trying to coax promoters into dropping Tracii from concert bills. Guns, who played West Hollywood's House of Blues in January with Skid Row (minus singer Sebastian Bach, of course), says he could quash Riley's band but won't.

Most of these bands, in the end, will always be smaller than their brands.

"There's a huge, huge misconception out there that this stuff is back," Oklahoma radio man Eddie Trunk says.

"The reality is this though: There is no pot of gold out there for these guys. They can all make their money, and they can all have some level of success, but the glory days of playing these arenas and stadiums is over."

Teo Macero, 82, Record Producer, Dies

NYT
February 22, 2008
Teo Macero, 82, Record Producer, Dies
By BEN RATLIFF

Teo Macero, a record producer, composer and saxophonist most famous for his role in producing a series of albums by Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including editing that almost amounted to creating compositions after the recordings, died on Tuesday in Riverhead, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in Quogue, N.Y.

His death followed a long illness, his stepdaughter, Suzie Lightbourn, said.

Helping to build Miles Davis albums like “Bitches Brew,” “In a Silent Way” and “Get Up With It,” Mr. Macero (pronounced TEE-oh mah-SEH-roh) used techniques partly inspired by composers like Edgard Varèse, who had been using tape-editing and electronic effects to help shape the music. Such techniques were then new to jazz and have largely remained separate from it since. But the electric-jazz albums he helped Davis create — especially “Bitches Brew,” which remains one of the best-selling albums by a jazz artist — have deeper echoes in almost 40 years of experimental pop, like work by Can, Brian Eno and Radiohead.

Davis’s routine in the late 1960s was to record a lot of music in the studio with a band, much of it improvised and based on themes and even mere chords that he would introduce on the spot. Later Mr. Macero, with Davis’s help, would splice together vamps and bits and pieces of improvisation.

For example, Mr. Macero isolated a little melodic improvisation Davis played on the trumpet for “Shhh/Peaceful” on “In a Silent Way” and used it as the theme, placing it at the beginning and the end of the piece. Even live recordings he sometimes treated as drafts; the first track of Davis’s “Live at Fillmore East,” from 1970, contains a snippet pasted in from a different song.

Mr. Macero strongly believed that the finished versions of Davis’s LPs, with all their intricate splices and sequencing — done on tape with a razor blade, in the days before digital editing — were the work of art, the entire point of the exercise. He opposed the current practice of releasing boxed sets that include all the material recorded in the studio, including alternate and unreleased takes. Mr. Macero was not involved in Columbia’s extensive reissuing of Davis’s work for the label, in lavish boxed sets from the mid-’90s until last year.

Attilio Joseph Macero was born and raised in Glens Falls, N.Y. He served in the Navy, then moved to New York in 1948 to attend the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with the composer Henry Brant. In 1953 he became involved with Charles Mingus in the cooperative organization called the Jazz Composers Workshop; he played in Mingus’s other groups and put out his own records on Debut Records, the label founded by Mingus and Max Roach.

While simultaneously working as a tenor saxophonist — with Mingus, Teddy Charles and the Sandole Brothers, among others — and composing modern classical music as well as working in the classical-to-jazz idiom then called Third Stream, he joined Columbia Records in 1957. He was first hired as a music editor; in 1959 he became a staff producer.

At Columbia he worked with artists like J. J. Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Johnny Mathis, Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck, for whom he produced the famous album “Time Out.” He also produced Broadway cast albums like “A Chorus Line” and film soundtracks.

Mr. Macero left Columbia in 1975. He later worked with the singer Robert Palmer, the Lounge Lizards, Vernon Reid, D.J. Logic and others.

Besides Ms. Lightbourn, of Morristown, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jeanne, of Quogue, N.Y., and his sister, Lydia Edwards of Sarasota, Fla., and Queensbury, N.Y.

Saudi Hip-Hop's Painful Birth

Washington Post

Saudi Hip-Hop's Painful Birth
Selection in MTV Contest Brings Joy and Misery for Group Defying Strictures of Muslim Kingdom

By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 22, 2008; A16

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- For many years, the members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men performed mostly in living rooms for their friends. They hid their pastime from relatives who view singing and dancing as shameful in this strict Muslim kingdom where concerts, theaters and movies are banned.

