New York Times
July 19, 2008
Neil Young, Where Politics and Technology Meet
By BEN SISARIO
When Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young booked a concert tour for the summer of 2006, it was supposed to be an easygoing, no-surprises reunion ticket for the Chardonnay set.
But Neil Young being Neil Young, it ended up a much more confrontational affair. Prodded by Mr. Young, the band reshaped the program around his album “Living With War,” a grungy jeremiad written, recorded and released in a few weeks that spring.
“I played them the record and said, ‘This is all I want to do,’ ” he recalled in an interview this week.
As recorded in Mr. Young’s new documentary of the tour, “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” which opens July 25 in New York, Los Angeles and 17 other cities, his band mates took to the antiwar theme eagerly. (In one scene, David Crosby calls the band “a benevolent dictatorship” and adds, “Neil is in charge.”) But the audiences were not exactly unanimous in agreement. In Atlanta, the first verse of Mr. Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President” brought boos, middle fingers and worse.
“The ‘Living With War’ album got such a varied reaction,” Mr. Young said. “Extreme negative and personal attacks, all kinds of things I had never had before from any kind of record. But that’s what made it so interesting, and such a great subject for a film. We didn’t know what was going happen, but we knew something was going to happen.”
To establish a journalistic tone for the film, Mr. Young hired Mike Cerre, a former ABC war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be “embedded” on the tour, interviewing fans and capturing the mood of the shows.
“I called my wife and cameraman and told them I was going to be embedded in a rock tour,” Mr. Cerre said in a telephone interview. “They thought I said Iraq. There was a long silence at the other end of the phone.”
Mr. Cerre said he was given complete freedom to produce 12 newsy segments. Larry Johnson, the film’s producer, said most of them were used, and with only minor editing for length. Mr. Cerre found some support among concertgoers for the band’s politics, but what stands out are unflattering shots of the aging group onstage — like Stephen Stills, then 61, struggling to get up after a fall during “Rockin’ in the Free World” — and complaints from fans, not always civil, who disapproved of the political message.
When asked why he included such harsh reactions and images, Mr. Young said simply: “Because it was harsh. It’s content. This is a documentary.”
Mr. Young’s career as a musical provocateur is well known, but his interests as a multimedia mogul aren’t. “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” made under his pseudonym, Bernard Shakey, is the fifth release in his sporadic career as a director, following the surrealistic comedy “Human Highway” (1982) and “Greendale,” based on his concept album of the same title from 2003.
He also has a company developing high-quality audio downloads and a project to convert a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV — all 2 1/2 tons and 19 1/2 feet of it — to ultra-efficient electric power, with the help of an international network of scientists and businessmen. Even more ambitious is his archives project, using technology for Blu-ray discs (the prevailing high-definition format of DVD) that he developed with Sun Microsystems. The first of five volumes, a 10-disc package covering 1963 to 1972, is scheduled for release in October.
At 62, Mr. Young still wants to change the world, and he seems to embrace the contradictions of his persona. Staying at the swank Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he was interviewed with two signed Picasso prints over his shoulder, but his plain shirt and rumpled khaki pants were spattered with paint. Giving a photographer less than 60 seconds to shoot his portrait, he seemed very much the impatient superstar, but in an hourlong interview he was casual and energetically talkative.
He said he has no great box office expectations for “CSNY: Déjà Vu,” which might be wise, given the poor ticket sales of recent war documentaries. This year’s Oscar winner, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” from Alex Gibney, has brought in about $275,000.
“My films are pretty wacky,” he said. “They definitely don’t have much of a commercial appeal. This is probably the most serious film I’ve ever made. It’s more like journalism.”
In conversation Mr. Young went back and forth between politics and technology, and in discussing his Lincoln Continental project — called “Linc-Volt” — he linked the two. Its goal, he said, is to eliminate the need for oil and therefore the cause for war. “Why are we having a war?” he said. “It’s all about energy. Trying to get rid of the reason for the war, that’s something that’s doable.”
His archive project is not political but is challenging nonetheless. Conceived more than a decade ago but stalled for technological reasons, it uses the high-quality multimedia capabilities of Blu-ray to display music, video and other digital documentation through a file-cabinet structure — pull out the cabinet with a click and choose the rarity. A demonstration revealed some astonishing footage, like two moments from the 1971 sessions for the album “Harvest” and a spontaneous performance at a Greenwich Village folk club in 1970.
Like the archives, “CSNY: Déjà Vu” involves no small amount of nostalgia. The first words in the film are, “In the 1960s the Vietnam War was raging,” and the antiwar activism of the Vietnam era is frequently invoked, both as bona fides for the band’s history of political protest and as a foil for the more conservative climate that the four men encounter nearly 40 years after their first performances together.
But Mr. Young rejected a suggestion that the film might be more about Vietnam than about Iraq.
“It’s about war; it’s not about either one of them,” he said. “In our sound-bite society, ‘Let’s Impeach the President’ and the political side of it seems to be the side that the press focused on the most. But that’s an offshoot of the real story, which is the tragedy of war, and the families, and how it affects people.”
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
UK Massive Attack Interview
From the The Guardian (UK)
'It's always a terrible and crucial time with us ... that's Massive Attack'
The Bristol band's sound has helped define British pop for 20 years. Now, they are curating the South Bank's influential Meltdown festival. In an exclusive interview, Miranda Sawyer talks politics, camper vans, and their upcoming album
Miranda Sawyer
Sunday May 11, 2008
Observer
Grant and D of Massive Attack always look down in photographs - literally and in mood. It's rare to see a snap of them doing anything but giving it glum. This suits their music, which is intense, rhythm-driven, atmospheric, modern - but it's a shame, because they're upbeat company, even while they're having their picture taken, a process musicians traditionally enjoy as much as high tea with the taxman.
'Have you tried one of these?' grins D, short for 3D, or Delge, real name Robert Del Naja. 'Frozen Jaffa Cakes. Just the normal ones, but you put them in the freezer, they're unbelievable. They taste completely different! The orange really snaps.' He passes them around the company. I can report that frozen Jaffa Cakes are... freezing. Meanwhile, Grant (surname Marshall, aka Daddy G: keep up), is discussing the merits of VW camper vans with Harry the photographer. 'I'm getting a new one,' he announces. 'You can get 'em made, brand new, in Mexico. An authentic Sixties camper van but new, with a Passat engine.'
We are upstairs in Massive Attack's two-storey studio in Bristol. Outside is Grant's current camper: battered, unpretty, furnished with camouflage cushions. Inside the studio, on the ground floor, are the switch banks, dimmed lights, scrawled notes, furry walls of a working studio. Upstairs, the hang-out area is dominated by a twisting installation of silver air-conditioning pipes. 'I'm going to put a Cyberman in the middle of them, just popping his head out,' informs D.
In the corner rest several vast canvases: a couple of D's pieces and one instantly recognisable as the work of Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz fame. These, and the camper van, hint at the reasons behind Massive Attack's most recent pause between LPs. The band's last release, 100th Window, was in 2003. Since then, D has been doing his painting and working on film scores (four in the last year), plus contemplating the slow process of having his house done up. 'I took the roof off and replaced it with glass - that took a while.' Grant, meanwhile, is ensconced in family life. He and his partner, Sylvia, have three children, aged six, three and one and a half. 'So with work, I'm on a three-day week,' he says.
By their reckoning, he and D have been properly grafting on their fifth, as-yet-untitled album, for 'only' the past two years. It's due out in September. 'But you never know with us,' says D. 'It might be next year.' What point are you at with it? I ask. Are you at a terrible and crucial time? 'It's always a terrible and crucial time with us,' laughs Grant. 'That's Massive Attack.'
Massive Attack have never operated like a 'normal' pop group. No drums-bass-guitar-singer structure, no attention-grabbing frontman, no sense of release schedule urgency. 'We tend to get distracted,' admits Grant. The band have always been a hazy, collaborative collective, with members coming and going as they pleased and vital contributions arriving from guest vocalists, such as Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, Elizabeth Fraser, Horace Andy (Andy, Damon Albarn, Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval and Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio all feature on the upcoming album). This may sound hippie; over the years, it has proved both pragmatic and fraught. There have been as many falling-outs as joining-ins.
Massive Attack grew, in the late Eighties, out of the Wild Bunch, a Bristolian hip hop sound system that also included Nellee Hooper. In the beginning, there were four permanent band members: D, Grant, Mushroom and Tricky. Tricky left to forge his own career and, for a long time, there were three. Then, 10 years ago, after the release of third LP, Mezzanine, Mushroom left, unhappy with the direction the music was taking (too dark, not hip hop enough) and unhappy, full-stop: none of the three was on good terms by then.
Finally, during the making of 100th Window, Grant left too. Though not officially; the release coincided with the birth of his first child and he and D were sick of each other. They didn't speak for three years.
Not that you'd know it today. The pair are relaxed, with each other and with me. As ever, D does most of the talking, his Bristol burr rapid-fire, his mind churning. Grant is less excitable, his accent just as strong; he tends to let D speak first and then chime in. They make each other laugh, you notice. At the moment, they're chatting about the local beach resort of Weston-super-Mare. D visited the other day: 'In the shops, they were selling golliwogs! Rows of them. Furry ones, metal ones, plastic ones...'
'Ah, negrophilia,' says Grant. 'I actually collect a bit of that. You should try reading Enid Blyton. The new ones are edited, but I got some second-hand ones and it's all golliwogs and bulging eyes.' They both crack up.
But we're not here to talk about racist stereotyping for kids, Massive Attack are this year's curators for the Southbank's Meltdown festival and they've come up with a brilliant selection of artists: Grace Jones, George Clinton, Stiff Little Fingers, Elbow, Gong, Tunng, Gang of Four, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Terry Callier, the Shortwave Set, Horace Andy, plus newer acts like Fleet Foxes, George Pringle and Aloe Blacc.
The artists they've chosen illustrate their musical obsessions: hip hop, punk, funk, reggae, new wave, electronica - sounds that weave throughout Massive's dark musical universe. 'The idea was to try to encapsulate what we always did as a sound system,' says D, 'but put it on as an event.' Characteristically, D and Grant were a bit disappointed that Meltdown doesn't work like an outdoor festival; they thought that the musicians would be able to wander between venues and mix things up. Still, they're very excited: all that music, all that partying. 'Eleven days,' says Grant. 'We'll be meeting and greeting everyone playing, making sure all their needs are taken care of. Drink, drugs...'
'To be honest, the worry is sustaining,' says D. 'We're playing on the first night and then we've got to last through the next 10.' They're performing on the last night, too, and, during the festival, doing a live mix of the Blade Runner soundtrack as it's being played by the Heritage Orchestra.
Massive Attack have always had a strong visual sense (another possible reason why they don't smile in photos); plus, over the years, an increasingly dominant political bent. So there are films and outside events on top of the gigs. A selection of graffiti/ cartoon artists, such as Hewlett, Banksy (who's from Bristol, too, and a friend) and up-and-coming painter Insekt, is due to create works for an exhibition and there are some interesting movies scheduled, such as Shane Meadows's new one, Somers Town and Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about the death of an Afghan taxi driver while in the custody of US troops. Taxi to the Dark Side will be followed by a discussion with Moazzam Begg, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who stars in the film, and Clive Stafford Smith, legal director and founder of Reprieve, which works against the death penalty but is increasingly acts against human-rights violations.Stafford Smith has issued more than 100 writs against the US government on behalf of Guantánamo Bay inmates.
Massive Attack have been involved with Reprieve for a few years; it is, says D, almost a relief to be helping a charity that focuses so intensely on individual situations, after the band's anti-Iraq war efforts (D was heavily involved in CND's protest campaign). 'I wasn't naive enough to believe that the war would be stopped, we all knew it was a foregone conclusion,' he says. 'But I thought en masse protesting would create an impression that would be indelible, so the next government would have to think twice - which didn't happen. With Reprieve, it's a more containable objective; you're helping individual people, and you can imagine being in their situation. It's human, it's real, you can engage with it.'
D and Grant are wary of publicly talking politics - they know how pompous pop musicians can sound when they do - but once they get going, they find it hard to hold back. They treat me to an entertaining dissection of local government. Sadly, it's nearly all libellous, so I can't repeat it. Some of the printable stuff includes their question as to why Bristol's new buildings all look like 'big Barratt homes' and why the city still doesn't have a music arena for bands to play. After all, Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky created for Bristol a modern musical reputation to rival Manchester's and Liverpool's - so why no great venue? 'It's pathetic,' grumbles Grant.
They also get stuck into the US elections (they're both Obama supporters). Grant is convinced that Hillary will get the nomination - 'There's no way the people with real power will let a black man run for President' - and that McCain will win: 'The Democratic race is a side-show.' D, naturally more optimistic, is hopeful that Obama will win through.
All very interesting, but talk soon moves on to more domestic affairs: to flowers (D has got into gardening), camping, houses and cars (D is learning to drive and has bought a Prius - he's also had solar panels installed, after inquiring about a wind turbine and learning that the resulting energy would be fed back into the National Grid and he would just get a discounted bill). 'That's not the point, is it?' he trumpets. 'I want my own little system, outside the system.' His house is outside Bristol; Grant's is in the city, in Montpelier. 'He's got a great garden,' informs D. 'An urban oasis.' 'With a load of crack addicts outside,' says Grant.
As they talk, it becomes clear that they don't usually chat about such everyday matters; there's a feeling of catching up. Grant is surprised that D's girlfriend had moved in, for instance. Like many musicians, they only discuss music when they're working, plus, they each tend to tinker on different tracks anyway. In the end, this distance is why Massive Attack have endured. It's clear they have loads in common, but so have most bands when they start. The process of being in pop music strains those bonds and very few bands last. Massive Attack have survived over 20 years because, like a good marriage, each partner has outside interests and they give each other space without actually walking away. And, like a good marriage, they only argue when they really, really have to.
It's decided that we'll go out to get some lunch and do some more photos. 'Let's go and get a pint,' says D. The Massive Attack work ethic strikes again. How they ever get anything done is beyond me.
· Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre from Friday 13 June to Sunday 22 June. Information at southbankcentre.co.uk. The Observer is media partner
Trip hop pioneers: Back in the groove
Early years Founders Robert Del Naja (3D), Grant Marshall (Daddy G) and Andrew Vowles (Mushroom) mixed down tempo beats and soulful vocals as the pioneers of trip hop in 1988.
Riding High Blue Lines (1991), the debut album, acclaimed as groundbreaking. Protection (1994) also well received.
Fall-outs and fallow years Mezzanine (1998) and 100th Window (2003) were less popular. Disagreements led to Mushroom leaving in 1998 and Daddy G in 2000.
Back on track After not speaking for three years, 3D and Daddy G have recorded a fifth album and will curate the Meltdown Festival next month.
Katie Toms
'It's always a terrible and crucial time with us ... that's Massive Attack'
The Bristol band's sound has helped define British pop for 20 years. Now, they are curating the South Bank's influential Meltdown festival. In an exclusive interview, Miranda Sawyer talks politics, camper vans, and their upcoming album
Miranda Sawyer
Sunday May 11, 2008
Observer
Grant and D of Massive Attack always look down in photographs - literally and in mood. It's rare to see a snap of them doing anything but giving it glum. This suits their music, which is intense, rhythm-driven, atmospheric, modern - but it's a shame, because they're upbeat company, even while they're having their picture taken, a process musicians traditionally enjoy as much as high tea with the taxman.
'Have you tried one of these?' grins D, short for 3D, or Delge, real name Robert Del Naja. 'Frozen Jaffa Cakes. Just the normal ones, but you put them in the freezer, they're unbelievable. They taste completely different! The orange really snaps.' He passes them around the company. I can report that frozen Jaffa Cakes are... freezing. Meanwhile, Grant (surname Marshall, aka Daddy G: keep up), is discussing the merits of VW camper vans with Harry the photographer. 'I'm getting a new one,' he announces. 'You can get 'em made, brand new, in Mexico. An authentic Sixties camper van but new, with a Passat engine.'
We are upstairs in Massive Attack's two-storey studio in Bristol. Outside is Grant's current camper: battered, unpretty, furnished with camouflage cushions. Inside the studio, on the ground floor, are the switch banks, dimmed lights, scrawled notes, furry walls of a working studio. Upstairs, the hang-out area is dominated by a twisting installation of silver air-conditioning pipes. 'I'm going to put a Cyberman in the middle of them, just popping his head out,' informs D.
In the corner rest several vast canvases: a couple of D's pieces and one instantly recognisable as the work of Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz fame. These, and the camper van, hint at the reasons behind Massive Attack's most recent pause between LPs. The band's last release, 100th Window, was in 2003. Since then, D has been doing his painting and working on film scores (four in the last year), plus contemplating the slow process of having his house done up. 'I took the roof off and replaced it with glass - that took a while.' Grant, meanwhile, is ensconced in family life. He and his partner, Sylvia, have three children, aged six, three and one and a half. 'So with work, I'm on a three-day week,' he says.
By their reckoning, he and D have been properly grafting on their fifth, as-yet-untitled album, for 'only' the past two years. It's due out in September. 'But you never know with us,' says D. 'It might be next year.' What point are you at with it? I ask. Are you at a terrible and crucial time? 'It's always a terrible and crucial time with us,' laughs Grant. 'That's Massive Attack.'
Massive Attack have never operated like a 'normal' pop group. No drums-bass-guitar-singer structure, no attention-grabbing frontman, no sense of release schedule urgency. 'We tend to get distracted,' admits Grant. The band have always been a hazy, collaborative collective, with members coming and going as they pleased and vital contributions arriving from guest vocalists, such as Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, Elizabeth Fraser, Horace Andy (Andy, Damon Albarn, Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval and Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio all feature on the upcoming album). This may sound hippie; over the years, it has proved both pragmatic and fraught. There have been as many falling-outs as joining-ins.