But that all changed last month after the group auditioned for a hip-hop competition on MTV Arabia -- launched in November as the latest addition to the MTV network -- and became one of eight finalists from the Middle East.

The channel produced a video clip of Dark2Men that aired in late January and flew the finalists to Dubai for the contest finale, which was taped Thursday and will be broadcast across the region next month.

"We used to sing about scratching our way to the surface," said lead rapper Hani Zain, 27, a gangly computer programmer at a bank. "We finally made it to the light."

In a kingdom where the Koran serves as the constitution, Dark2Men's rapid ascent from obscurity to the waiting room of pop fame has brought its three young members a mix of elation and misery.

Saudi Arabia is home to Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, and the group's tenuous leap into the realm of MTV is in many ways the story of the kingdom's own struggle with the effects of intrusive Western-style modernity.

There are no nightclubs or concerts in Saudi Arabia because of social and religious codes that also ban alcohol and the mixing of unrelated men and women. Local radio and television stations play mainly Arabic pop music. With those limitations, the group's biggest ambition had been to cut a CD.

What they got instead was a television appearance viewed by thousands in the Arab world.

Their fathers, who had never seen them perform, were ashamed and angry as they watched them rapping and dancing in the video on television.

Their fiancees, in a country where women are not allowed to drive and must cover their hair and wear a cloak in public, were unhappy about the trip to Dubai, where men and women mix freely and alcohol is readily available.

The time they needed to spend on practicing and attending the competition put them at risk of losing raises and promotions.

"This should be the happiest time of my life, but it's really the most difficult," said Tamer Farhan, 24, a human resources assistant at a hospital who taught himself English by watching American movies and television shows.

The video, for their song "The Journey," was filmed in the studio and around Jiddah's landmarks, and in it, they rap about the group's rise:

"Hard life but I'll be sticking to it. Bad times but I'll be going through it. All I know is that I know I can do it. Be strong and never lean down to it."

Farhan seemed shy in front of the camera. Zain, sporting sunglasses, moved like he had been performing for the cameras for years. Maan Mansour, 25, looked straight into the camera and made the effusive hand gestures of Western rap stars.

"There are a lot of Saudi rappers, but they're underground because of the wrong impression people have of them," Farhan told MTV's "Hip HopNa" co-host Qusai Khidr, a Saudi rapper who has lived in Florida. "We would like people to hear our words and listen to our message before they judge us."

After the video aired, the group members met at a pizza place, and their moods shifted between excitement and despondency.

Farhan said that when hip-hop was just a hobby, his father was tolerant and his fiancee was confident that her parents would not discover he was part of the group. But now that the group has been on television and could win a recording contract, his father fears that his son will leave a steady job to become an entertainer. His fiancee said it was only a matter of time before her parents found out and ended the engagement.

Farhan, the eldest of four siblings who has worked since he was 13 to supplement the family income, said his father's disapproval was especially hard. "All my life, I've tried to make him proud," he said.

Mansour, who raps in English and Arabic, recounted how his father, a retired school principal, threatened to disown him a day after the video clip aired. "He said the whole neighborhood was talking about his son prancing around and dancing and singing like a jester on television," said Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician at a hospital.

Zain said he had agreed with his fiancee that if his music career started to hurt their relationship, he would cut down on performing and concentrate on writing lyrics and composing music. "I love this girl more than I love singing," he said.

The group's biggest challenge, Zain said, was to prove to their friends, families and fiancees that they are as serious about their religion and their culture as they are about hip-hop.

"If you're a rapper, people immediately assume that you are into the things they see on television. We don't want to be them, we want to create our own style. We rap about problems faced by young Saudis and we promote Islamic values," Mansour said.

Zain said the name Dark2Men was about shedding light on the hidden difficulties Saudi youths face. The "2" stood for the number of members in the group when it was founded in 1999. But Zain said the other founding member, a friend of his, left the group because he did not want to hurt his reputation and anger his family.

Zain met Mansour at a mosque, and Farhan joined them later.

The feeling of being under siege and misunderstood by society has turned the group's members into close friends, they said.

"People don't understand us here. They think being part of a rap group means you're less Arab or less Muslim or you want to imitate the West," Zain said.

A song written after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, which were carried out mainly by Saudis, focuses on how the group views faith:

"We're the ones who care about women and family, we're the ones who care about neighbors and community, and after all that how dare you people call us terrorist. I'm proud to be Muslim. Islam is the deepest peace. And no matter what they say or do, I am, I am, I'm Muslim."

At the airport in Jiddah before leaving for Dubai, Farhan said his father had given him a good-luck gift that morning. He stretched out his hand to show a watch with a black leather strap.

Zain, wearing his ubiquitous sunglasses and black hooded sweat shirt, said he had "never been so scared and so excited."

"All my dreams are now staring me in the face," he said before taking off. "Everything depends on what happens in Dubai."

2008 Grammy Nominees and Winners

2008 Grammy Nominees and Winners.

Public singing in America

NYT

February 10, 2008
Music
Shared Song, Communal Memory
By BEN RATLIFF

EAST LANSING, Mich.

THEY meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or a banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called “Rise Up Singing.” They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.

From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voiced and bring old songs into common memory.

If there is a natural opposite to gold-plated pop irony and faceless file sharing — music as the American majority knows it in 2008 — this is it. These meetings are earnest, participant directed and person to person: a slow-going, folkish appreciation of American vernacular culture.

Much of this impulse descends from Pete Seeger, who has championed the cause of group-singing for more than 60 years. “No one can prove a damn thing,” Mr. Seeger said in a recent interview, “but I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’ ”

Amateur group-singing has been around forever, of course, at bars, churches, schools, camps and stadiums. Community sings like the one in East Lansing are pitched halfway between the ritual of the campfire singalong and the self-conscious American folk-music movement of the 20th century.

In 1945 Mr. Seeger founded the People’s Song collective, which disseminated its own songbooks, thereby helping to popularize songs like “We Shall Overcome.” The folk revival of the late 1950s and the subsequent rise of folk festivals, some of which included song-circles as special events, furthered the idea that singing together could reseed a homegrown culture and empower the ordinary citizen to change society.

In 1973 Peter Blood, a Quaker, political organizer, teacher and folk musician in Philadelphia, put together a homemade songbook called “Winds of the People,” which quickly took off in the group-sing scene. “There was a demand for it in the circles we ran in, which were religious and summer-camp circles,” said his wife, Annie Patterson. In time Movement for a New Society and other nonreligious activist organizations adopted it for singalong events.

A decade later Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson were envisioning a more ambitious book. They compiled and cleared the rights to 1,200 songs for “Rise Up Singing,” which was published in 1988. Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine, the pre-eminent journal of the folk movement, and also the publisher of the songbook, said it has sold about 800,000 copies, at $17.95 each.

It’s hard to gauge the size of the community-sing movement because by its essentially casual nature it resists documenting. There is no central organization, no comprehensive Web site of regular events. Groups of the kind that use “Rise Up Singing” are not registered with the American Choral Directors Association and have no academic or institutional affiliation.

But Mr. Blood, who now lives in Amherst, Mass., said that by a conservative estimate at least 100 regular singalongs around the country use the book, in cities including Santa Cruz, Calif.; both Portlands; Rochester; Chicago; Milwaukee; and Atlanta. Some of these are easy to find in an online search; some are publicized through regional folk-music society newsletters, church bulletins or strictly by word of mouth.

In East Lansing, Sally Potter, 47, a frank, energetic presence, leads the monthly sing. In early December the event drew about 80 people. Everyone gathered in the rear of the chapel, where the ceiling is low, “so you can get the chills more easily,” as Ms. Potter explained.

The chairs were arranged around an open square, the better to hear the blend of voices. The singers ranged from teenagers to the elderly; some had strong, penetrating voices, some murmured with wobbly pitch. They sang about 20 songs, including “Star of the County Down” (18th-century traditional Irish), “The M.T.A. Song” (a 1948 update of the early 20th-century American ballad “The Wreck of the Old 97”) and “The Rose” (1979, soft-rock radio).

The force of their voices grew during 90 minutes, with harmony occurring in unexpected places. In between numbers Ms. Potter waited for people to raise hands and politely make suggestions.