Massive Attack grew, in the late Eighties, out of the Wild Bunch, a Bristolian hip hop sound system that also included Nellee Hooper. In the beginning, there were four permanent band members: D, Grant, Mushroom and Tricky. Tricky left to forge his own career and, for a long time, there were three. Then, 10 years ago, after the release of third LP, Mezzanine, Mushroom left, unhappy with the direction the music was taking (too dark, not hip hop enough) and unhappy, full-stop: none of the three was on good terms by then.
Finally, during the making of 100th Window, Grant left too. Though not officially; the release coincided with the birth of his first child and he and D were sick of each other. They didn't speak for three years.
Not that you'd know it today. The pair are relaxed, with each other and with me. As ever, D does most of the talking, his Bristol burr rapid-fire, his mind churning. Grant is less excitable, his accent just as strong; he tends to let D speak first and then chime in. They make each other laugh, you notice. At the moment, they're chatting about the local beach resort of Weston-super-Mare. D visited the other day: 'In the shops, they were selling golliwogs! Rows of them. Furry ones, metal ones, plastic ones...'
'Ah, negrophilia,' says Grant. 'I actually collect a bit of that. You should try reading Enid Blyton. The new ones are edited, but I got some second-hand ones and it's all golliwogs and bulging eyes.' They both crack up.
But we're not here to talk about racist stereotyping for kids, Massive Attack are this year's curators for the Southbank's Meltdown festival and they've come up with a brilliant selection of artists: Grace Jones, George Clinton, Stiff Little Fingers, Elbow, Gong, Tunng, Gang of Four, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Terry Callier, the Shortwave Set, Horace Andy, plus newer acts like Fleet Foxes, George Pringle and Aloe Blacc.
The artists they've chosen illustrate their musical obsessions: hip hop, punk, funk, reggae, new wave, electronica - sounds that weave throughout Massive's dark musical universe. 'The idea was to try to encapsulate what we always did as a sound system,' says D, 'but put it on as an event.' Characteristically, D and Grant were a bit disappointed that Meltdown doesn't work like an outdoor festival; they thought that the musicians would be able to wander between venues and mix things up. Still, they're very excited: all that music, all that partying. 'Eleven days,' says Grant. 'We'll be meeting and greeting everyone playing, making sure all their needs are taken care of. Drink, drugs...'
'To be honest, the worry is sustaining,' says D. 'We're playing on the first night and then we've got to last through the next 10.' They're performing on the last night, too, and, during the festival, doing a live mix of the Blade Runner soundtrack as it's being played by the Heritage Orchestra.
Massive Attack have always had a strong visual sense (another possible reason why they don't smile in photos); plus, over the years, an increasingly dominant political bent. So there are films and outside events on top of the gigs. A selection of graffiti/ cartoon artists, such as Hewlett, Banksy (who's from Bristol, too, and a friend) and up-and-coming painter Insekt, is due to create works for an exhibition and there are some interesting movies scheduled, such as Shane Meadows's new one, Somers Town and Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about the death of an Afghan taxi driver while in the custody of US troops. Taxi to the Dark Side will be followed by a discussion with Moazzam Begg, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who stars in the film, and Clive Stafford Smith, legal director and founder of Reprieve, which works against the death penalty but is increasingly acts against human-rights violations.Stafford Smith has issued more than 100 writs against the US government on behalf of Guantánamo Bay inmates.
Massive Attack have been involved with Reprieve for a few years; it is, says D, almost a relief to be helping a charity that focuses so intensely on individual situations, after the band's anti-Iraq war efforts (D was heavily involved in CND's protest campaign). 'I wasn't naive enough to believe that the war would be stopped, we all knew it was a foregone conclusion,' he says. 'But I thought en masse protesting would create an impression that would be indelible, so the next government would have to think twice - which didn't happen. With Reprieve, it's a more containable objective; you're helping individual people, and you can imagine being in their situation. It's human, it's real, you can engage with it.'
D and Grant are wary of publicly talking politics - they know how pompous pop musicians can sound when they do - but once they get going, they find it hard to hold back. They treat me to an entertaining dissection of local government. Sadly, it's nearly all libellous, so I can't repeat it. Some of the printable stuff includes their question as to why Bristol's new buildings all look like 'big Barratt homes' and why the city still doesn't have a music arena for bands to play. After all, Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky created for Bristol a modern musical reputation to rival Manchester's and Liverpool's - so why no great venue? 'It's pathetic,' grumbles Grant.
They also get stuck into the US elections (they're both Obama supporters). Grant is convinced that Hillary will get the nomination - 'There's no way the people with real power will let a black man run for President' - and that McCain will win: 'The Democratic race is a side-show.' D, naturally more optimistic, is hopeful that Obama will win through.
All very interesting, but talk soon moves on to more domestic affairs: to flowers (D has got into gardening), camping, houses and cars (D is learning to drive and has bought a Prius - he's also had solar panels installed, after inquiring about a wind turbine and learning that the resulting energy would be fed back into the National Grid and he would just get a discounted bill). 'That's not the point, is it?' he trumpets. 'I want my own little system, outside the system.' His house is outside Bristol; Grant's is in the city, in Montpelier. 'He's got a great garden,' informs D. 'An urban oasis.' 'With a load of crack addicts outside,' says Grant.
As they talk, it becomes clear that they don't usually chat about such everyday matters; there's a feeling of catching up. Grant is surprised that D's girlfriend had moved in, for instance. Like many musicians, they only discuss music when they're working, plus, they each tend to tinker on different tracks anyway. In the end, this distance is why Massive Attack have endured. It's clear they have loads in common, but so have most bands when they start. The process of being in pop music strains those bonds and very few bands last. Massive Attack have survived over 20 years because, like a good marriage, each partner has outside interests and they give each other space without actually walking away. And, like a good marriage, they only argue when they really, really have to.
It's decided that we'll go out to get some lunch and do some more photos. 'Let's go and get a pint,' says D. The Massive Attack work ethic strikes again. How they ever get anything done is beyond me.
· Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre from Friday 13 June to Sunday 22 June. Information at southbankcentre.co.uk. The Observer is media partner
Trip hop pioneers: Back in the groove
Early years Founders Robert Del Naja (3D), Grant Marshall (Daddy G) and Andrew Vowles (Mushroom) mixed down tempo beats and soulful vocals as the pioneers of trip hop in 1988.
Riding High Blue Lines (1991), the debut album, acclaimed as groundbreaking. Protection (1994) also well received.
Fall-outs and fallow years Mezzanine (1998) and 100th Window (2003) were less popular. Disagreements led to Mushroom leaving in 1998 and Daddy G in 2000.
Back on track After not speaking for three years, 3D and Daddy G have recorded a fifth album and will curate the Meltdown Festival next month.
Katie Toms
Interview with Portishead's Adrian Utley
Sonicstate.com interviewed Portishead's Adrian Utley in his home studio.
Part 1 here
Part 2 here
Part 3 here
Hat tip to the most excellent Music Thing.
Part 1 here
Part 2 here
Part 3 here
Hat tip to the most excellent Music Thing.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! In Bilingual ‘West Side Story’
In the New York Times
July 17, 2008
Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! In Bilingual ‘West Side’
By JULIE BOSMAN
More than 50 years after the musical “West Side Story” had its original Broadway premiere, it is set to return in February in a darker, grittier, bilingual revival, the show’s producers said on Wednesday.
In an element that its director, Arthur Laurents, said would heighten the passion and authenticity of the show, much of the dialogue — both spoken and sung — will be in Spanish.
“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray to the translation.”
Mr. Laurents, the author of the book for “West Side Story” and the director of the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” whose book he also wrote, has vowed to make this revival a more realistic version of the original, a teenage-gang-romance musical modeled after “Romeo and Juliet” and set on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. With music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it was first staged on Broadway, to great critical success, in 1957. Writing in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”
After playing for 732 performances, “West Side Story” was turned into a film starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in 1961, and later revived in 1964 and 1980.
Mr. Laurents still rankles at the mention of the 1980 revival, which he called bland, and the film version, about which he said: “Bogus accents, bogus dialect, bogus costumes. I think it’s also terribly acted.”
Earlier interpretations left the teenage characters appearing too innocent, Mr. Laurents said. “You don’t treat these kids as little darlings, but as what they are,” he said. “They’re all killers, Jets and Sharks. And the piece is really about how love is destroyed by a world of violence and bigotry.”
The idea for a 21st-century revival first came up nearly five years ago, said Kevin McCollum, a producer along with Jeffrey Seller and James L. Nederlander, but after several discussions, it was set aside. “It just wasn’t the right timing,” he said.
Then two years ago Mr. Laurents called. “He got me to the apartment and said, ‘I’ve got it,’ ” Mr. McCollum said. “He really wanted to play with the idea of authenticating the language, and that got us really excited.” (Mr. McCollum and Mr. Seller also produced “In the Heights,” a musical set in Washington Heights and peppered with Spanish phrases.)
Mr. Laurents, who turned 91 on Monday, traced the origin of the new revival to his companion of 52 years, Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006.
Mr. Hatcher was a fluent Spanish speaker, and on a visit to Bogotá, Colombia, saw a staging of “West Side Story” in Spanish.
In that version, Mr. Hatcher reported back to Mr. Laurents, the language had transformed the show: the Sharks were the heroes and the Jets were the villains.
That sparked the idea of incorporating Spanish into a modern revival. “I thought it would be terrific if we could equalize the two gangs somehow,” Mr. Laurents said. “But I had a lot of trouble because I was depending on Tom, who is fluent. And then he died.”
Not long afterward, two of Mr. Laurents’s friends in Buenos Aires told him that they had a “West Side Story” script entirely in Spanish, on which Mr. Hatcher had made handwritten notations. “It was like he was telling me, ‘You must do it,’ ” Mr. Laurents said.
So with the help of a translator, Mr. Laurents began adding Spanish to the original script.
The result is what he calls “bilingual sexual spats” between the characters Anita and Bernardo, and some of the Stephen Sondheim lyrics translated into Spanish. Other elements, like the original choreography by Jerome Robbins, remain unchanged.
Casting for the show has begun and should be completed by mid-September, Mr. McCollum said. The show will play for a four-week engagement at the National Theater in Washington beginning in December.
Mr. Laurents said he intended to cast Hispanic actors in the roles of the Puerto Rican Sharks and particularly the lead role of Maria.
“I’m not about to go slap some dark makeup on her,” Mr. Laurents said. “I think it’s important to have a Latina in the role for a very simple reason — I think they know what it feels like to be an outsider. If they’ve got Puerto Rican blood, they know what prejudice is. If they’ve got any kind of Hispanic blood, they know what prejudice is.”
July 17, 2008
Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! In Bilingual ‘West Side’
By JULIE BOSMAN
More than 50 years after the musical “West Side Story” had its original Broadway premiere, it is set to return in February in a darker, grittier, bilingual revival, the show’s producers said on Wednesday.
In an element that its director, Arthur Laurents, said would heighten the passion and authenticity of the show, much of the dialogue — both spoken and sung — will be in Spanish.
“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray to the translation.”
Mr. Laurents, the author of the book for “West Side Story” and the director of the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” whose book he also wrote, has vowed to make this revival a more realistic version of the original, a teenage-gang-romance musical modeled after “Romeo and Juliet” and set on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. With music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it was first staged on Broadway, to great critical success, in 1957. Writing in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”
After playing for 732 performances, “West Side Story” was turned into a film starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in 1961, and later revived in 1964 and 1980.
Mr. Laurents still rankles at the mention of the 1980 revival, which he called bland, and the film version, about which he said: “Bogus accents, bogus dialect, bogus costumes. I think it’s also terribly acted.”
Earlier interpretations left the teenage characters appearing too innocent, Mr. Laurents said. “You don’t treat these kids as little darlings, but as what they are,” he said. “They’re all killers, Jets and Sharks. And the piece is really about how love is destroyed by a world of violence and bigotry.”
The idea for a 21st-century revival first came up nearly five years ago, said Kevin McCollum, a producer along with Jeffrey Seller and James L. Nederlander, but after several discussions, it was set aside. “It just wasn’t the right timing,” he said.
Then two years ago Mr. Laurents called. “He got me to the apartment and said, ‘I’ve got it,’ ” Mr. McCollum said. “He really wanted to play with the idea of authenticating the language, and that got us really excited.” (Mr. McCollum and Mr. Seller also produced “In the Heights,” a musical set in Washington Heights and peppered with Spanish phrases.)
Mr. Laurents, who turned 91 on Monday, traced the origin of the new revival to his companion of 52 years, Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006.
Mr. Hatcher was a fluent Spanish speaker, and on a visit to Bogotá, Colombia, saw a staging of “West Side Story” in Spanish.
In that version, Mr. Hatcher reported back to Mr. Laurents, the language had transformed the show: the Sharks were the heroes and the Jets were the villains.
That sparked the idea of incorporating Spanish into a modern revival. “I thought it would be terrific if we could equalize the two gangs somehow,” Mr. Laurents said. “But I had a lot of trouble because I was depending on Tom, who is fluent. And then he died.”
Not long afterward, two of Mr. Laurents’s friends in Buenos Aires told him that they had a “West Side Story” script entirely in Spanish, on which Mr. Hatcher had made handwritten notations. “It was like he was telling me, ‘You must do it,’ ” Mr. Laurents said.
So with the help of a translator, Mr. Laurents began adding Spanish to the original script.
The result is what he calls “bilingual sexual spats” between the characters Anita and Bernardo, and some of the Stephen Sondheim lyrics translated into Spanish. Other elements, like the original choreography by Jerome Robbins, remain unchanged.
Casting for the show has begun and should be completed by mid-September, Mr. McCollum said. The show will play for a four-week engagement at the National Theater in Washington beginning in December.
Mr. Laurents said he intended to cast Hispanic actors in the roles of the Puerto Rican Sharks and particularly the lead role of Maria.
“I’m not about to go slap some dark makeup on her,” Mr. Laurents said. “I think it’s important to have a Latina in the role for a very simple reason — I think they know what it feels like to be an outsider. If they’ve got Puerto Rican blood, they know what prejudice is. If they’ve got any kind of Hispanic blood, they know what prejudice is.”
Monday, July 14, 2008
Afropop Worldwide: Cuban Abakuá
From Afropop Worldwide, which includes photographs, sounds, and links.
Ivor Miller 2007
Place and Date: Brooklyn, New York
2007
Interviewer: Ned Sublette
VOICE OF THE LEOPARD: IVOR MILLER talks to NED SUBLETTE
Ned Sublette: I’m talking to Dr. Ivor Miller, Research Fellow in the African Studies Center of Boston University and author of the forthcoming Voice of the Leopard, from University Press of Mississippi in the Fall of 2008. What does Voice of the Leopard mean?
Ivor Miller: The voice of the leopard is the main symbol of the Ekpe society of the Cross River region of Nigeria and Cameroon, which was re-created in colonial Cuba as the Abakuá society. And it’s a symbol in both. Essentially the leopard is a sign of royalty all over Central West Africa and the Calabar zone, and it’s a symbol of their political autonomy. Every village in the Cross River region that has Ekpe has their own way to manifest the voice, which means, “we are independent.”
NS: In Cuba the Abakuá occupies a unique position in the history of the society. Can you give us a sort of thumbnail of what Abakuá has meant in Cuba?
IM: Abakuá is at the foundation of Cuban society. It was founded around the 1830s in Havana by African Ekpe members who had been enslaved and brought over. They reorganized themselves in the cabildos and they would not allow their offspring born in Cuba to join, because of the well-known tensions between the so-called old world and new world people. So eventually they decided to establish a lodge of their offspring, the black Creoles, and they called it Efik Butón, after a settlement in Calabar. To do that they had to create a fundamento [consecrated object], which represented the autonomy of that lodge.
NS: When you say they created a lodge, that’s a word that we associate maybe with the Masons or the Odd Fellows.
IM: The great Cuban scholar Don Fernando Ortiz used to refer to Abakuá as “African masonry,” because there are similarities in the fact that it’s a graded system – there are titles – and they are an independent group of mutual aid. The function of Abakuá was to buy people out of slavery, so Abakuá is known as a force of liberation in Cuban history. And in the wars of [Cuban] independence, representatives of Abakuá lodges interacted with Freemasons – people like Antonio Maceo, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, all the leaders of the Mambí independence army, were Masons – so they’re parallel systems.
NS: What about the aspect of secrecy? The Abakuá is a secret society of men…
IM: Yes. Abakuá is exclusively for men, and there’s a lot of reasons for that we could talk about. But another way of saying a secret society is to say an initiation society. Once one is initiated, one takes oaths about maintaining discretion about what one learns. What they call the esoteric knowledge, the insider’s information, are the secrets. There are secret societies all over the world. The Vatican is a secret society. Whatever happens at the top layers of the U.S. government, those are secrets too. Essentially these secret societies or initiation schools are really schools of learning, and in order to begin to learn, you’ve got to take an oath.
NS: Now these hermetic societies also existed in the Cross River Delta of Africa. How did they function there?
IM: In the Cross River region, Ekpe is the indigenous government. As an example, in order to found a settlement – okay, we want to take my family and move to a new place? We’ve picked a piece of land. The first thing we do is create the Ekpe lodge, and then we create the settlement, because that is the symbol that we are an independent settlement. You can’t come here and do anything you want, you’ve got to deal with Ekpe. It’s the indigenous system. The legal system, the judiciary, the executive branches, are all Ekpe.
NS: In place of a strong centralized government, there were Ekpe lodges throughout the region.
IM: That’s exactly it. Whereas the Yoruba have a centralized system, Ekpe was how a series of autonomous villages could trade and interact in meaningful ways. If one was an Ekpe member in the Cross River region, one could travel anywhere and be safe. Because wherever there was a lodge, you were protected.
NS: So there were offshoots of this system that were transported to Cuba. But unlike the Yoruba system – or santería, or Ifá, or Ocha, or Lucumí, whatever you want to call it – which has gone all over the world now, Abakuá has remained only in Havana and Matanzas province, not even in Oriente in Cuba. Only in these two parts of Cuba and only there in the entire New World. Why is that?
IM: Because the Abakuá have retained what they were given by the Africans with a remarkable orthodoxy. In order to establish a lodge, one has to get the permission of all the elders. There has to be a collective consensus. And that’s part of what makes Abakuá so important. They want to control the morality of their citizens, as it were, of their initiates. And if it starts spreading anywhere, it will be transformed and perhaps used for other means.
NS: So it has been a decision of the elders in Cuba that this not spread.
IM: Exactly.
NS: How did you get involved with studying this, and what is your status vis-à-vis this practice?
IM: I first went to Cuba in 1991 as a student of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional to study dance -- I danced professionally in New York -- and really became interested in Cuba from being in New York and going to toques [Yoruba ceremonies] with Puntilla [Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos]. While there [in Havana] studying the Lucumí [Yoruba] system, in my andanzas [wanderings] in the city, I was introduced to a gentleman [7] who was in his 90s. His grandfather had come over from Calabar. He wanted to tell me the story of this, and he was an incredible storyteller. Andrés Flores was his name. And all the members of his family were members [of Abakuá]. He was not. That gave him certain liberty to tell me the story.
NS: Because an initiate can’t tell the stories.
IM: Or one would run the risk of being castigated.
NS: Well, they’re quite serious about their secrecy within this practice. Can you explain about how the militancy with which this secrecy is maintained?
IM: You have to understand the context within which Abakuá was founded and created: the extreme oppressive society of colonial Havana. Anyone who reads the history knows that the Year of the Lash, 1844, was an extreme repression. Abakuá, in order to survive, have maintained discretion in order to not announce their presence.
NS: So there are things you can talk about and things you can’t talk about.
IM: And in much of the Cuban popular music we’re going to listen to [in the Hip Deep episode in which portions of this interview appear], there is Abakuá language. It can be spoken, because people don’t understand what they’re saying. So in “Ritmo Abakuá” of the Muñequitos de Matanzas, they’re essentially greeting the first lodge in Cuba, Efik Ebutón, they’re greeting it as a way of saying, “we thank God for the birth of Abakuá. We’re members from Matanzas, and we greet Havana.” And this is all in Abakuá language.
NS: And this is recorded in 1956.
IM: It’s the first Abakuá recording from Matanzas, as far as I know.
NS: So if you’re not an initiate, there are sounds you’re allowed to hear, and sounds you’re not allowed to hear. I recorded the Muñequitos de Matanzas, as you know, playing a number called “Abakuá Makánica,” in which they play traditional Abakuá drums. And that’s allowed. But in their ceremonies, there’s a drum you can see that does not make sound.
IM: Exactly. There’s a drum that is called the eribó – the sese eribó, which is a silent drum, it’s symbolic. It represents the mother of Abakuá. This refers to the foundational myth of how Abakuá was perfected, in a place called Usagaré, now known as Isangele in southwestern Cameroon. The story is that a princess went to the river to get some water. She put her ceramic jar in the water, and inadvertently, a fish entered it, and the fish made a roaring sound. She put the jar on her head and she became in effect the first initiate. This is a story to talk about divine creation. She’s the universal mother, and when men are initiated they’re effectively reborn, so as in any other religion, initation in Abakuá is a rebirth, symbolically.
NS: And this story is what Benny Moré is referring to when he sings “En el tiempo de colonia / tiempo de senseribó.” [“In colonial times, times of the senseribó”]
IM: A classic! That’s a classic. Yes, so this is the drum that’s symbolic and it doesn’t make a sound. And why? What is the message there? This is Ekpe philosophy. If you know esoteric secrets, you don’t talk about them. That’s the message in the silent drum.
NS: Now what about the sound? The voice of the leopard is a sound. What is that sound?
IM: In Ekpe they describe it as a mystic sound that emits from the butame, the temple, and only the high levels of society’s leaders know what makes that sound. It’s not known by others. But the sound is the symbol that Ekpe’s in session, and those who are not members should move away, should stay clear.
NS: Do you consider Abakuá a religion? Do you consider it a society? Do you…
IM: Well, Abakuá describe it as a religion. But that’s a very interesting question, because it’s an exclusive thing that not everybody can join. So it’s really a club of prestige that has a very deep spiritual base.
NS: And this is based on a sound.
IM: Mm-hmm…
NS: But it’s a secret sound. It’s a sound that we can’t play on the radio.
IM: Exactly.
NS: Why can’t we play it on the radio?
IM: [pauses] Well, because that might be seen as disrespectful by the leadership. They don’t take this lightly at all. And as a matter of fact, on none of the recordings that I know from either West Africa or Cuba is that sound reproduced.
NS: That sound is never heard outside the sacred region.
IM: Exactly.
NS: And you can’t really talk about it.
IM: Exactly. But the point is that it’s not the vehicle that makes the sound that’s important. It’s the sound that is adored, that is worshipped, that is seen as the voice of God. It’s connecting humans with the divine.
NS: And at the same time, the sound has been evoked frequently in popular music by Abakuá members. It’s not the same sound, but it’s evoked.
IM: Exactly. As you well know, some of the same recordings by Sexteto Habanero in the 20s, there’s a track called “Criolla Carabalí”, we’ll hear some of the bongó drum, the glissade-making.
NS: When the bongosero moistens his finger and slides it across the drumhead, making a friction sound.
IM: It’s a reference.
NS: There are friction drums all over Africa, that make various sounds. One place the sound is referenced, and it’s a unique recording -- could you talk about the importance of Arsenio [Rodríguez]’s recording of Abakuá music?
IM: Well, one of the incredible things about the story of Abakuá is that like other African-derived traditions it’s expressed most fully through artistic means – through popular music, through dance, through theater. The commercial recordings made by Abakuá people and people who love Abakuá, whether they’re members -- or not, like Arsenio – these commercial recordings are important to understand the history of Abakuá. And New York has played a fundamental role in this story. Many Cubans have come to New York throughout history. Ignacio Piñeiro was one. Chano Pozo was another. And Arsenio in New York in 1963 recorded “Canto Abakuá,” a fantastic tune. In it he’s evoking Abakuá, and he’s speaking about the relationship of the Congo, of which [religion] he’s a member, and the Carabalí, which is the base of Abakuá. And it’s a very important track for bringing up the relationship between Congo and Carabalí. And also, at the end, there is an evocation of the voice of the leopard by the bass.
NS: In your work, you did something no one else has done: you made a re-encounter between Cuba and Africa. The Ekpe of Cuba, which began in 1830, has continued all this time, but meanwhile, in the Calabar region, the Ekpe society there has also continued. But there was no contact between Cuba and Calabar during all this time, as far as anyone knows.
IM: I don’t know of any contact, if there was. And this is quite a unique situation, because in the Yoruba case, especially between Yorubaland and Brazil there was a lot of contact and moving back and forth. In terms of Cross River and Cuba, as far as we know, there is none. That’s why it’s extraordinary that Ekpe in Calabar can listen to speech by Abakuá, and music and chanting, and understand it and recognize the rhythm and many of the words.
NS: Now tell me about what you did.
IM: From 1991 until the 21st century I was in Cuba documenting history. Cataloguing when each Abakuá lodge was founded, its name in Abakuá language, et cetera, et cetera. Because I recognized there was an incredible story that had not been told about the migration of African peoples and how their actions helped found Caribbean societies. And in order to prove that, in 2004 I was able to go to Calabar.
I brought some videotapes of Abakuá ceremonies. I brought some recordings of Abakuá music. And I gave a talk at the National Museum in Calabar. And the Ekpe people there were overwhelmed. When I played “Criolla Carabalí,” they freaked out. They got up and strated dancing, and they said, “This is the way our parents used to play.” And they recognized the very specific rhythms that the Cubans were playing as the rhythm of a particular grade. The Ekpe system has nine different grades. One of those grades is called bonkó. Bonkó really represents the universal mother, the myth of the woman I talked about, and this is the rhythm that they recognize in the Cuban music. They’re playing the bonkó rhythm. There happens to be a grade in Cuba called bonkó, which is the talking drum that we hear referred to in a lot of the recordings.
Bonkó enchemiyá is the full name of the drum. And as we know from Joseíto Fernández’s recording, “Así Son Bonkó,” and Arsenio Rodríguez’s “Oigan bonkó / Como se gozan en el barrio,” bonkó has become a word that means truth.
NS: How many times have you been to Calabar?
IM: Three times. I went in the summer of 2004, and I brought materials. I met essentially with all the paramount rulers of Calabar, which has three different groups: the Abakpa, which are also known as the Qua Ejagham, and the Efik, which are [known as] the Efí in Cuba, and the Efut, which are [known as] the Efó in Cuba, so I met with all three of these leaderships.
And it so happens that the leader of one of the lodges – Efé Ekpe, Eyo Ema, and the lodge is also known as Ekoritonkó, which happens to be a lodge in Havana -- the leader of this lodge invited me to come to a ceremony soon after I had showed them all this material. During that night they initiated me. It happened that way – “please come to our ceremony” -- and essentially they recognized the importance of this connection with Cuba, and in order to help me with my research, they initiated me so I could actually go to different settlements and talk about Ekpe, because it’s off limits to non-initiates.
NS: So you haven’t been initiated in Cuba, but you have been in Calabar.
IM: Exactly. So I’m unofficial ambassador of Calabar Ekpe to the Caribbean. After the talk in the National Museum, there were some government representatives there, and they announced that they were going to put their support behind this project for the Third International Ekpe Festival. There’s a festival there every December, to which y’all are invited.
NS: I’m there.
IM: And I was able to go with two Abakuá members – Vicente Sánchez and Román Díaz, who both happened to be from the Ekoritonkó lodge of Havana.
NS: And who both live in New Jersey now.
IM: They’re both professional musicians from Havana that now work in the New York area. It was a very spontaneous visit. You know, Abakuá’s a collective society. To have a full conjunto, a full ensemble of Abakuá, you need about ten people, with the dancers, the drummers, the chanters, and all that. We had two. But they did a beautiful job, and we have some recordings of Román chanting to an audience of about 2,000 in Calabar.
NS: What happened when he chanted?
IM: We came to Calabar in December of 2004, invited by the government of Cross River state for the Third International Ekpe Festival. The day we arrived to the Calabar Cultural Center, there was a huge open space, and at what they call the “high table” in Nigeria, where the important people sit, was the governor of Cross River state and the iyamba of the Eyo Ema lodge Ekoritonkó, who were judging the event as a competition of masked dancers. Masked dancers are another thing shared by Ekpe and Abakuá. They represent ancestors, who are there to make sure that the living conduct the ceremonies in the right way, another part of the orthodoxy we talked about.
So Román Díaz and Vicente Sánchez arrive. There’s about 3,000 people there in a circle, about the size of a football stadium, a hundred-yard circle. And the masked dancers come out one by one and are performing. There is no rehearsal for any of this. Román Díaz is asked to come out. He goes over to the percussion ensemble and gets them in a pace that he likes. Which is very easy, because they’re basically playing the same music as the Abakuá do – the same instruments, fabricated in the same way, the same construction. So Román goes out and he starts chanting the phrase about the foundation of Abakuá in Cameroon: Iya, iya, kondondó. And all of a sudden the crowd starts responding, two to three thousand people. Usually an Abakuá ensemble is ten people, but Román is going out there essentially alone, with Vicente on the bonkó. And the entire crowd responds. And then using, of course, Cuban methods, he calls out the masked dancer, who responds to him and enters the competition. He picks up a drum which he uses as the symbolic drum to call out, because the drum is the symbol of authority, so the drum calls out the masked dancer, and he brings it to the high table, just like the others had done. The crowd goes wild, and for everyone there it’s the confirmation that the Abakuá is obviously an extension of their own culture. Iya, iya, kondondó is related to the myth of the woman who goes to the river. Iya is the fish. The fish who was an ancestor, who came back to bring the divine voice. In Efik iya is fish. In Abakuá iya is fish.
NS: What does kondondó mean?
IM: It means arrival. The people understood what he was saying, and they responded. Unrehearsed. Very powerful.
NS: So what then happened in terms of your experience in Calabar with the Abakuá?
IM: Essentially what I’m trying to do as a historian, as a scholar, is facilitate this conversation. Because the first thing is to confirm that this cultural migration actually happened. The Cubans have had no contact with Calabar since the 1830s. They know this language and they’re told it comes from somewhere. But there’s doubt, if you don’t have concrete information, so I’m trying to share information, very much in the way that Pierre Verger did between Yorubaland and Brazil. And the Calabar people are very happy about this, because all of a sudden they have an international dimension to their culture, which they never knew about. Something they’re very proud of. I think this encounter is strenghtening the historical awareness of both groups, and it’s strengthening their practice.
NS: Let’s talk about some of the music we’re going to hear in this program.
IM: There are some wonderful field recordings done through the years. Harold Courlander went to Cuba in the 40s and recorded some beautiful stuff by Alberto Zayas, an important rumbero who had his own group in the 50s, an Abakuá man.
NS: The first person to record rumba in Cuba, in fact. Before the Muñequitos.
IM: That’s right, Alberto Zayas, “El Vive Bien.” So Courlander did a field recording, and then in the 60s, or maybe it was ’59 or ’62, Argeliers León recorded Víctor Herrera. Víctor Herrera had a folklore troupe called Efí Yawaremo – it’s an Abakuá term – and they did in the first-ever Abakuá performance in the National Theater. So he recorded the chant, Iya, iya, kondondó.
Essentially the Abakuá tradition is epic poetry. It’s Homeric in that way. The artists who are chanting it are drawn from an epic tradition, and they’re telling the story of the mythic past, which they believe to be their authentic history. And they are re-creating it in the present, so every time there’s an initiation, they’re recreating the original initiation in Usagaré.
NS: You were telling me about a recording that you believe is the most important, greatest Abakuá recording ever done.
IM: In 2001, a group of Abakuá masters – people who in the barrios performed the ceremonies and, really, the vanguard of the culture -- got together in a studio and they recorded an album called Ibiono. Ibiono is an Abakuá word for music with swing. Each track is to a different territory in Cross River, and they’re laying down the basic elements of their mythic history. They start with the Efó group, who are the Efuts in Cameroon, then they move to the Efí, who are the Efik of Calabar, and they end with Orú, who are likely the Uruan people of the Cross River region. All of them have Ekpe, and all of them interacted to create what’s known as the modern Ekpe system -- a cosmopolitan form of Ekpe.
NS: This is basically an album of poetry.
IM: And it’s an essential album for any student, any scholar, or any practitioner of this cultural system. The importance of this album is that it confirms all the Abakuá chants that have been recorded throughout the 20th century in little fragments. This pulls them all together into one epic narrative. And by the way, this album is only a small piece of what could be [done], what’s out there.
NS: These fragments have been dropped into popular music over the course of Cuban music history since the beginning of recording in Cuba. You made the observation to me when we were talking earlier that whatever the important style of recording Cuban music was in any given era, Abakuá was always present.
IM: As you well know, there’s no recordings from the 19th century, but the titles of habaneras and danzones have Abakuá terms in them.
NS: For example?
IM: [20] Miguel Faílde was using Abakuá rhythms – “andante ñáñigo” [ñáñigo: an Abakuá practitioner]. There was a danza by Enrique Peña, who was Antonio Maceo’s cornet player during the invasion of the west [of Cuba, in 1895]. He composed a danza in 6/8 rhythm called “El ñáñigo” that starts off with the trumpet call to arms of the military band. Abakuá musicians tell me the tune is definitely Abakuá.
NS: Let’s talk about Ignacio Piñeiro.
IM: “Los Cantares del Abakuá” by Ignacio Piñeiro – Piñeiro was an Abakuá man. He was a member of Efori Enkomo, the parent lodge to Muñanga. He was fantastically important in the development of the son. He had a coro de clave [19th-century style of ambulatory choral group] called Los Roncos at the turn of the 1900s. He played with María Teresa Vera in her Sexteto Occidental.
NS: And they recorded “Los Cantares del Abakuá.” Can you tell me about that?
IM: Ignacio Piñeiro is known as the poet of the son. He’s supposed to have composed about 400 sones. A prolific person. A lot of his compositions are in the costumbrista genre – meaning, he was describing the customs of the era, what was happening in the neighborhood. Things he overheard people talking about, or what happened last night at the Abakuá plante, the Abakuá ceremony. “Los Cantares del Abakuá” is talking about the police invasion of an Abakuá plante, because Abakuá, being a symbol of liberty for the black population, being an organized black society, was repressed throughout Cuban history.
NS: And was considered witchcraft by the ruling class.
IM: Everything that the nation was held to be, Abakuá was not. Progress, et cetera. And so Abakuá are essentially the boogeymen of Cuban history. And so “Los Cantares del Abakuá” describes the police invading a plante and how even in spite of that the plante continues, because the people and their culture cannot be stopped.
NS: What is a plante?
IM: A plante is an Abakuá ceremony that happens in the temples and the patios. And we talked about how in the Cross River the Ekpe lodges represent an independent community, and so the temple grounds of Abakuá are off limits to anyone who’s not a member. So it’s a very sacred space, and not anyone can just go there.
NS: So when the Cuban police came to an Abakuá plante…
IM: Well, as I said, the Abakuá have historically been the boogeymen of Cuba, and they’re described as criminals throughout Cuban history, especially the colonial period. So the police thought there was criminal activity happening, they wanted to get inside the temple, and they were not allowed to, so there were conflicts about that. Piñeiro’s describing one of these, and how in spite of the repression, the culture continues. And for me, the important lyric in this is: “En cuanto suena el bonkó, todo el mundo se emociona” -- when the bonkó drum sounds, everyone is moved. This is a very poetic way of talking about the importance of Abakuá music in commercial recordings in Cuba. The Abakuá clave, when it’s heard, people get excited, because it represents their capacity to be autonomous people on their own terms. It’s a symbol of liberation, and so forth.
NS: So, 1928 – Septeto Habanero, “Criolla Carabalí” – what gives?