“Page 117, ‘Julian of Norwich’?” someone offered, referring to a selection from “Rise Up Singing.”

“Great!” Ms. Potter responded quickly. “One of my favorite songs.”

“Is it ‘Nor-witch,’ ” another voice asked, “or ‘Nor-rich’?”

“I don’t know,” Ms. Potter said, shrugging, though she did. “It’s your song.”

Some sang the word one way, some the other. But Ms. Potter does have a few guidelines, including this: If someone picks a song, and it takes more than 45 seconds for everyone to learn it, let it go. There were no nonstarters on this particular Monday. In general, Ms. Potter said, she believes that people should get to sing what they came to sing.

The combined area of Lansing and East Lansing, which has a population of about 165,000 and is home to Michigan State University, has a perfect sense of scale for community projects: it’s not too small, not too big, and despite a perpetually slumped economy, it has a great deal of civic pride. It also has a famous guitar store, Elderly Instruments, a folk-music locus open since 1972; the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a folk-concert producer that has put on events for almost that long; and a popular local folk-music radio show on the NPR-affiliated WKAR.

Ms. Potter teaches high school history and economics in nearby Williamston. She has lived in Lansing for the last 23 years, during which time she has owned a restaurant, run the local farmers’ market and a used-sporting-goods store, and toured the Midwest in a folk trio, Second Opinion. Her interest in community sings goes back to the Hudson River Clearwater Festival in 1994, where Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, led a singalong group in a tent. Ms. Potter saw the same people returning day after day to sit cross-legged and sing, and she realized that participation was folk music’s core pleasure.

In 2003 she helped found the annual Mid Winter Singing Festival, a two-day event featuring community sings that tend to draw 400 to 500 people each night. This year’s festival, the sixth, was last weekend. There was a blizzard the first night, yet 340 people fought their way to the Hannah Community Center, a large building across the street from the Unitarian church.

In the evening events the singers sat in an auditorium and faced the stage, referring to set lists and lyric sheets. The song leaders were folk singers with longstanding local reputations: Claudia Schmidt, Joel Mabus and Frank Youngman.

“I’ve watched so many concerts, and I know what works,” Ms. Potter said. “When people are singing, you’re giving them the power, you’re giving them the music.”

Peter Blood agrees. “A lot of the experience of music in our culture is listening to someone else sing,” he said. “What I find exciting about community sings is that people feel they own the music.”

“Rise Up Singing” includes rudimentary chord notations but otherwise gives no indication how to sing a particular song; it is essentially used as a book of lyrics. It is not the only book used for participatory singalongs (shape-note singers tend toward “The Sacred Harp,” originally published in 1844), and some singalong groups bring their own songs. But it is the breakaway hit of its kind in recent decades.

Dan Zanes, the singer and popular children’s entertainer, used to sell “Rise Up Singing,” which he called “the ultimate songbook,” at his shows. “We don’t have that many songs rattling around in our heads anymore," he said, "so we need a guide of sorts.”

BookScan, which tracks sales back to 2000 through traditional bookstores, registers about 12,000 copies sold. But Mr. Moss said that most sales of the book have not come from bookstores. Song leaders order it by the boxful, directly from the publisher, or from the authors at quakersong.org.

Mr. Moss said that although Sing Out! magazine did not map or facilitate the movement, he believed that it is “much broader than ‘Rise Up Singing.’ ”

“Often I hear from people that they hate the book for use in those settings because people keep their noses in it,” he said.

Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson organized the songs in it by theme, including “Ecology,” “Sea,” “Faith,” “Hard Times & Blues,” “Men” and “Women.” (While the “Women” section is full of feminist vigor, the “Men” section is introspective, with songs like “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” and “Let the Woman in You Come Through.”) The book includes traditional black American hymns; Cuban, Mexican, Irish and Hebrew songs; Stephen Foster; Jacques Brel; the Beatles; Phil Ochs; Bob Dylan; and Stevie Wonder. There are songs for specific holidays and songs from musicals.

With groovy spot-illustrations and hand-lettered calligraphy, “Rise Up Singing” has a 1970s liberal-progressive feel and an obvious bias toward group-singability, although Mr. Blood admitted that some of the songs were included more for lyrical content than for their significance or popularity. (The couple are at work on compiling a 1,200-song sequel that will include more selections from jazz, blues and rock.)

Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its tacit proposal that there are many, many songs Americans should know by heart. In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.

“I was surprised how many the average person knew back then,” he said. He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.”

At 88 Mr. Seeger is still a song leader, helping to run a singalong at the monthly meeting of a volunteer environmental organization near his home in Beacon, N.Y. “I like the sound of average voices more than trained voices,” he said. “Especially kids singing a little off pitch. They have a nice, rascally sound.”

After “Edelweiss,” and a beautiful run-through of “Song of Peace,” adapted from Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” the session at the Universalist Unitarian Church wrapped up. It was almost 9 p.m., but nobody seemed in a rush to get home. A scattering of regulars stayed, packing up the cider and cookies.

One of them was Marcus Cheatham, 51, who works in public health. Earlier in the evening he introduced one of his own songs, picking a mandolin to teach the melody. Mr. Cheatham started singing about six years ago, when he joined a church choir and later a “diversity choir” at work, performing on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and other holidays. The next step, he reasoned, was attending a community sing.

Asked if his knowledge of songs had grown since then, he corrected the question. “My enjoyment of songs has grown,” he said. “I’m not much of a musician at all. If you enjoy it, you can jump in and do it.”

“In our little community,” he added, “the economy is horrible, and people are scared and sad. But you go to something like this, and you think, ‘Wow, our community is resilient.’ ”

Margaret Kingsbury, 67, a nurse who is involved with peace groups, sounded a similar note. “I honestly believe that this is one of the ways to create peace,” she said. “You go away from here, and you’re uplifted.”

Ms. Potter isn’t surprised by such reactions. “I think it’s all a result of people needing to come together and find some power somewhere,” she said. “It’s a political need and a spiritual need. How many people left early tonight? It’s a Monday night. They’re tired. But people didn’t leave. That’s how you know.”

Juan Formell (Los Van Van) interview

Los Van Van have reached the 21st century

BY RAFAEL LAM —Special for Granma International—

JUAN Formell, director of Los Van Van, gives us a recount of his band on the 38th anniversary of its debut on December 4, 1969. The most famous salsa group in the world has filled a rich career for years with creations and joy.

Formell, how was the start to Los Van Van’s career?

Los Van Van have reached the 21st centurySince 1967, I had been a member of the Revé group; I did it as a kind of transition, I wasn’t that interested in playing in a charanga. But I started to experiment and things turned out well, we had some hits. But by the summer of 1969 things weren’t working out; problems started and I decided to form my own band. The majority of Revé’s members came with me. The battle was on to get hold of instruments and making the new group official.

How did you solve those problems?

We had the support of Julio Bidopia, who is still working alongside us today, and who heads the Musical Clave Enterprise. He went off, getting hold of the instruments in Panama and Japan. For the debut show, we asked for some audio equipment from the Los Dada group, which was really popular at the time.

How was Los Van’s debut?

It took place on a very significant day, December 4, 1969, on Rampa St. It was fantastic. The press talked about a "new kind of music", a renovation of charanga.

What did this renovation consist of?

We used rock drums in the charanga, electric bass, and organ. We had arrangements that had a touch of pop, modern, and a bit of Yoruba. The rhythmic structure changed, plus the tone and concept; it was a total revolution.

Let’s talk about some of the members from those days…

Of the musicians, you have to always bear in mind César Pedroso, who was able to understand my technical changes. José Luis Quintana (Changuito) carried the weight of the rhythm base, he’s a star of Cuban and world percussion. The vocals were also decisive: the first lead was Lele (Miguel Angel Rasalp), who was a popularity phenomenon. He had a rock-ish swing, mixed it with son and, in the second stage, with rumba. He’s a born rumbero. He was followed by the voices of Armandito Cuervo, a son singer from Havana; Lázaro Morúa who created songo with a touch of gospel and jazz. Pedrito Calvo, another hugely popular artist. Israel Sardiñas gave a new boost to Los Van Van. Mario Luis Valdés replaced Sardiñas and filled a vacuum at that time. Angelito Bonne, who sang the hit song "Azucar". Mayito Rivera, an excellent rumbero. Robertón a timbale player who is unequalled. Jenny Valdés, the only female singer in the group.