IM: The composition “Criolla Carabalí” evokes the union of tribes, territories and people through the adoration of Ekpe. There’s a phrase in this track that says, “aba íreme efí, aba íreme efó, bongó itá.” That is, it doesn’t matter if you’re from the Efí tribe or the Efó, our adoration of the Ekpe makes us one. So this 1928 recording is essentially describing the function of Ekpe in Cross River.
NS: But it’s a Cuban son, released commercially on Victor.
IM: Exactly. So this is part of my proposition, that the narratives left by Africans in Cuba are useful to understand African history. And also they’re describing, of course, the Cuban context, because there are lineages of Efí, Efó, and Orú. Each is considered a different territory in the Cross River, and they’re talking about, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, we’re all one in the drum. Because the drum is a universal mother, and we’re reborn as a brother. In Abakuá they say yeniká. It’s like saying ekobio, it’s brother. It means “brother of the same mother,” literally.
NS: Let’s talk about Chano Pozo and Abakuá.
IM: Chano Pozo, one of the great composers of Cuban music in the early 20th century. He came to New York in 1947, ended up playing with Dizzy Gillespie and transforming the sound of bebop music in that era. And a couple of months before Chano met Dizzy, he recorded a very important Abakuá track. As you stated in your book, it’s the first real recording of rumbas de solar. This track is called “Abasí,” which is the prime mover, the supreme being. “Abasí” is God almighty. This track has an incredible swing in the rhythm. Oh my lord, it’s just a beautiful piece. Essentially Chano is evoking an Abakuá ceremony. It’s all in Abakuá language. You start off by greeting the astros – the stars, the moon, the sun, the ancestors, and then you greet the living leadership in all their hierarchies, and then you commence. He introduces himself as a member of the Muñanga lodge of Havana. And there’s a point where he starts to bring out the íreme, who are the representatives of the ancestors, the masked ancestors. And to do that he says, cle-cle-cle-cle-cle, which means, come, come forward, come forward.
Now this track influenced a lot of people in New York at the time. And one of them was Machito. In the 1949 version of “Tangá,” Machito is riffing on Chano Pozo’s cle-cle-cle-cle-cle, when this mambo-tanga begins, and he’s inviting the dancers to come out to the ballroom and get down. And he says, “Cle-cle-cle-cle-cle-cle-cle” – a wonderful example of the influence of Abakuá on the popular music of the day.
NS: What’s the influence of Abakuá on rumba?
IM: It’s profound. I believe that the influence of Abakuá and rumba begins at the foundation of Abakuá itself -- let’s say, in the mid-1800s -- when the Africans were in their cabildos, their nation groups, performing. Down the street in Matanzas there was a Congo cabildo, and on the other block was a Carabalí cabildo, and they would hear their music and they would interact, they’re part of the same community. That fusion, I believe, is how the rumba emerged as a so-called secular form, but all the people involved in it are definitely initiates in all the Cuban traditions, and they’re referring to it each time they play.
The Muñequitos are the best example of that. They’re an all-Abakuá troupe, as well as practitioners of Congo and Lucumí, and their messages are all about the importance of these traditions to the well-being of their communities. And they’re doing it in coded languages, but that’s the message. They’re talking about their philosophical system, and how it’s been a heartbeat for the communities in Cuba.
NS: You identified Agustín Gutiérrez, going back to “Criolla Carabalí” for a minute. We were talking about the referencing of the sacred sound in the bongó playing in son. Agustín Gutiérrez is, I think, one of the key figures in Cuban percussion, and often overlooked.
IM: I’ve heard some speculation that Agustín Gutiérrez came from Santiago de Cuba. I don’t know if that’s rumor or what. There’s also speculation that this sound, this glissade, actually came from Santiago de Cuba with the son already, because there are Carabalí cabildos in Santiago as well. So, whereas Abakuá was only established in Matanzas and Havana in northwestern Cuba, Carabalí culture was throughout the island in the cabildos, and that’s something that really hasn’t been studied yet, but I can tell you an anecdote that Fernando Ortiz got me started on. During the wars of independence, known Abakuá were captured and they were sent overseas, to Ceuta and to Fernando Pó, along with a lot of other people, like Masons and any rebel. And it was in Ceuta that Carabalí members and Abakuá people from Havana and from Santiago could meet and interact, and therein may be part of the history of the son and the story of that sound.
NS: Wow.
IM: So that’s a bomb I’m dropping. It’s unconfirmed, but it’s quite possible.
NS: And ironically, Abakuá were sent to Fernando Pó, which was right across from where Abakuá originally came from in Africa.
IM: Yeah, Fernando Pó is a really incredible story. From the 1820s to the 1840s, the British were centered there, and it was their anti-slavery base. They were trying to stop slavery in Calabar and in that whole Biafra region. Ekpe members were interacting with the British in Fernando Pó, so there was Ekpe going to Fernando Pó also. The Cubans started coming in the 1860s, because part of the Spanish project was to make Fernando Pó another plantation colony. At one point it was called the “African Cuba,” because there were so many Cubans being sent there. [Note: Cigars made from tobacco grown on Fernando Po plantations run by Cuban deportees won the Amsterdam Prize in 1878 ]. And of course the white Cubans didn’t want to go, so they were getting black laborers to go work the tobacco crops in Fernando Pó.
So again, it’s very under-researched, but there is definitely an Abakuá resonance, and perhaps they were meeting with Ekpe there. And some of those people came back. Most died. But many Cubans were able to come back, and if there was a meeting of Abakuá from Havana and Carabalí from Santiago, they each came back having learned more from the other folks.
NS: You identified Agustín Gutiérrez as an Abakuá member.
IM: I learned this from the director of Septeto Habanero in the 90s, because they know the story of their conjunto very well. And yes, he was a member. As I said, when I played this track to Ekpe people in Calabar, they got so excited, started dancing, they responded to this viscerally.
NS: Let’s talk about Tito Rodríguez and “Abanekue.”
IM: So Chano Pozo arrives. He records “Abasí.” With only Cuban musicians, by the way. It’s very interesting to listen to “Manteca” and the Afro-Cuban drum suite that he does with Dizzy Gillespie, because he’s so articulate when he’s chanting Abakuá in “Abasí,” and if you compare that to his chanting with Dizzy, he’s diminishing it, he’s become very discreet. He’s sort of turning it into a scat. Because he knows they’re not going to be able to understand him, and he’s also being respectful of the tradition by not articulating it among people who aren’t members.
So the work of Dizzy and Chano changes jazz history, essentially, and in 1950 Machito does another track called “Negro Ñañamboro.” I consider it to be in the dance instruction genre. You know, usually they’re teaching you how to do the latest step? Here he’s describing the person who catches the spirit. He’s mounted by an orisha, so the shirt is taken off, the shoes are taken off, and the hat is taken off, and he’s saying, “Negro ñañamboro, arrollando como es.” He’s dancing like it should be done. But ñañamboro is – there are two Abakuá phrases, ñaña is the masked dancer, and Embemoro is an Abakuá lodge. So it’s a playful use of Abakuá themes, but he’s evoking ritual in the mambo context in the Palladium. Kinda nice.
In the same year, Tito Rodríguez does “Abanekue,” which is a beautiful Abakuá-inspired dance tune. The title “Abanekue” means “initiate.” Some people in Cuba say obonekue, but the term is also abanekue, which is what the Efik call it. This is the earliest recording of Abakuá material by a Puerto Rican that I know.
NS: How did Tito Rodríguez, who was a Puerto Rican, learn about this?
IM: I wish I knew. That’s a great question. It’s an expression of the interaction of the musicians from all over the Spanish Caribbean in New York, and their mutual support and enthusiasm.
After Tito Rodríguez did “Abanekue” in 1950, there’s been some amazing recordings by Puerto Rican bands. El Gran Combo did “Írimo,” which is íreme, the masked dancer. And it’s a wonderful dance tune. This is popular music. And they’re talking about the íreme coming out, the representative of the ancestors, and interacting with the bonkó. Now what’s amazing for this – talk about the Abakuá influence in the rumba. That’s exactly what happens in the rumba – the caller and the drum bring out the dancer, and they begin to interact. It’s the same structure. Then another important track is La Sonora Ponceña, who did “Congo Carabalí,” which is a fantastic Abakuá-inspired track, which I hope you can play.
NS: Can you talk about the role of Abakuá in Puerto Rican culture in general? They have that famous word…
IM: Which is?
NS: Chévere.
IM: Chévere, qué chévere, qué chévere. I was just in Venezuela, where chévere is in every other sentence as a term of affirmation. What’s so incredible about using music as a way to understand Abakuá -- the perspective we get is totally different from what’s in the official histories of Abakuá as criminals, as something negative, like, “watch out, kids, don’t go out, the Abakuá will get you.” Because chévere is a positive term of affirmation. To be chévere is to be, that’s great, it’s positive, what could be better. It’s an Abakuá title, they say Mokongo machévere, because Mokongo was a valiant warrior who, thanks to him, the society was created in Africa. And the term Mokongo machévere is in almost all the Abakuá recordings that we’ve mentioned, somewhere. Usually it’s the last phrase – Mokongo machévere. It’s in the Muñequitos “Ritmo Abakuá.”
NS: Let’s talk about Mongo Santamaría, a figure who just gets bigger as time passes.
IM: In the 50s in New York, the mambo was happening, and the involvement of Puerto Ricans cannot be underestimated. It’s tremendous. Tito Rodríguez, Tito Puente. When Mongo came on the scene, Tito Puente hired him in his band – another example of Puerto Ricans supporting and sustaining this culture. Mongo ends up recording a very important Abakuá track called “Bríkamo” in the 1950s. I think around 1958 Mongo records “Bríkamo.” And Bríkamo is a Carabalí tradition in Matanzas, it’s sustained by the Calle family. They’re very famous rumberos.
NS: Co-founders of the Muñequitos.
IM: Exactly. And Bríkamo – the Abakuá language is called Bríkamo, and Bríkamo is understood to be a reference to Usagaré, the place where the woman got the fish in the river and Ekpe was perfected. So Mongo lays this track down with Willie Bobo and Francisco Aguabella in 1958.
NS: Now what about Julito Collazo?
IM: To talk about Julito Collazo, we’ve gotta talk about [choreographer] Katharine Dunham, a very important figure in the Caribbean cultural scene in New York in the 1940s and 50s, and onwards. Katharine Dunham went to Cuba, where she hired some Abakuá musicians for her international troupe to tour the world, and she did Abakuá-inspired pieces. One was called “El ñáñigo.” Katharine Dunham hired Julito Collazo, and brought him to New York, where he became a foundational figure in the culture of santería, in the culture of batá music…
NS: …and in the culture of palo…
IM: Exactly. And Julito taught a lot of people. René López, who organized the Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Nuevayorquino, worked with Julito Collazo. Mongo and Julito went on to record a very important track in the 70s – I think, 1976, called “Ubane,” with Justo Betancourt. “Ubane” uses jazz harmonies, and it’s an Abakuá track, praising an Abakuá lineage, Efí Obane. It just so happens that Oban is a very important Ekpe village of the Ejagham people in the Cross River region, so again, when I play this for people in the Cross River they get it immediately, and they’re amazed that their town is remembered 200 years later in Cuba.
NS: Ivor Miller, thank you so much for sharing your deep experience with us today. I wish we could go on longer because this is obviously endless, but this has given me a lot to think about.
IM: Well, thank you. This is really part of a process, and it’s been a real privilege for me to share this information and be part of this historic connection. And the Ekpe festival in Calabar is ongoing. It’s meant to be an annual event, and details are posted up on Afrocubaweb, so folks can go there and check that out.
NS: www.afrocubaweb.com
Ivor Miller 2007
Place and Date: Brooklyn, New York
2007
Interviewer: Ned Sublette
VOICE OF THE LEOPARD: IVOR MILLER talks to NED SUBLETTE
Ned Sublette: I’m talking to Dr. Ivor Miller, Research Fellow in the African Studies Center of Boston University and author of the forthcoming Voice of the Leopard, from University Press of Mississippi in the Fall of 2008. What does Voice of the Leopard mean?
Ivor Miller: The voice of the leopard is the main symbol of the Ekpe society of the Cross River region of Nigeria and Cameroon, which was re-created in colonial Cuba as the Abakuá society. And it’s a symbol in both. Essentially the leopard is a sign of royalty all over Central West Africa and the Calabar zone, and it’s a symbol of their political autonomy. Every village in the Cross River region that has Ekpe has their own way to manifest the voice, which means, “we are independent.”
NS: In Cuba the Abakuá occupies a unique position in the history of the society. Can you give us a sort of thumbnail of what Abakuá has meant in Cuba?
IM: Abakuá is at the foundation of Cuban society. It was founded around the 1830s in Havana by African Ekpe members who had been enslaved and brought over. They reorganized themselves in the cabildos and they would not allow their offspring born in Cuba to join, because of the well-known tensions between the so-called old world and new world people. So eventually they decided to establish a lodge of their offspring, the black Creoles, and they called it Efik Butón, after a settlement in Calabar. To do that they had to create a fundamento [consecrated object], which represented the autonomy of that lodge.
NS: When you say they created a lodge, that’s a word that we associate maybe with the Masons or the Odd Fellows.
IM: The great Cuban scholar Don Fernando Ortiz used to refer to Abakuá as “African masonry,” because there are similarities in the fact that it’s a graded system – there are titles – and they are an independent group of mutual aid. The function of Abakuá was to buy people out of slavery, so Abakuá is known as a force of liberation in Cuban history. And in the wars of [Cuban] independence, representatives of Abakuá lodges interacted with Freemasons – people like Antonio Maceo, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, all the leaders of the Mambí independence army, were Masons – so they’re parallel systems.
NS: What about the aspect of secrecy? The Abakuá is a secret society of men…
IM: Yes. Abakuá is exclusively for men, and there’s a lot of reasons for that we could talk about. But another way of saying a secret society is to say an initiation society. Once one is initiated, one takes oaths about maintaining discretion about what one learns. What they call the esoteric knowledge, the insider’s information, are the secrets. There are secret societies all over the world. The Vatican is a secret society. Whatever happens at the top layers of the U.S. government, those are secrets too. Essentially these secret societies or initiation schools are really schools of learning, and in order to begin to learn, you’ve got to take an oath.
NS: Now these hermetic societies also existed in the Cross River Delta of Africa. How did they function there?
IM: In the Cross River region, Ekpe is the indigenous government. As an example, in order to found a settlement – okay, we want to take my family and move to a new place? We’ve picked a piece of land. The first thing we do is create the Ekpe lodge, and then we create the settlement, because that is the symbol that we are an independent settlement. You can’t come here and do anything you want, you’ve got to deal with Ekpe. It’s the indigenous system. The legal system, the judiciary, the executive branches, are all Ekpe.
NS: In place of a strong centralized government, there were Ekpe lodges throughout the region.
IM: That’s exactly it. Whereas the Yoruba have a centralized system, Ekpe was how a series of autonomous villages could trade and interact in meaningful ways. If one was an Ekpe member in the Cross River region, one could travel anywhere and be safe. Because wherever there was a lodge, you were protected.
NS: So there were offshoots of this system that were transported to Cuba. But unlike the Yoruba system – or santería, or Ifá, or Ocha, or Lucumí, whatever you want to call it – which has gone all over the world now, Abakuá has remained only in Havana and Matanzas province, not even in Oriente in Cuba. Only in these two parts of Cuba and only there in the entire New World. Why is that?
IM: Because the Abakuá have retained what they were given by the Africans with a remarkable orthodoxy. In order to establish a lodge, one has to get the permission of all the elders. There has to be a collective consensus. And that’s part of what makes Abakuá so important. They want to control the morality of their citizens, as it were, of their initiates. And if it starts spreading anywhere, it will be transformed and perhaps used for other means.
NS: So it has been a decision of the elders in Cuba that this not spread.
IM: Exactly.
NS: How did you get involved with studying this, and what is your status vis-à-vis this practice?
IM: I first went to Cuba in 1991 as a student of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional to study dance -- I danced professionally in New York -- and really became interested in Cuba from being in New York and going to toques [Yoruba ceremonies] with Puntilla [Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos]. While there [in Havana] studying the Lucumí [Yoruba] system, in my andanzas [wanderings] in the city, I was introduced to a gentleman [7] who was in his 90s. His grandfather had come over from Calabar. He wanted to tell me the story of this, and he was an incredible storyteller. Andrés Flores was his name. And all the members of his family were members [of Abakuá]. He was not. That gave him certain liberty to tell me the story.
NS: Because an initiate can’t tell the stories.
IM: Or one would run the risk of being castigated.
NS: Well, they’re quite serious about their secrecy within this practice. Can you explain about how the militancy with which this secrecy is maintained?
IM: You have to understand the context within which Abakuá was founded and created: the extreme oppressive society of colonial Havana. Anyone who reads the history knows that the Year of the Lash, 1844, was an extreme repression. Abakuá, in order to survive, have maintained discretion in order to not announce their presence.
NS: So there are things you can talk about and things you can’t talk about.
IM: And in much of the Cuban popular music we’re going to listen to [in the Hip Deep episode in which portions of this interview appear], there is Abakuá language. It can be spoken, because people don’t understand what they’re saying. So in “Ritmo Abakuá” of the Muñequitos de Matanzas, they’re essentially greeting the first lodge in Cuba, Efik Ebutón, they’re greeting it as a way of saying, “we thank God for the birth of Abakuá. We’re members from Matanzas, and we greet Havana.” And this is all in Abakuá language.
NS: And this is recorded in 1956.
IM: It’s the first Abakuá recording from Matanzas, as far as I know.
NS: So if you’re not an initiate, there are sounds you’re allowed to hear, and sounds you’re not allowed to hear. I recorded the Muñequitos de Matanzas, as you know, playing a number called “Abakuá Makánica,” in which they play traditional Abakuá drums. And that’s allowed. But in their ceremonies, there’s a drum you can see that does not make sound.
IM: Exactly. There’s a drum that is called the eribó – the sese eribó, which is a silent drum, it’s symbolic. It represents the mother of Abakuá. This refers to the foundational myth of how Abakuá was perfected, in a place called Usagaré, now known as Isangele in southwestern Cameroon. The story is that a princess went to the river to get some water. She put her ceramic jar in the water, and inadvertently, a fish entered it, and the fish made a roaring sound. She put the jar on her head and she became in effect the first initiate. This is a story to talk about divine creation. She’s the universal mother, and when men are initiated they’re effectively reborn, so as in any other religion, initation in Abakuá is a rebirth, symbolically.
NS: And this story is what Benny Moré is referring to when he sings “En el tiempo de colonia / tiempo de senseribó.” [“In colonial times, times of the senseribó”]
IM: A classic! That’s a classic. Yes, so this is the drum that’s symbolic and it doesn’t make a sound. And why? What is the message there? This is Ekpe philosophy. If you know esoteric secrets, you don’t talk about them. That’s the message in the silent drum.
NS: Now what about the sound? The voice of the leopard is a sound. What is that sound?
IM: In Ekpe they describe it as a mystic sound that emits from the butame, the temple, and only the high levels of society’s leaders know what makes that sound. It’s not known by others. But the sound is the symbol that Ekpe’s in session, and those who are not members should move away, should stay clear.
NS: Do you consider Abakuá a religion? Do you consider it a society? Do you…
IM: Well, Abakuá describe it as a religion. But that’s a very interesting question, because it’s an exclusive thing that not everybody can join. So it’s really a club of prestige that has a very deep spiritual base.
NS: And this is based on a sound.
IM: Mm-hmm…
NS: But it’s a secret sound. It’s a sound that we can’t play on the radio.
IM: Exactly.
NS: Why can’t we play it on the radio?
IM: [pauses] Well, because that might be seen as disrespectful by the leadership. They don’t take this lightly at all. And as a matter of fact, on none of the recordings that I know from either West Africa or Cuba is that sound reproduced.
NS: That sound is never heard outside the sacred region.
IM: Exactly.
NS: And you can’t really talk about it.
IM: Exactly. But the point is that it’s not the vehicle that makes the sound that’s important. It’s the sound that is adored, that is worshipped, that is seen as the voice of God. It’s connecting humans with the divine.
NS: And at the same time, the sound has been evoked frequently in popular music by Abakuá members. It’s not the same sound, but it’s evoked.
IM: Exactly. As you well know, some of the same recordings by Sexteto Habanero in the 20s, there’s a track called “Criolla Carabalí”, we’ll hear some of the bongó drum, the glissade-making.
NS: When the bongosero moistens his finger and slides it across the drumhead, making a friction sound.
IM: It’s a reference.
NS: There are friction drums all over Africa, that make various sounds. One place the sound is referenced, and it’s a unique recording -- could you talk about the importance of Arsenio [Rodríguez]’s recording of Abakuá music?
IM: Well, one of the incredible things about the story of Abakuá is that like other African-derived traditions it’s expressed most fully through artistic means – through popular music, through dance, through theater. The commercial recordings made by Abakuá people and people who love Abakuá, whether they’re members -- or not, like Arsenio – these commercial recordings are important to understand the history of Abakuá. And New York has played a fundamental role in this story. Many Cubans have come to New York throughout history. Ignacio Piñeiro was one. Chano Pozo was another. And Arsenio in New York in 1963 recorded “Canto Abakuá,” a fantastic tune. In it he’s evoking Abakuá, and he’s speaking about the relationship of the Congo, of which [religion] he’s a member, and the Carabalí, which is the base of Abakuá. And it’s a very important track for bringing up the relationship between Congo and Carabalí. And also, at the end, there is an evocation of the voice of the leopard by the bass.
NS: In your work, you did something no one else has done: you made a re-encounter between Cuba and Africa. The Ekpe of Cuba, which began in 1830, has continued all this time, but meanwhile, in the Calabar region, the Ekpe society there has also continued. But there was no contact between Cuba and Calabar during all this time, as far as anyone knows.
IM: I don’t know of any contact, if there was. And this is quite a unique situation, because in the Yoruba case, especially between Yorubaland and Brazil there was a lot of contact and moving back and forth. In terms of Cross River and Cuba, as far as we know, there is none. That’s why it’s extraordinary that Ekpe in Calabar can listen to speech by Abakuá, and music and chanting, and understand it and recognize the rhythm and many of the words.
NS: Now tell me about what you did.
IM: From 1991 until the 21st century I was in Cuba documenting history. Cataloguing when each Abakuá lodge was founded, its name in Abakuá language, et cetera, et cetera. Because I recognized there was an incredible story that had not been told about the migration of African peoples and how their actions helped found Caribbean societies. And in order to prove that, in 2004 I was able to go to Calabar.
I brought some videotapes of Abakuá ceremonies. I brought some recordings of Abakuá music. And I gave a talk at the National Museum in Calabar. And the Ekpe people there were overwhelmed. When I played “Criolla Carabalí,” they freaked out. They got up and strated dancing, and they said, “This is the way our parents used to play.” And they recognized the very specific rhythms that the Cubans were playing as the rhythm of a particular grade. The Ekpe system has nine different grades. One of those grades is called bonkó. Bonkó really represents the universal mother, the myth of the woman I talked about, and this is the rhythm that they recognize in the Cuban music. They’re playing the bonkó rhythm. There happens to be a grade in Cuba called bonkó, which is the talking drum that we hear referred to in a lot of the recordings.
Bonkó enchemiyá is the full name of the drum. And as we know from Joseíto Fernández’s recording, “Así Son Bonkó,” and Arsenio Rodríguez’s “Oigan bonkó / Como se gozan en el barrio,” bonkó has become a word that means truth.
NS: How many times have you been to Calabar?
IM: Three times. I went in the summer of 2004, and I brought materials. I met essentially with all the paramount rulers of Calabar, which has three different groups: the Abakpa, which are also known as the Qua Ejagham, and the Efik, which are [known as] the Efí in Cuba, and the Efut, which are [known as] the Efó in Cuba, so I met with all three of these leaderships.
And it so happens that the leader of one of the lodges – Efé Ekpe, Eyo Ema, and the lodge is also known as Ekoritonkó, which happens to be a lodge in Havana -- the leader of this lodge invited me to come to a ceremony soon after I had showed them all this material. During that night they initiated me. It happened that way – “please come to our ceremony” -- and essentially they recognized the importance of this connection with Cuba, and in order to help me with my research, they initiated me so I could actually go to different settlements and talk about Ekpe, because it’s off limits to non-initiates.
NS: So you haven’t been initiated in Cuba, but you have been in Calabar.
IM: Exactly. So I’m unofficial ambassador of Calabar Ekpe to the Caribbean. After the talk in the National Museum, there were some government representatives there, and they announced that they were going to put their support behind this project for the Third International Ekpe Festival. There’s a festival there every December, to which y’all are invited.
NS: I’m there.
IM: And I was able to go with two Abakuá members – Vicente Sánchez and Román Díaz, who both happened to be from the Ekoritonkó lodge of Havana.
NS: And who both live in New Jersey now.
IM: They’re both professional musicians from Havana that now work in the New York area. It was a very spontaneous visit. You know, Abakuá’s a collective society. To have a full conjunto, a full ensemble of Abakuá, you need about ten people, with the dancers, the drummers, the chanters, and all that. We had two. But they did a beautiful job, and we have some recordings of Román chanting to an audience of about 2,000 in Calabar.
NS: What happened when he chanted?
IM: We came to Calabar in December of 2004, invited by the government of Cross River state for the Third International Ekpe Festival. The day we arrived to the Calabar Cultural Center, there was a huge open space, and at what they call the “high table” in Nigeria, where the important people sit, was the governor of Cross River state and the iyamba of the Eyo Ema lodge Ekoritonkó, who were judging the event as a competition of masked dancers. Masked dancers are another thing shared by Ekpe and Abakuá. They represent ancestors, who are there to make sure that the living conduct the ceremonies in the right way, another part of the orthodoxy we talked about.
So Román Díaz and Vicente Sánchez arrive. There’s about 3,000 people there in a circle, about the size of a football stadium, a hundred-yard circle. And the masked dancers come out one by one and are performing. There is no rehearsal for any of this. Román Díaz is asked to come out. He goes over to the percussion ensemble and gets them in a pace that he likes. Which is very easy, because they’re basically playing the same music as the Abakuá do – the same instruments, fabricated in the same way, the same construction. So Román goes out and he starts chanting the phrase about the foundation of Abakuá in Cameroon: Iya, iya, kondondó. And all of a sudden the crowd starts responding, two to three thousand people. Usually an Abakuá ensemble is ten people, but Román is going out there essentially alone, with Vicente on the bonkó. And the entire crowd responds. And then using, of course, Cuban methods, he calls out the masked dancer, who responds to him and enters the competition. He picks up a drum which he uses as the symbolic drum to call out, because the drum is the symbol of authority, so the drum calls out the masked dancer, and he brings it to the high table, just like the others had done. The crowd goes wild, and for everyone there it’s the confirmation that the Abakuá is obviously an extension of their own culture. Iya, iya, kondondó is related to the myth of the woman who goes to the river. Iya is the fish. The fish who was an ancestor, who came back to bring the divine voice. In Efik iya is fish. In Abakuá iya is fish.
NS: What does kondondó mean?
IM: It means arrival. The people understood what he was saying, and they responded. Unrehearsed. Very powerful.
NS: So what then happened in terms of your experience in Calabar with the Abakuá?
IM: Essentially what I’m trying to do as a historian, as a scholar, is facilitate this conversation. Because the first thing is to confirm that this cultural migration actually happened. The Cubans have had no contact with Calabar since the 1830s. They know this language and they’re told it comes from somewhere. But there’s doubt, if you don’t have concrete information, so I’m trying to share information, very much in the way that Pierre Verger did between Yorubaland and Brazil. And the Calabar people are very happy about this, because all of a sudden they have an international dimension to their culture, which they never knew about. Something they’re very proud of. I think this encounter is strenghtening the historical awareness of both groups, and it’s strengthening their practice.
NS: Let’s talk about some of the music we’re going to hear in this program.
IM: There are some wonderful field recordings done through the years. Harold Courlander went to Cuba in the 40s and recorded some beautiful stuff by Alberto Zayas, an important rumbero who had his own group in the 50s, an Abakuá man.
NS: The first person to record rumba in Cuba, in fact. Before the Muñequitos.
IM: That’s right, Alberto Zayas, “El Vive Bien.” So Courlander did a field recording, and then in the 60s, or maybe it was ’59 or ’62, Argeliers León recorded Víctor Herrera. Víctor Herrera had a folklore troupe called Efí Yawaremo – it’s an Abakuá term – and they did in the first-ever Abakuá performance in the National Theater. So he recorded the chant, Iya, iya, kondondó.
Essentially the Abakuá tradition is epic poetry. It’s Homeric in that way. The artists who are chanting it are drawn from an epic tradition, and they’re telling the story of the mythic past, which they believe to be their authentic history. And they are re-creating it in the present, so every time there’s an initiation, they’re recreating the original initiation in Usagaré.
NS: You were telling me about a recording that you believe is the most important, greatest Abakuá recording ever done.
IM: In 2001, a group of Abakuá masters – people who in the barrios performed the ceremonies and, really, the vanguard of the culture -- got together in a studio and they recorded an album called Ibiono. Ibiono is an Abakuá word for music with swing. Each track is to a different territory in Cross River, and they’re laying down the basic elements of their mythic history. They start with the Efó group, who are the Efuts in Cameroon, then they move to the Efí, who are the Efik of Calabar, and they end with Orú, who are likely the Uruan people of the Cross River region. All of them have Ekpe, and all of them interacted to create what’s known as the modern Ekpe system -- a cosmopolitan form of Ekpe.
NS: This is basically an album of poetry.
IM: And it’s an essential album for any student, any scholar, or any practitioner of this cultural system. The importance of this album is that it confirms all the Abakuá chants that have been recorded throughout the 20th century in little fragments. This pulls them all together into one epic narrative. And by the way, this album is only a small piece of what could be [done], what’s out there.
NS: These fragments have been dropped into popular music over the course of Cuban music history since the beginning of recording in Cuba. You made the observation to me when we were talking earlier that whatever the important style of recording Cuban music was in any given era, Abakuá was always present.
IM: As you well know, there’s no recordings from the 19th century, but the titles of habaneras and danzones have Abakuá terms in them.
NS: For example?
IM: [20] Miguel Faílde was using Abakuá rhythms – “andante ñáñigo” [ñáñigo: an Abakuá practitioner]. There was a danza by Enrique Peña, who was Antonio Maceo’s cornet player during the invasion of the west [of Cuba, in 1895]. He composed a danza in 6/8 rhythm called “El ñáñigo” that starts off with the trumpet call to arms of the military band. Abakuá musicians tell me the tune is definitely Abakuá.
NS: Let’s talk about Ignacio Piñeiro.
IM: “Los Cantares del Abakuá” by Ignacio Piñeiro – Piñeiro was an Abakuá man. He was a member of Efori Enkomo, the parent lodge to Muñanga. He was fantastically important in the development of the son. He had a coro de clave [19th-century style of ambulatory choral group] called Los Roncos at the turn of the 1900s. He played with María Teresa Vera in her Sexteto Occidental.
NS: And they recorded “Los Cantares del Abakuá.” Can you tell me about that?
IM: Ignacio Piñeiro is known as the poet of the son. He’s supposed to have composed about 400 sones. A prolific person. A lot of his compositions are in the costumbrista genre – meaning, he was describing the customs of the era, what was happening in the neighborhood. Things he overheard people talking about, or what happened last night at the Abakuá plante, the Abakuá ceremony. “Los Cantares del Abakuá” is talking about the police invasion of an Abakuá plante, because Abakuá, being a symbol of liberty for the black population, being an organized black society, was repressed throughout Cuban history.
NS: And was considered witchcraft by the ruling class.
IM: Everything that the nation was held to be, Abakuá was not. Progress, et cetera. And so Abakuá are essentially the boogeymen of Cuban history. And so “Los Cantares del Abakuá” describes the police invading a plante and how even in spite of that the plante continues, because the people and their culture cannot be stopped.
NS: What is a plante?
IM: A plante is an Abakuá ceremony that happens in the temples and the patios. And we talked about how in the Cross River the Ekpe lodges represent an independent community, and so the temple grounds of Abakuá are off limits to anyone who’s not a member. So it’s a very sacred space, and not anyone can just go there.
NS: So when the Cuban police came to an Abakuá plante…
IM: Well, as I said, the Abakuá have historically been the boogeymen of Cuba, and they’re described as criminals throughout Cuban history, especially the colonial period. So the police thought there was criminal activity happening, they wanted to get inside the temple, and they were not allowed to, so there were conflicts about that. Piñeiro’s describing one of these, and how in spite of the repression, the culture continues. And for me, the important lyric in this is: “En cuanto suena el bonkó, todo el mundo se emociona” -- when the bonkó drum sounds, everyone is moved. This is a very poetic way of talking about the importance of Abakuá music in commercial recordings in Cuba. The Abakuá clave, when it’s heard, people get excited, because it represents their capacity to be autonomous people on their own terms. It’s a symbol of liberation, and so forth.
NS: So, 1928 – Septeto Habanero, “Criolla Carabalí” – what gives?
IM: The composition “Criolla Carabalí” evokes the union of tribes, territories and people through the adoration of Ekpe. There’s a phrase in this track that says, “aba íreme efí, aba íreme efó, bongó itá.” That is, it doesn’t matter if you’re from the Efí tribe or the Efó, our adoration of the Ekpe makes us one. So this 1928 recording is essentially describing the function of Ekpe in Cross River.
NS: But it’s a Cuban son, released commercially on Victor.
IM: Exactly. So this is part of my proposition, that the narratives left by Africans in Cuba are useful to understand African history. And also they’re describing, of course, the Cuban context, because there are lineages of Efí, Efó, and Orú. Each is considered a different territory in the Cross River, and they’re talking about, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, we’re all one in the drum. Because the drum is a universal mother, and we’re reborn as a brother. In Abakuá they say yeniká. It’s like saying ekobio, it’s brother. It means “brother of the same mother,” literally.
NS: Let’s talk about Chano Pozo and Abakuá.
IM: Chano Pozo, one of the great composers of Cuban music in the early 20th century. He came to New York in 1947, ended up playing with Dizzy Gillespie and transforming the sound of bebop music in that era. And a couple of months before Chano met Dizzy, he recorded a very important Abakuá track. As you stated in your book, it’s the first real recording of rumbas de solar. This track is called “Abasí,” which is the prime mover, the supreme being. “Abasí” is God almighty. This track has an incredible swing in the rhythm. Oh my lord, it’s just a beautiful piece. Essentially Chano is evoking an Abakuá ceremony. It’s all in Abakuá language. You start off by greeting the astros – the stars, the moon, the sun, the ancestors, and then you greet the living leadership in all their hierarchies, and then you commence. He introduces himself as a member of the Muñanga lodge of Havana. And there’s a point where he starts to bring out the íreme, who are the representatives of the ancestors, the masked ancestors. And to do that he says, cle-cle-cle-cle-cle, which means, come, come forward, come forward.
Now this track influenced a lot of people in New York at the time. And one of them was Machito. In the 1949 version of “Tangá,” Machito is riffing on Chano Pozo’s cle-cle-cle-cle-cle, when this mambo-tanga begins, and he’s inviting the dancers to come out to the ballroom and get down. And he says, “Cle-cle-cle-cle-cle-cle-cle” – a wonderful example of the influence of Abakuá on the popular music of the day.
NS: What’s the influence of Abakuá on rumba?