There were misunderstandings when Los Van Van started…

Many people opened fire: critics, journalists, certain people who always show up as detractors of dance music, always a negative view from certain slack people.

Did you think that you would last 38 years?

I never thought we would get this far. It was quite simply our goal to make music for us to enjoy and for the people to enjoy. We worked for dancers, for the joy of Cuba; and we were ahead of our time. We went on a world tour; we stopped where we had to, in the skyscrapers and theaters of New York to demonstrate that Cuban music is immortal, indisputable. We won at the Grammys in the Salsa category in 1999 with our album Llegó Van Van. You start off doing what you have to do and as time passes, you realize that you’re writing part of the musical history of your country.

How have you been able to keep up with the times?

Times change very quickly in music; staying behind is the easiest thing in the world. If you don’t renew yourself, you die, and if you change the concept, you also die. You have to change the tones, but never the concept, the essential objective. We maintain the rhythmic base but the instruments can change, the vocals, the styles, the tones. But you always have to have an identifiable base. On the contrary, if you’re a weather vane that goes where the wind takes you, then that’s musical opportunism.

You had a reshuffle…

At a specific moment, I changed the lineup, I renovated it. My son joined with new ideas and plans. Boris Luna on keyboards. Violinists with young blood. Vocals with more "swing"; Mayito is very young, a rumbero and expert on musical percussion. Robertón has an amazing voice. Jenny provides the feminine touch. At certain times, my son takes over the musical direction and I feel renewed and go to almost all the shows. On the bass, I’ve got a youngster called Roberto Carlos and I sing and encourage the band. As you can see, there is both youth and experience.

Los Van Van’s latest album?

It’s called Arrasando and it’s got all the contemporary sound and strength of Los Van Van.

What’s the most important thing for Juan Formell?

I was always a dancer; that’s the essence and the principal objective. Without that, we wouldn’t exist. When I started out, I never thought that we would get so far and for so long. It’s the public who have brought us this far.

Will Van Van be around for a while?

As Revé used to say, hasta que ñangue (till who knows when).

Tata Guines (1930-2008)

NYT
February 7, 2008
Tata Güines, 77, Cuban Master of the Congas, Is Dead
By BEN RATLIFF

Tata Güines, one of the most important percussionists on the tumbadora, or conga drum, in the first generation of Afro-Cuban jazz and son montuno, died on Monday in Havana, where he lived. He was 77.

The cause was a kidney infection, according to Cuban state media.

Known for drawing a great range of sounds from his drums, with his fingernails as well as his hands, he was highly imitated, one of the best tumbadora soloists of his time, along with Chano Pozo and Patato Valdés.

Born Federico Arístides Soto in Güines, southeast of Havana, the son of a musician who played the six-string instrument called the tres, Mr. Güines moved to Havana in 1946. By the 1950s he was working with major Cuban bandleaders, including Peruchín, Bebo Valdés, José Fajardo and Chico O’Farrill. In the late 1950s he played as a soloist on the enormously influential recordings made for the Panart label of Cuban jam sessions led by Israel (Cachao) López, originally released as “Descargas en Miniatura.”

Also by the late 1950s he had joined forces with the pianist Frank Emilio Flynn, forming a new band, Quinteto Instrumental de Musica Moderna, later known as Los Amigos. But with the rise of the nueva canción singer-songwriter movement in Cuba, instrumentalists like Mr. Güines were falling out of favor. His second wind came with his participation in the “Estrellas de Areito” sessions in 1979, recordings made for Egrem, the Cuban state record company, which revived the descarga style from 20 years before.

By the ’90s, even before the waves of recognition for older Cuban musicians started by the “Buena Vista Social Club” film and record, Mr. Güines was recognized as an old master, and toured often. He recorded with the young conguero Miguel (Angá) Díaz, his greatest stylistic descendant, on the 1995 record “Pasaporte,” which won the Egrem album of the year award, Cuba’s equivalent of a Grammy.