IM: It’s profound. I believe that the influence of Abakuá and rumba begins at the foundation of Abakuá itself -- let’s say, in the mid-1800s -- when the Africans were in their cabildos, their nation groups, performing. Down the street in Matanzas there was a Congo cabildo, and on the other block was a Carabalí cabildo, and they would hear their music and they would interact, they’re part of the same community. That fusion, I believe, is how the rumba emerged as a so-called secular form, but all the people involved in it are definitely initiates in all the Cuban traditions, and they’re referring to it each time they play.
The Muñequitos are the best example of that. They’re an all-Abakuá troupe, as well as practitioners of Congo and Lucumí, and their messages are all about the importance of these traditions to the well-being of their communities. And they’re doing it in coded languages, but that’s the message. They’re talking about their philosophical system, and how it’s been a heartbeat for the communities in Cuba.
NS: You identified Agustín Gutiérrez, going back to “Criolla Carabalí” for a minute. We were talking about the referencing of the sacred sound in the bongó playing in son. Agustín Gutiérrez is, I think, one of the key figures in Cuban percussion, and often overlooked.
IM: I’ve heard some speculation that Agustín Gutiérrez came from Santiago de Cuba. I don’t know if that’s rumor or what. There’s also speculation that this sound, this glissade, actually came from Santiago de Cuba with the son already, because there are Carabalí cabildos in Santiago as well. So, whereas Abakuá was only established in Matanzas and Havana in northwestern Cuba, Carabalí culture was throughout the island in the cabildos, and that’s something that really hasn’t been studied yet, but I can tell you an anecdote that Fernando Ortiz got me started on. During the wars of independence, known Abakuá were captured and they were sent overseas, to Ceuta and to Fernando Pó, along with a lot of other people, like Masons and any rebel. And it was in Ceuta that Carabalí members and Abakuá people from Havana and from Santiago could meet and interact, and therein may be part of the history of the son and the story of that sound.
NS: Wow.
IM: So that’s a bomb I’m dropping. It’s unconfirmed, but it’s quite possible.
NS: And ironically, Abakuá were sent to Fernando Pó, which was right across from where Abakuá originally came from in Africa.
IM: Yeah, Fernando Pó is a really incredible story. From the 1820s to the 1840s, the British were centered there, and it was their anti-slavery base. They were trying to stop slavery in Calabar and in that whole Biafra region. Ekpe members were interacting with the British in Fernando Pó, so there was Ekpe going to Fernando Pó also. The Cubans started coming in the 1860s, because part of the Spanish project was to make Fernando Pó another plantation colony. At one point it was called the “African Cuba,” because there were so many Cubans being sent there. [Note: Cigars made from tobacco grown on Fernando Po plantations run by Cuban deportees won the Amsterdam Prize in 1878 ]. And of course the white Cubans didn’t want to go, so they were getting black laborers to go work the tobacco crops in Fernando Pó.
So again, it’s very under-researched, but there is definitely an Abakuá resonance, and perhaps they were meeting with Ekpe there. And some of those people came back. Most died. But many Cubans were able to come back, and if there was a meeting of Abakuá from Havana and Carabalí from Santiago, they each came back having learned more from the other folks.
NS: You identified Agustín Gutiérrez as an Abakuá member.
IM: I learned this from the director of Septeto Habanero in the 90s, because they know the story of their conjunto very well. And yes, he was a member. As I said, when I played this track to Ekpe people in Calabar, they got so excited, started dancing, they responded to this viscerally.
NS: Let’s talk about Tito Rodríguez and “Abanekue.”
IM: So Chano Pozo arrives. He records “Abasí.” With only Cuban musicians, by the way. It’s very interesting to listen to “Manteca” and the Afro-Cuban drum suite that he does with Dizzy Gillespie, because he’s so articulate when he’s chanting Abakuá in “Abasí,” and if you compare that to his chanting with Dizzy, he’s diminishing it, he’s become very discreet. He’s sort of turning it into a scat. Because he knows they’re not going to be able to understand him, and he’s also being respectful of the tradition by not articulating it among people who aren’t members.
So the work of Dizzy and Chano changes jazz history, essentially, and in 1950 Machito does another track called “Negro Ñañamboro.” I consider it to be in the dance instruction genre. You know, usually they’re teaching you how to do the latest step? Here he’s describing the person who catches the spirit. He’s mounted by an orisha, so the shirt is taken off, the shoes are taken off, and the hat is taken off, and he’s saying, “Negro ñañamboro, arrollando como es.” He’s dancing like it should be done. But ñañamboro is – there are two Abakuá phrases, ñaña is the masked dancer, and Embemoro is an Abakuá lodge. So it’s a playful use of Abakuá themes, but he’s evoking ritual in the mambo context in the Palladium. Kinda nice.
In the same year, Tito Rodríguez does “Abanekue,” which is a beautiful Abakuá-inspired dance tune. The title “Abanekue” means “initiate.” Some people in Cuba say obonekue, but the term is also abanekue, which is what the Efik call it. This is the earliest recording of Abakuá material by a Puerto Rican that I know.
NS: How did Tito Rodríguez, who was a Puerto Rican, learn about this?
IM: I wish I knew. That’s a great question. It’s an expression of the interaction of the musicians from all over the Spanish Caribbean in New York, and their mutual support and enthusiasm.
After Tito Rodríguez did “Abanekue” in 1950, there’s been some amazing recordings by Puerto Rican bands. El Gran Combo did “Írimo,” which is íreme, the masked dancer. And it’s a wonderful dance tune. This is popular music. And they’re talking about the íreme coming out, the representative of the ancestors, and interacting with the bonkó. Now what’s amazing for this – talk about the Abakuá influence in the rumba. That’s exactly what happens in the rumba – the caller and the drum bring out the dancer, and they begin to interact. It’s the same structure. Then another important track is La Sonora Ponceña, who did “Congo Carabalí,” which is a fantastic Abakuá-inspired track, which I hope you can play.
NS: Can you talk about the role of Abakuá in Puerto Rican culture in general? They have that famous word…
IM: Which is?
NS: Chévere.
IM: Chévere, qué chévere, qué chévere. I was just in Venezuela, where chévere is in every other sentence as a term of affirmation. What’s so incredible about using music as a way to understand Abakuá -- the perspective we get is totally different from what’s in the official histories of Abakuá as criminals, as something negative, like, “watch out, kids, don’t go out, the Abakuá will get you.” Because chévere is a positive term of affirmation. To be chévere is to be, that’s great, it’s positive, what could be better. It’s an Abakuá title, they say Mokongo machévere, because Mokongo was a valiant warrior who, thanks to him, the society was created in Africa. And the term Mokongo machévere is in almost all the Abakuá recordings that we’ve mentioned, somewhere. Usually it’s the last phrase – Mokongo machévere. It’s in the Muñequitos “Ritmo Abakuá.”
NS: Let’s talk about Mongo Santamaría, a figure who just gets bigger as time passes.
IM: In the 50s in New York, the mambo was happening, and the involvement of Puerto Ricans cannot be underestimated. It’s tremendous. Tito Rodríguez, Tito Puente. When Mongo came on the scene, Tito Puente hired him in his band – another example of Puerto Ricans supporting and sustaining this culture. Mongo ends up recording a very important Abakuá track called “Bríkamo” in the 1950s. I think around 1958 Mongo records “Bríkamo.” And Bríkamo is a Carabalí tradition in Matanzas, it’s sustained by the Calle family. They’re very famous rumberos.
NS: Co-founders of the Muñequitos.
IM: Exactly. And Bríkamo – the Abakuá language is called Bríkamo, and Bríkamo is understood to be a reference to Usagaré, the place where the woman got the fish in the river and Ekpe was perfected. So Mongo lays this track down with Willie Bobo and Francisco Aguabella in 1958.
NS: Now what about Julito Collazo?
IM: To talk about Julito Collazo, we’ve gotta talk about [choreographer] Katharine Dunham, a very important figure in the Caribbean cultural scene in New York in the 1940s and 50s, and onwards. Katharine Dunham went to Cuba, where she hired some Abakuá musicians for her international troupe to tour the world, and she did Abakuá-inspired pieces. One was called “El ñáñigo.” Katharine Dunham hired Julito Collazo, and brought him to New York, where he became a foundational figure in the culture of santería, in the culture of batá music…
NS: …and in the culture of palo…
IM: Exactly. And Julito taught a lot of people. René López, who organized the Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Nuevayorquino, worked with Julito Collazo. Mongo and Julito went on to record a very important track in the 70s – I think, 1976, called “Ubane,” with Justo Betancourt. “Ubane” uses jazz harmonies, and it’s an Abakuá track, praising an Abakuá lineage, Efí Obane. It just so happens that Oban is a very important Ekpe village of the Ejagham people in the Cross River region, so again, when I play this for people in the Cross River they get it immediately, and they’re amazed that their town is remembered 200 years later in Cuba.
NS: Ivor Miller, thank you so much for sharing your deep experience with us today. I wish we could go on longer because this is obviously endless, but this has given me a lot to think about.
IM: Well, thank you. This is really part of a process, and it’s been a real privilege for me to share this information and be part of this historic connection. And the Ekpe festival in Calabar is ongoing. It’s meant to be an annual event, and details are posted up on Afrocubaweb, so folks can go there and check that out.
NS: www.afrocubaweb.com
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Just the Way He Is (Billy Joel)
Nice New York Times profile on Billy Joel.
July 13, 2008
Music
Just the Way He Is
By DAN BARRY
SAG HARBOR, N.Y.
SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more.
The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit and the guilt from having conceived such a hollow ambition. The restlessness, angst and ache of the striver. The Long Island of it all.
Of course the meeting of Shea muckety-mucks to discuss who should sing this farewell probably lasted as long as it took to say: Billy Joel.
Those of you who detest Billy Joel, you self-assured music critics and self-appointed cultural arbiters, you who have Reagan-era flashbacks of being stuck in summertime traffic in a car with only AM radio and hearing “Uptown Girl” or “Pressure” or “Tell Her About It” no matter what button you push and traffic still isn’t moving — consider this:
When tickets went on sale several months ago for an absolutely final Shea concert, starring Mr. Joel and taking place this Wednesday, more than 50,000 were sold in 48 minutes; a sellout. Promoters were so, um, touched by this response that they added a final, we mean it this time, absolutely final show for Friday; those tickets sold out in 46 minutes.
That’s a lot of Brendas and Eddies buying tickets. Not bad for a 59-year-old piano player who hasn’t released an album of new pop songs in 15 years.
A few weeks ago, during a sound check just hours before another sold-out Billy Joel concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in eastern Connecticut, the drummer tested his drums, the saxophone player his sax. Then a short, stocky man in a T-shirt and baseball cap limped up the steps and gimped over to the piano, looking every bit the road-battered stagehand making one last check for Mr. Joel.
He sat down, turned his cap around, propped his coffee mug on the piano — oh, the boss ain’t gonna like that — and started fluttering with the keys. A medley of opening strains to old Billy Joel hits echoed through the empty arena, then segued into a little of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto.” Satisfied, the man collected his mug and hobbled offstage to have a cigarette.
Two hours later, this same balding, gray-haired man — Himself, of course — sat before the same piano, in a dark blazer and blue jeans but still looking just as short and stocky. As 10,000 people rose to their feet, a not so angry, not so young, but energetic as hell Billy Joel ripped into the first of two dozen songs, most of them written before the births of the women worshiping him from the front rows.
And here’s the thing. He gets it. “I’m just this shlubby guy who plays the piano,” he says later.
He knows that save for those large, please-don’t-hurt-me eyes, he looks nothing like the bushy-haired young man communing with a white mask on the cover of “The Stranger,” the album that launched him into the stratosphere, now being released in a 30th-anniversary deluxe package. (What happened to the 25th anniversary?) Nothing like the baby-faced entertainer asserting in old video loops playing in the casino gift shop that he didn’t start the fire — a fire that, post-9/11, seems almost innocent.
While Bruce Springsteen has stalled the aging process through blessed genes or some Faustian bargain, Mr. Joel looks like every heartbreak, bad review, car crash and attendant tabloid dig has exacted a physical toll, so much so that if those adoring young women were to encounter him at the mall, he says, “they wouldn’t look twice at me.”
But he clearly understands this; he even seizes upon it to mock the myth of the ageless, unapproachable rock star. “I’m from Long Island; I’m not going to delude myself,” he says. “I know what I look like. And I want them to know that I know how absurd all this is.”
He lets them know by often announcing the release dates — “This next song came out in 1977” — as if to suggest both the song’s endurance and a disbelief that he still gets paid to sing it. And he lets them know by poking fun at himself. During this particular Mohegan Sun concert, he recalled a tabloid photograph many years ago of him on the beach, reaching up to hold hands with the tall model Elle Macpherson.
“I looked like Bubbles the Chimp,” he told the audience.
One could argue that Mr. Joel can afford to be so self-deprecating. According to the Recording Industry Association of America he is ranked sixth among the top-selling artists of all time, behind the Beatles and Elvis Presley but ahead of Elton John and Barbra Streisand. He has the financial wherewithal to surprise his wife, the cookbook author and television correspondent Katie Lee Joel, with the darnedest thinking-of-you gift: a house in the Hamptons worth roughly $16 million (not to be confused with other multimillion-dollar properties he owns, including an estate in Oyster Bay).
Sitting in another of his homes, this one facing his boat basin in Sag Harbor and large enough so that his collection of vintage motorcycles takes up little space, Mr. Joel says he knows what I am thinking, since I too am from the lower-middle-class middle of Long Island, having grown up 15 miles from Hicksville, his hometown. “I know: rich bastard,” he says. “I used to feel awkward about it, but I shrugged it off. It’s all luck and sweat. But I earned it — though I can’t justify the amounts.”
Mr. Joel often expresses an opinion or emotion, then almost immediately holds that opinion or emotion up for analysis, as though running it through some internal truth check. He expresses pride in his work but doesn’t want to brag. He makes crazy money but isn’t saying he’s worth it. He mocks himself before someone else gets the chance.
If you’re tired of hearing “Just the Way You Are,” well, he’s tired of playing it. (“It’s a wedding song,” he says. “I also feel hypocritical. I divorced the woman I wrote it for.”) If you wince when you hear “Honesty,” well, so does he, on the inside. (“You hypocrite,” he says he thinks to himself. “Since when are you Mr. Sincerity?”)
And if he doesn’t sing “Uptown Girl,” he mimics what you’re thinking with a slight rise in his voice: “He’s probably mad at Christie.” In fact it has nothing to do with Christie Brinkley, his second ex-wife, but with the lost ability to hit the very high notes with consistency.
He may be one of the most successful performers in the world, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an extraordinarily gifted musician who can move from rock to ballad to soulful doo-wop, who can capture with a few spare words the dreams and disappointments of clerks and secretaries rocking their lives away on the Long Island Rail Road.
But he acts as though he still worries what the guys standing outside some 7-Eleven in Hicksville might say, because the worst that they can say is:
He forgot where he came from. He’s full of it. A fake.
Mr. Joel is occasionally dismissed as inauthentic, as more of a Tin Pan Alley jinglemeister than a rock musician. While he says the question of authenticity is contrived, he defends himself by resurrecting a couple of pet conspiracy theories. First, he plays piano, suspect instrument of the rich, rather than guitar, revered instrument of the poor. And second, he comes from Long Island — and really, the thought goes, what hard-knocks artistry could possibly emerge from the land of suburban tracts?
The truth is, if rock-star authenticity means having endured pain and tribulation, self-created and otherwise, then Billy Joel sits in the V.I.P. room.
His Jewish grandparents fled Europe to evade the Nazis, leaving behind a successful business. He was 8 when his parents split up and his father returned to Europe. His mother worked as a bookkeeper, paying a few bucks a week for her gifted son’s piano lessons. He took up boxing to answer the bullies who teased him about playing the piano; he’ll gladly show you the unevenness of his damaged nose. He didn’t graduate from high school because he was already a working musician, helping his mother pay bills by performing in bars and clubs from Mineola to Montauk.
Along the way he identified and teased out certain themes about Long Island, his world. He cites a few as he sits in his Sag Harbor home, sipping coffee: how the city that our parents escaped became the first place we wanted to go; how we Long Islanders have an inherent inferiority complex; how we use ridicule and sarcasm to show affection.
“Everything was testing, testing, testing,” he says. “Testing your manhood, testing your humor — really, testing your friendship.”
He attempted suicide when he was 21 and spent three weeks in a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric unit, where he says his time with the profoundly troubled gave him perspective. “I’d go up to the nurse’s window and say, ‘Hey, I’m O.K., but these other people are really crazy,’ ” he recalls. “They’d just hand me my Thorazine.”
He made it big, really big, then lost money and his trust in some close advisers. He made back his money and more, smashed up cars and motorcycles, and married for a third time, in 2004, to Katie Lee, a woman more than 30 years his junior. A few months later he went into rehab.
“I realized I was still drinking too much,” he says. “And I wanted to fix it.”
All this has given deeper resonance to his lyrics, many of them written during his precocious youth. When asked which of his songs make him think, Ah, at least I got that one right, he immediately cites two: “Vienna” (1978), a celebration of a life’s worth at every age, and “Summer, Highland Falls” (1976), a meditation on emotional extremes. His back and forth between sadness and euphoria may have led to effective songwriting over the years, he says, but he now strives toward the more comfortable middle ground of contentment.
There was a time when he would read a bad review aloud onstage, fulminate and dramatically rip up the article to the cheers of an audience that “most of the time didn’t know what I was talking about,” he says. Now a bad review doesn’t ruin his life. “I think that was a Long Island thing,” he says. “Someone would take a swipe, and I felt compelled to swing back.”
There was a time when he resented his signature song, “Piano Man,” when he simply refused to sing about its Paul, the real-estate novelist, and Davy, forever in the Navy. Now he accepts his role as patron saint of all those who provide wallpaper music in open obscurity, like the slumped man playing for the early-bird crowd at a Sag Harbor restaurant just around the corner.
“I made peace with it,” he says — so much so that the song now often closes his concerts.