He worked with other young bands, including Orlando Valle’s, and Jesús Alemañy’s band Cubanismo; he also recorded “Chamalongo,” with the Canadian saxophonist Jane Bunnett, and played on the title track of Bebo Valdés and Diego el Cigala’s popular 2003 album, “Lágrimas Negras.”

Cubans mourn 'King of the Congas'

By JAVIER GALEANO, Associated Press WriterTue Feb 5, 8:08 PM ET

Cuban musicians, family and friends remembered the island's most famous conga drummer, Tata Guines, as he was buried outside Havana on Tuesday after a six decade career that helped popularize Afro-Cuban rhythms worldwide.

Known as the "King of the Congas" and "Golden Hands," the 77-year-old Guines died Monday after being hospitalized for hypertension and kidney problems.

"There's no one in Cuba, if not the world, better at making percussion an art," Cuban music critic Jose Luis Estrada wrote Tuesday in the state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

Mourners sang, clapped and swayed at a ceremony in his hometown of Guines — which he took as his stage name at the start of his career.

Born Federico Aristides Soto on June 30, 1930, Guines was best known for playing the conga, a tall, barrel-like drum central to Rumba and Afro-Cuban music and culture.

He took the stage in Havana in the early 1940s with the Partagas Sextet and moved to the United States in 1957, where he performed with jazz greats Josephine Baker, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

Though he enjoyed success in the U.S., Guines was upset by the racial segregation he experienced there and returned to Cuba after Fidel Castro's rebels toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Guines won a Latin Grammy in 2004 for "Lagrimas Negras," or "Black Tears," a collaboration with legendary exiled Cuban jazz pianist Bebo Valdes and Spanish singer Diego La Cigala. He also worked with the Rumba Cubana All-Stars on "La Rumba Soy Yo," or "I Am the Rumba," which won a Latin Grammy in 2001.

He received Cuba's National Music Award in 2006.

Recife's 'frevo' rhythms fuel its intimate carnival

Miami Herald

Posted on Mon, Feb. 04, 2008
Recife's 'frevo' rhythms fuel its intimate carnival
BY MICHAEL ASTOR
Jelly-limbed dancers with tiny multicolored umbrellas, frolicking to frenetic frevo rhythms, make carnival in this Brazilian coastal city unique and for residents second to none.

Recife's frevo music -- which is accompanied by a frantic tip-toe dance in which participants leap into midair splits and fold themselves like contortionists as they land -- forms a carnival tradition distinct from the better-known samba.

While Rio de Janeiro's famed Samba parade, which takes place Sunday and Monday nights, is broadcast to millions of adoring fans, Recife's bash is perhaps Brazil's best kept secret. Late Sunday, the two traditions met in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome stadium where Mangueira, one of Brazil's best loved samba groups, sang Recife's praises.

''By paying for Mangueira's parade we are bringing national and international media attention for our carnival, which is the most democratic in Brazil and free to all,'' said Recife Mayor Joao Paulo Lima Silva, explaining the $1.7 million expense to the city's coffers.

In recent years, revelers turned off by Rio's commercialism and tired of being confined to the stands have begun looking elsewhere to cities like Salvador da Bahia -- where supermodel Naomi Campbell and music producer Quincy Jones are celebrating this year.

Those in search of a more intimate carnival have been heading to Recife and the neighboring colonial hilltop town of Olinda. Here, the vibrantly colored costumes and huge puppets may be dwarfed by the Rio's gargantuan floats and armies of uniformed dancers, but the lack of pomp is compensated for by the proximity.

Recife also offers up a potpourri of rhythms with names that seem to flow from poetry, like maracatu, caboclo, coco and ciranda.

''Mangueira has knelt before a carnival that is totally original and chocked full of culture. In Rio's there's just one, Samba,'' explains Alceu Valenca, a popular Brazilian musician.

That may be so, but in Recife one carnival rhythm stands above all the others and that is frevo.

Frevo is celebrating its centenary this year and Mangueira's theme samba this year is fittingly titled, 100 Years of Frevo, It's Enough to Lose Your Shoe.

''Frevo is the maximum expression of carnival, there's nothing like frevo and if we can put a minuet into our samba, we can certainly incorporate frevo,'' said Mangueira's carnival designer, Max Lopes.

Will.i.am's "Yes We Can"