None of this should suggest that Mr. Joel has achieved a constant state of inner peace. “When I’m low, I’m very low, and when I’m euphoric, I’m very euphoric,” he says. “Which is why I seek contentment. And I wish I was less discontent.”
These days Mr. Joel works on original instrumental compositions, preferring what he calls a more abstract form of expression. Still, he continues to perform in concert, singing songs he has sung 1,000 times, 10,000 times.
Why?
Because he can. Because it’s the greatest job in the world. And, he says, “Because people still want to see me do this.”
They do, because they get it too. The Brendas and Eddies of yesterday, who long ago “bought a couple of paintings from Sears,” and the Brendas and Eddies of today, buying their wall decorations at Target. Those who moved out and wish they hadn’t; those who didn’t move out and wish they had. Those who didn’t start the fire but lived through it.
A few nights from now they will file into a doomed stadium that will be remembered as much for its tragicomedies as for its triumphs. They will fill those uncomfortable seats. And when a short, stocky, bald man appears onstage, they will roar in recognition.
July 13, 2008
Music
Just the Way He Is
By DAN BARRY
SAG HARBOR, N.Y.
SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more.
The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit and the guilt from having conceived such a hollow ambition. The restlessness, angst and ache of the striver. The Long Island of it all.
Of course the meeting of Shea muckety-mucks to discuss who should sing this farewell probably lasted as long as it took to say: Billy Joel.
Those of you who detest Billy Joel, you self-assured music critics and self-appointed cultural arbiters, you who have Reagan-era flashbacks of being stuck in summertime traffic in a car with only AM radio and hearing “Uptown Girl” or “Pressure” or “Tell Her About It” no matter what button you push and traffic still isn’t moving — consider this:
When tickets went on sale several months ago for an absolutely final Shea concert, starring Mr. Joel and taking place this Wednesday, more than 50,000 were sold in 48 minutes; a sellout. Promoters were so, um, touched by this response that they added a final, we mean it this time, absolutely final show for Friday; those tickets sold out in 46 minutes.
That’s a lot of Brendas and Eddies buying tickets. Not bad for a 59-year-old piano player who hasn’t released an album of new pop songs in 15 years.
A few weeks ago, during a sound check just hours before another sold-out Billy Joel concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in eastern Connecticut, the drummer tested his drums, the saxophone player his sax. Then a short, stocky man in a T-shirt and baseball cap limped up the steps and gimped over to the piano, looking every bit the road-battered stagehand making one last check for Mr. Joel.
He sat down, turned his cap around, propped his coffee mug on the piano — oh, the boss ain’t gonna like that — and started fluttering with the keys. A medley of opening strains to old Billy Joel hits echoed through the empty arena, then segued into a little of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto.” Satisfied, the man collected his mug and hobbled offstage to have a cigarette.
Two hours later, this same balding, gray-haired man — Himself, of course — sat before the same piano, in a dark blazer and blue jeans but still looking just as short and stocky. As 10,000 people rose to their feet, a not so angry, not so young, but energetic as hell Billy Joel ripped into the first of two dozen songs, most of them written before the births of the women worshiping him from the front rows.
And here’s the thing. He gets it. “I’m just this shlubby guy who plays the piano,” he says later.
He knows that save for those large, please-don’t-hurt-me eyes, he looks nothing like the bushy-haired young man communing with a white mask on the cover of “The Stranger,” the album that launched him into the stratosphere, now being released in a 30th-anniversary deluxe package. (What happened to the 25th anniversary?) Nothing like the baby-faced entertainer asserting in old video loops playing in the casino gift shop that he didn’t start the fire — a fire that, post-9/11, seems almost innocent.
While Bruce Springsteen has stalled the aging process through blessed genes or some Faustian bargain, Mr. Joel looks like every heartbreak, bad review, car crash and attendant tabloid dig has exacted a physical toll, so much so that if those adoring young women were to encounter him at the mall, he says, “they wouldn’t look twice at me.”
But he clearly understands this; he even seizes upon it to mock the myth of the ageless, unapproachable rock star. “I’m from Long Island; I’m not going to delude myself,” he says. “I know what I look like. And I want them to know that I know how absurd all this is.”
He lets them know by often announcing the release dates — “This next song came out in 1977” — as if to suggest both the song’s endurance and a disbelief that he still gets paid to sing it. And he lets them know by poking fun at himself. During this particular Mohegan Sun concert, he recalled a tabloid photograph many years ago of him on the beach, reaching up to hold hands with the tall model Elle Macpherson.
“I looked like Bubbles the Chimp,” he told the audience.
One could argue that Mr. Joel can afford to be so self-deprecating. According to the Recording Industry Association of America he is ranked sixth among the top-selling artists of all time, behind the Beatles and Elvis Presley but ahead of Elton John and Barbra Streisand. He has the financial wherewithal to surprise his wife, the cookbook author and television correspondent Katie Lee Joel, with the darnedest thinking-of-you gift: a house in the Hamptons worth roughly $16 million (not to be confused with other multimillion-dollar properties he owns, including an estate in Oyster Bay).
Sitting in another of his homes, this one facing his boat basin in Sag Harbor and large enough so that his collection of vintage motorcycles takes up little space, Mr. Joel says he knows what I am thinking, since I too am from the lower-middle-class middle of Long Island, having grown up 15 miles from Hicksville, his hometown. “I know: rich bastard,” he says. “I used to feel awkward about it, but I shrugged it off. It’s all luck and sweat. But I earned it — though I can’t justify the amounts.”
Mr. Joel often expresses an opinion or emotion, then almost immediately holds that opinion or emotion up for analysis, as though running it through some internal truth check. He expresses pride in his work but doesn’t want to brag. He makes crazy money but isn’t saying he’s worth it. He mocks himself before someone else gets the chance.
If you’re tired of hearing “Just the Way You Are,” well, he’s tired of playing it. (“It’s a wedding song,” he says. “I also feel hypocritical. I divorced the woman I wrote it for.”) If you wince when you hear “Honesty,” well, so does he, on the inside. (“You hypocrite,” he says he thinks to himself. “Since when are you Mr. Sincerity?”)
And if he doesn’t sing “Uptown Girl,” he mimics what you’re thinking with a slight rise in his voice: “He’s probably mad at Christie.” In fact it has nothing to do with Christie Brinkley, his second ex-wife, but with the lost ability to hit the very high notes with consistency.
He may be one of the most successful performers in the world, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an extraordinarily gifted musician who can move from rock to ballad to soulful doo-wop, who can capture with a few spare words the dreams and disappointments of clerks and secretaries rocking their lives away on the Long Island Rail Road.
But he acts as though he still worries what the guys standing outside some 7-Eleven in Hicksville might say, because the worst that they can say is:
He forgot where he came from. He’s full of it. A fake.
Mr. Joel is occasionally dismissed as inauthentic, as more of a Tin Pan Alley jinglemeister than a rock musician. While he says the question of authenticity is contrived, he defends himself by resurrecting a couple of pet conspiracy theories. First, he plays piano, suspect instrument of the rich, rather than guitar, revered instrument of the poor. And second, he comes from Long Island — and really, the thought goes, what hard-knocks artistry could possibly emerge from the land of suburban tracts?
The truth is, if rock-star authenticity means having endured pain and tribulation, self-created and otherwise, then Billy Joel sits in the V.I.P. room.
His Jewish grandparents fled Europe to evade the Nazis, leaving behind a successful business. He was 8 when his parents split up and his father returned to Europe. His mother worked as a bookkeeper, paying a few bucks a week for her gifted son’s piano lessons. He took up boxing to answer the bullies who teased him about playing the piano; he’ll gladly show you the unevenness of his damaged nose. He didn’t graduate from high school because he was already a working musician, helping his mother pay bills by performing in bars and clubs from Mineola to Montauk.
Along the way he identified and teased out certain themes about Long Island, his world. He cites a few as he sits in his Sag Harbor home, sipping coffee: how the city that our parents escaped became the first place we wanted to go; how we Long Islanders have an inherent inferiority complex; how we use ridicule and sarcasm to show affection.
“Everything was testing, testing, testing,” he says. “Testing your manhood, testing your humor — really, testing your friendship.”
He attempted suicide when he was 21 and spent three weeks in a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric unit, where he says his time with the profoundly troubled gave him perspective. “I’d go up to the nurse’s window and say, ‘Hey, I’m O.K., but these other people are really crazy,’ ” he recalls. “They’d just hand me my Thorazine.”
He made it big, really big, then lost money and his trust in some close advisers. He made back his money and more, smashed up cars and motorcycles, and married for a third time, in 2004, to Katie Lee, a woman more than 30 years his junior. A few months later he went into rehab.
“I realized I was still drinking too much,” he says. “And I wanted to fix it.”
All this has given deeper resonance to his lyrics, many of them written during his precocious youth. When asked which of his songs make him think, Ah, at least I got that one right, he immediately cites two: “Vienna” (1978), a celebration of a life’s worth at every age, and “Summer, Highland Falls” (1976), a meditation on emotional extremes. His back and forth between sadness and euphoria may have led to effective songwriting over the years, he says, but he now strives toward the more comfortable middle ground of contentment.
There was a time when he would read a bad review aloud onstage, fulminate and dramatically rip up the article to the cheers of an audience that “most of the time didn’t know what I was talking about,” he says. Now a bad review doesn’t ruin his life. “I think that was a Long Island thing,” he says. “Someone would take a swipe, and I felt compelled to swing back.”
There was a time when he resented his signature song, “Piano Man,” when he simply refused to sing about its Paul, the real-estate novelist, and Davy, forever in the Navy. Now he accepts his role as patron saint of all those who provide wallpaper music in open obscurity, like the slumped man playing for the early-bird crowd at a Sag Harbor restaurant just around the corner.
“I made peace with it,” he says — so much so that the song now often closes his concerts.
None of this should suggest that Mr. Joel has achieved a constant state of inner peace. “When I’m low, I’m very low, and when I’m euphoric, I’m very euphoric,” he says. “Which is why I seek contentment. And I wish I was less discontent.”
These days Mr. Joel works on original instrumental compositions, preferring what he calls a more abstract form of expression. Still, he continues to perform in concert, singing songs he has sung 1,000 times, 10,000 times.
Why?
Because he can. Because it’s the greatest job in the world. And, he says, “Because people still want to see me do this.”
They do, because they get it too. The Brendas and Eddies of yesterday, who long ago “bought a couple of paintings from Sears,” and the Brendas and Eddies of today, buying their wall decorations at Target. Those who moved out and wish they hadn’t; those who didn’t move out and wish they had. Those who didn’t start the fire but lived through it.
A few nights from now they will file into a doomed stadium that will be remembered as much for its tragicomedies as for its triumphs. They will fill those uncomfortable seats. And when a short, stocky, bald man appears onstage, they will roar in recognition.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Police halt 'mooning' of trains in Laguna Niguel after a crowd of 8,000 gathers
LA Times
Police halt 'mooning' of trains in Laguna Niguel after a crowd of 8,000 gathers
Some bared more than their bottoms, the Orange County Sheriff's Department says.
By David Haldane
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
7:58 PM PDT, July 12, 2008
Police were called out to break up the annual "mooning" of Amtrak trains in Laguna Niguel this afternoon when the crowd grew to 8,000 and many began baring more than just their behinds.
"We had some mooners and some female flashers and some people who were nude altogether," said Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department. "There was also lots of drinking. We felt that it was in the public's interest to shut it down."
Mooners, flashers and others dispersed peacefully about 3 p.m. and there were no arrests, Amormino said. More than 50 officers, backed up by helicopters from several police agencies, responded.
Some participants were angered by the police response.
"What was the point of stopping people from enjoying themselves when they were under control?" asked Robert Zoellner, 47, a first-time mooner from Mission Viejo. "Everybody was getting along."
Some participants returned to a mile-long stretch of festivities after police left and newcomers arrived throughout the afternoon. Into the evening, revelers continued to moon the trains that passed about every 20 minutes.
Participants -- who included children with their parents as well as middle-aged adults -- stood on a shoulder of the road parallel to the tracks to show themselves. The sideshow included barbecues, T-shirts sales and RV parties.
"It's so liberating it's contagious," said Steve Bartolo, 39, of Costa Mesa. "You just wait until that next train goes by . . . I can't stop."
The 29-year-old event is said to have started when a patron at the nearby Mugs Away Saloon in the 27000 block of Camino Capistrano offered to buy drinks for any of his buddies who would run out to the tracks and bare their bottoms for the next passing train. Many did, and the tradition was born.
Usually held the second Saturday in July, the event begins early in the morning and continues into the night. Though it has no official sponsors and free beer is no longer provided, it does have a web site..
"The truth is I never heard of it until today," Amormino said. "This is probably the first time it's gotten out of hand."
"It's a good thing they were mooning trains," Amormino said, "because if it were cars I'm sure it would cause" an accident. "I guess a few people wrecked it for everybody."
Police halt 'mooning' of trains in Laguna Niguel after a crowd of 8,000 gathers
Some bared more than their bottoms, the Orange County Sheriff's Department says.
By David Haldane
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
7:58 PM PDT, July 12, 2008
Police were called out to break up the annual "mooning" of Amtrak trains in Laguna Niguel this afternoon when the crowd grew to 8,000 and many began baring more than just their behinds.
"We had some mooners and some female flashers and some people who were nude altogether," said Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department. "There was also lots of drinking. We felt that it was in the public's interest to shut it down."
Mooners, flashers and others dispersed peacefully about 3 p.m. and there were no arrests, Amormino said. More than 50 officers, backed up by helicopters from several police agencies, responded.
Some participants were angered by the police response.
"What was the point of stopping people from enjoying themselves when they were under control?" asked Robert Zoellner, 47, a first-time mooner from Mission Viejo. "Everybody was getting along."
Some participants returned to a mile-long stretch of festivities after police left and newcomers arrived throughout the afternoon. Into the evening, revelers continued to moon the trains that passed about every 20 minutes.
Participants -- who included children with their parents as well as middle-aged adults -- stood on a shoulder of the road parallel to the tracks to show themselves. The sideshow included barbecues, T-shirts sales and RV parties.
"It's so liberating it's contagious," said Steve Bartolo, 39, of Costa Mesa. "You just wait until that next train goes by . . . I can't stop."
The 29-year-old event is said to have started when a patron at the nearby Mugs Away Saloon in the 27000 block of Camino Capistrano offered to buy drinks for any of his buddies who would run out to the tracks and bare their bottoms for the next passing train. Many did, and the tradition was born.
Usually held the second Saturday in July, the event begins early in the morning and continues into the night. Though it has no official sponsors and free beer is no longer provided, it does have a web site..
"The truth is I never heard of it until today," Amormino said. "This is probably the first time it's gotten out of hand."
"It's a good thing they were mooning trains," Amormino said, "because if it were cars I'm sure it would cause" an accident. "I guess a few people wrecked it for everybody."
NPR story on folk singer Karen Dalton
NPR
Weekend Edition Saturday, July 12, 2008 - Karen Dalton's new album, Green Rocky Road, was 45 years in the making.
The folk singer made the record at her cabin in Colorado with nothing but a 12-string guitar, a banjo and her voice. Joe Loop captured the recordings on a reel-to-reel tape deck in 1963.
"I can still see her in my mind, sitting in her rocking chair with that long-neck banjo, rocking back and forth playing," he says.
At the time, Loop owned a coffee shop in Boulder called The Attic. Young singers who were just discovering traditional folk music would stop there on the way from coast to coast — people like David Crosby and John Phillips. Loop says Dalton put most of them to shame.
"She was the real deal," he says. "Karen had been living the life and doing it for some time."
Dalton could sound like Billie Holiday, and she had the striking beauty of a Walker Evans dustbowl portrait. Bob Dylan called her his favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s.
She never enjoyed much commercial success, but her emotional performances and tragic life story continue to attract new fans. Fifteen years after her death, her music has never been more popular.
A Singer's Life
Dalton grew up in Oklahoma, and was married and divorced twice by the time she was 21. In the early '60s, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she crossed paths with Dylan, who occasionally backed her up on harmonica.
Dalton also got married for a third time, to folksinger Richard Tucker. "If you saw her on a stage in a small club and heard her voice, it was just awesome," Tucker says. "My favorite was [when] she did blues, really slow. The slowest blues I ever heard in my life."
It wasn't just Dalton's singing that drew comparisons to Billie Holiday: Her tumultuous personal life also became part of her mythology. Her daughter, Abralyn Baird, says that Dalton lost her two bottom front teeth when she got in the middle of a fight between boyfriends.
"The man she was living with at the time, he came home and found her in bed with my soon-to-be stepfather," Baird says. "Heh and, yeah, a fight ensued. She got punched in the face. She always said when she got that big recording contract and became famous, she was gonna have teeth put in."
But that big recording contract never came through. Dalton was tall and beautiful and certainly looked like a star. But veteran bass player and producer Harvey Brooks says she wasn't interested in playing the music industry's games in an era when musicians had little other choice.
"Karen came from the backwoods of Oklahoma," Brooks says. "She was different. She was very laid-back and reserved. ... There was no fire behind her. By the time the fire came, her personal fire was not up to it."
On Her Own Terms
Dalton did manage to record two albums, with Brooks producing the second one. But he says her personal problems — including a growing reliance on hard drugs and alcohol — made recording them difficult and touring to promote them impossible.
Record companies might have taken Dalton for a rube, but Baird insists her mother was anything but.
"She was very well-read," Baird says. "Our house was always full of books. She knew what was going on in the world, about literature, the whole bit. When people approached her as being the stupid farm girl from Oklahoma, it could really piss her off in a hurry."
And when record executives tried to change her music, Baird says, it made her even angrier.
"She wanted to have her sound," she says. "That's what they told her they wanted to hear, and then she'd get in the studio, and they're like, 'Well, we'll just add a couple tracks to this.' And she's like, 'No.' She'd get furious. My mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers."
But at the same time, Dalton was a reluctant performer, according to cafe owner and recordist Loop. "She had a way of carrying herself and an aura of strength that made it surprising that somebody who had such a strong personality would get in a situation like a recording situation and be really shy and intimidated by the whole thing," he says.
Mysteries Of Revival
She isn't around to resolve that personality contradiction. Dalton died in 1993. And if she gave any recorded interviews, they're nowhere to be found.
The mystery that surrounds her life may be part of the reason for her recent comeback. In the last two years, independent labels have put out three CDs' worth of reissued and previously unreleased material.
Loop says he's not surprised that she's having more success now than she did in her own lifetime.
"Most people they were recording in the late '50s, early '60s were the Weavers and Pete Seeger and Joan Baez," Loop says. "Kind of the Ozzie and Harriet people of the folk-music world. Straight, cleaned up. Karen didn't belong in that world."
Dalton's stormy personal life may have scared away record executives 40 years ago, but it also may be one of the reasons new fans are discovering what many of her peers knew all along.
Weekend Edition Saturday, July 12, 2008 - Karen Dalton's new album, Green Rocky Road, was 45 years in the making.
The folk singer made the record at her cabin in Colorado with nothing but a 12-string guitar, a banjo and her voice. Joe Loop captured the recordings on a reel-to-reel tape deck in 1963.
"I can still see her in my mind, sitting in her rocking chair with that long-neck banjo, rocking back and forth playing," he says.
At the time, Loop owned a coffee shop in Boulder called The Attic. Young singers who were just discovering traditional folk music would stop there on the way from coast to coast — people like David Crosby and John Phillips. Loop says Dalton put most of them to shame.
"She was the real deal," he says. "Karen had been living the life and doing it for some time."
Dalton could sound like Billie Holiday, and she had the striking beauty of a Walker Evans dustbowl portrait. Bob Dylan called her his favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s.
She never enjoyed much commercial success, but her emotional performances and tragic life story continue to attract new fans. Fifteen years after her death, her music has never been more popular.
A Singer's Life
Dalton grew up in Oklahoma, and was married and divorced twice by the time she was 21. In the early '60s, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she crossed paths with Dylan, who occasionally backed her up on harmonica.
Dalton also got married for a third time, to folksinger Richard Tucker. "If you saw her on a stage in a small club and heard her voice, it was just awesome," Tucker says. "My favorite was [when] she did blues, really slow. The slowest blues I ever heard in my life."
It wasn't just Dalton's singing that drew comparisons to Billie Holiday: Her tumultuous personal life also became part of her mythology. Her daughter, Abralyn Baird, says that Dalton lost her two bottom front teeth when she got in the middle of a fight between boyfriends.
"The man she was living with at the time, he came home and found her in bed with my soon-to-be stepfather," Baird says. "Heh and, yeah, a fight ensued. She got punched in the face. She always said when she got that big recording contract and became famous, she was gonna have teeth put in."
But that big recording contract never came through. Dalton was tall and beautiful and certainly looked like a star. But veteran bass player and producer Harvey Brooks says she wasn't interested in playing the music industry's games in an era when musicians had little other choice.
"Karen came from the backwoods of Oklahoma," Brooks says. "She was different. She was very laid-back and reserved. ... There was no fire behind her. By the time the fire came, her personal fire was not up to it."
On Her Own Terms
Dalton did manage to record two albums, with Brooks producing the second one. But he says her personal problems — including a growing reliance on hard drugs and alcohol — made recording them difficult and touring to promote them impossible.
Record companies might have taken Dalton for a rube, but Baird insists her mother was anything but.
"She was very well-read," Baird says. "Our house was always full of books. She knew what was going on in the world, about literature, the whole bit. When people approached her as being the stupid farm girl from Oklahoma, it could really piss her off in a hurry."
And when record executives tried to change her music, Baird says, it made her even angrier.
"She wanted to have her sound," she says. "That's what they told her they wanted to hear, and then she'd get in the studio, and they're like, 'Well, we'll just add a couple tracks to this.' And she's like, 'No.' She'd get furious. My mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers."
But at the same time, Dalton was a reluctant performer, according to cafe owner and recordist Loop. "She had a way of carrying herself and an aura of strength that made it surprising that somebody who had such a strong personality would get in a situation like a recording situation and be really shy and intimidated by the whole thing," he says.
Mysteries Of Revival
She isn't around to resolve that personality contradiction. Dalton died in 1993. And if she gave any recorded interviews, they're nowhere to be found.
The mystery that surrounds her life may be part of the reason for her recent comeback. In the last two years, independent labels have put out three CDs' worth of reissued and previously unreleased material.
Loop says he's not surprised that she's having more success now than she did in her own lifetime.
"Most people they were recording in the late '50s, early '60s were the Weavers and Pete Seeger and Joan Baez," Loop says. "Kind of the Ozzie and Harriet people of the folk-music world. Straight, cleaned up. Karen didn't belong in that world."
Dalton's stormy personal life may have scared away record executives 40 years ago, but it also may be one of the reasons new fans are discovering what many of her peers knew all along.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Chicago’s aging blues scene growing tired
AP/MSNBC
Chicago’s aging blues scene growing tired
Wailing guitars, moaning harmonicas falling silent as clubs continue to close
By Caryn Rousseau
The Associated Press
updated 10:26 a.m. PT, Fri., July. 11, 2008
CHICAGO - Blues guitar virtuosos and honey-voiced singers filled the Chicago streets with music during the 1950s. Muddy Waters’ guitar seeped from corner juke joints. Willie Dixon strummed bass guitar beats, echoing the city’s blues sound.
Now more than a half century later, a music that was born in the rural South and raised in the urban North, has grown old and tired. Its fan base is aging, key blues haunts have shuttered and some of its up-and-coming musicians are struggling. Nowhere is the decline more evident than in Chicago, arguably the city that made the genre famous.
At age 41, Ronnie Baker Brooks is a second-generation Chicago bluesman. His father, 74-year-old Lonnie Brooks, came to the city from Louisiana in 1959 and Ronnie has listened to his father’s blues since he was a baby.
“It was a lot more vibrant back then,” Ronnie Baker Brooks says. “(The blues) is in a transition because a lot of the older blues guys are passing on.”
Those older blues musicians migrated north to Chicago from southern deltas in the 1930s through the 1960s, lured by industrial steel and automobile jobs as sharecropping jobs withered. The musicians brought with them an acoustic country blues that morphed in the big city, taking on the electrified sound of their new urban life.
Record Row popped up on south Michigan Avenue with labels like Chess Records and Vee-Jay Records. Blues dominated local radio stations. And music poured from clubs into the streets.
Marie Dixon, 70, widow of the late Willie Dixon, says parties started on Thursday and ended Sunday night.
‘The highlight of your life’
“An evening out was the highlight of your life,” she says. “You had good music, great people who were there just to feel the music. Blues was a part of your life.”
Now many clubs are gone, the wailing guitars and moaning harmonicas practically silenced.
So what’s happened in the city known as the “Blues Capital” — the town where “The Blues Brothers” was filmed, where musicians with names like Magic Slim played and Buddy Guy built his famous club, Legends? Chicago has earned itself a reputation as the place to hear the blues and the city that bred the blues.
The decline is partly because national interest in the music waned — and that’s reflected in the city’s club scene.
In the 1970s, there were about three dozen spots to hear the blues. Now, that’s down to about seven or eight. Some joints have been razed, others are open but don’t book the blues anymore.
The spiffed-up clubs are downtown, while tiny old-time dives dwindle on the South Side.
“Most of the tourists do go downtown because it’s more convenient,” says Brooks. “They’re closer to their hotels. They want to hear ‘Mustang Sally’ or ‘Sweet Home Chicago,’ the standards. Whereas on the South Side it’s more gut-bucket to me, it’s more, it’s got a direct vein to Mississippi, but it’s got the Chicago vibe to it.”
At Artis’ Lounge on the South Side, the drummer slaps his sticks starting the song. Howls bellow from speakers in the cramped room, shaking tables as the bartender dances while serving drinks. A sign on the back office door reads: “Where people meet and greet. Great music.”
“They’re not places where the expense-account crowds are going,” says Janice Monti, a blues expert and the sociology department chair at Dominican University in suburban Chicago. “It’s a very, very different scene than the stylized, marketed blues club. There’s a feeling the clubs are an extension of the living room or the house party.”
On the North Side, tourists and businessmen in suits dot the crowd at B.L.U.E.S., a club in the city’s trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood, where the bands are more likely to throw riffs from popular tunes into their songs rather than perform hard-core blues.
Eric Clapton tops in blues record sales
And while blues experts agree that Muddy Waters’ tunes would have be on every blues fan’s record shelf in the 1950s, Geoff Mayfield, the chart director at Billboard, says the most substantial-selling recent blues album was Eric Clapton’s “From the Cradle” in 1994. According to Nielsen SoundScan it sold 2.5 million.
Tracking blues record sales are difficult to determine. The genre was often roped in with jazz or R&B and Billboard didn’t start its blues chart until 1995. SoundScan only began tracking the blues in 1991.
Bruce Iglauer, who owns the blues music label Alligator Records in Chicago, says his sales have averaged more than 250,000 copies over the past five years. He didn’t provide figures from other years.
“It’s always had strong appeal to people who are really into the roots of music,” Billboard’s Mayfield says. “But it’s never been a mass appeal product.”
But there is faith to be had.
“I think there’s definitely a lot of talent in our generation that’s coming up,” Brooks says. “It is hard when you’re young, because a lot of people figure you haven’t been through enough to sing about the blues. I think that’s all irrelevant. If you can express it, you can make an impression with the people.”
Blues music still proves popular in the city’s Chicago Blues Festival each summer. The festival started 25 years ago in 1984 with 145,000 people and attendance has grown to 725,000 for this year’s fest in June.
And the Blues Heaven Foundation — founded by Willie Dixon — helps artists navigate the blues business with hopes of making it more prosperous. It teaches them about copyright law, publishing contracts and writers’ shares.
Marie Dixon says she wants blues artists to demand the recognition they deserve before its too late for the genre.
“It’s slowly dying at this point,” Dixon says. “I have no answer about what can be done about (its future). I really have no answer.”
Chicago’s aging blues scene growing tired
Wailing guitars, moaning harmonicas falling silent as clubs continue to close
By Caryn Rousseau
The Associated Press
updated 10:26 a.m. PT, Fri., July. 11, 2008
CHICAGO - Blues guitar virtuosos and honey-voiced singers filled the Chicago streets with music during the 1950s. Muddy Waters’ guitar seeped from corner juke joints. Willie Dixon strummed bass guitar beats, echoing the city’s blues sound.
Now more than a half century later, a music that was born in the rural South and raised in the urban North, has grown old and tired. Its fan base is aging, key blues haunts have shuttered and some of its up-and-coming musicians are struggling. Nowhere is the decline more evident than in Chicago, arguably the city that made the genre famous.
At age 41, Ronnie Baker Brooks is a second-generation Chicago bluesman. His father, 74-year-old Lonnie Brooks, came to the city from Louisiana in 1959 and Ronnie has listened to his father’s blues since he was a baby.
“It was a lot more vibrant back then,” Ronnie Baker Brooks says. “(The blues) is in a transition because a lot of the older blues guys are passing on.”
Those older blues musicians migrated north to Chicago from southern deltas in the 1930s through the 1960s, lured by industrial steel and automobile jobs as sharecropping jobs withered. The musicians brought with them an acoustic country blues that morphed in the big city, taking on the electrified sound of their new urban life.
Record Row popped up on south Michigan Avenue with labels like Chess Records and Vee-Jay Records. Blues dominated local radio stations. And music poured from clubs into the streets.
Marie Dixon, 70, widow of the late Willie Dixon, says parties started on Thursday and ended Sunday night.
‘The highlight of your life’
“An evening out was the highlight of your life,” she says. “You had good music, great people who were there just to feel the music. Blues was a part of your life.”
Now many clubs are gone, the wailing guitars and moaning harmonicas practically silenced.
So what’s happened in the city known as the “Blues Capital” — the town where “The Blues Brothers” was filmed, where musicians with names like Magic Slim played and Buddy Guy built his famous club, Legends? Chicago has earned itself a reputation as the place to hear the blues and the city that bred the blues.
The decline is partly because national interest in the music waned — and that’s reflected in the city’s club scene.
In the 1970s, there were about three dozen spots to hear the blues. Now, that’s down to about seven or eight. Some joints have been razed, others are open but don’t book the blues anymore.
The spiffed-up clubs are downtown, while tiny old-time dives dwindle on the South Side.
“Most of the tourists do go downtown because it’s more convenient,” says Brooks. “They’re closer to their hotels. They want to hear ‘Mustang Sally’ or ‘Sweet Home Chicago,’ the standards. Whereas on the South Side it’s more gut-bucket to me, it’s more, it’s got a direct vein to Mississippi, but it’s got the Chicago vibe to it.”
At Artis’ Lounge on the South Side, the drummer slaps his sticks starting the song. Howls bellow from speakers in the cramped room, shaking tables as the bartender dances while serving drinks. A sign on the back office door reads: “Where people meet and greet. Great music.”
“They’re not places where the expense-account crowds are going,” says Janice Monti, a blues expert and the sociology department chair at Dominican University in suburban Chicago. “It’s a very, very different scene than the stylized, marketed blues club. There’s a feeling the clubs are an extension of the living room or the house party.”
On the North Side, tourists and businessmen in suits dot the crowd at B.L.U.E.S., a club in the city’s trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood, where the bands are more likely to throw riffs from popular tunes into their songs rather than perform hard-core blues.
Eric Clapton tops in blues record sales
And while blues experts agree that Muddy Waters’ tunes would have be on every blues fan’s record shelf in the 1950s, Geoff Mayfield, the chart director at Billboard, says the most substantial-selling recent blues album was Eric Clapton’s “From the Cradle” in 1994. According to Nielsen SoundScan it sold 2.5 million.
Tracking blues record sales are difficult to determine. The genre was often roped in with jazz or R&B and Billboard didn’t start its blues chart until 1995. SoundScan only began tracking the blues in 1991.
Bruce Iglauer, who owns the blues music label Alligator Records in Chicago, says his sales have averaged more than 250,000 copies over the past five years. He didn’t provide figures from other years.
“It’s always had strong appeal to people who are really into the roots of music,” Billboard’s Mayfield says. “But it’s never been a mass appeal product.”
But there is faith to be had.
“I think there’s definitely a lot of talent in our generation that’s coming up,” Brooks says. “It is hard when you’re young, because a lot of people figure you haven’t been through enough to sing about the blues. I think that’s all irrelevant. If you can express it, you can make an impression with the people.”
Blues music still proves popular in the city’s Chicago Blues Festival each summer. The festival started 25 years ago in 1984 with 145,000 people and attendance has grown to 725,000 for this year’s fest in June.
And the Blues Heaven Foundation — founded by Willie Dixon — helps artists navigate the blues business with hopes of making it more prosperous. It teaches them about copyright law, publishing contracts and writers’ shares.
Marie Dixon says she wants blues artists to demand the recognition they deserve before its too late for the genre.
“It’s slowly dying at this point,” Dixon says. “I have no answer about what can be done about (its future). I really have no answer.”
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Music Controllers: Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers
A neat little article on unique instrument/controllers in the New York Times:
July 10, 2008
Basics
Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers
By JASON TURBOW
FIRST came the theremin.
In 1919, Leon Theremin, an electronics wizard who had migrated from the Soviet Union, created one of the simplest musical instruments in existence, all of two metal rods protruding from a base. It did not have to be touched to elicit positively ethereal sounds — spaceship noises invented before anyone knew what a spaceship was.
Its sound — a cross between human voices and violins — is created by the musician’s hands’ disturbing electrical fields that surround the dual antennas — one for frequency, the other volume. Because it is played with precise hand movements through the air, the theremin is notoriously difficult to master.
Nearly a hundred years later, theremins are still on the scene, with updated models and kits manufactured by established synthesizer outlets like Moog and PAiA. They range from less than $100 to more than $1,000. And just as Theremin did in his studio, modern electronic whizzes continue to create clever electronic instruments for the musically inclined gadget freak to play at home — with considerably more ease than Theremin’s device.
The new breed ranges from the laser harp — arrayed beams of light that, when broken by a player’s hand, signal programmed MIDI processors — which was used in concert by the French instrumentalist Jean Michel Jarre, to the Beamz Music Performance System, more novelty than serious instrument, found in Skymall and Sharper Image catalogs for about $600.
These electronica are the modern manifestations of musical progress: Jetsons-like technology combined with utterly simplistic interfaces in which the work has been loaded, beats and samples arranged, ready for someone to wave his finger through a beam of light. (“The Beamz lets music lovers be musicians,” shouts the Sharper Image catalog.)
The popularity of Guitar Hero, the video game in which participants compete by playing a guitar-shaped controller along with the music on a screen, may also popularize new instruments to a wider audience. “Guitar Hero’s combination of an alternative controller, an alternative music notation and an interactive pedagogy has doubled the number of instrumental music makers in the U.S.A. in just two years,” said James Plamondon, chief executive of Thumtronics, maker of a keyboardlike device called the Thummer.
Take the Buchla Lightning II ($1,995), which relies on infrared light to read the spatial coordinates of a pair of wireless wands that can be waved by the user as if conducting a symphony. Triangulating and mapping as it computes velocity and acceleration, the Lightning registers the wands’ every position to generate arranged notes and samples. This is the road, it seems, to the melding of music and dance, something until now strictly the realm of tap shoes.
Modern musical development is not all about no-touch technology, however. The Haken Continuum Fingerboard ($3,390 to $5,290), the Doepfer R2M Midi Ribbon Controller ($299) and the Persephone from Monster Synths ($1,499 to $1,699) have pushed the one-touch idea, each featuring a long rectangular pad or ribbon that is manipulated by running a finger across its surface.
It is easy, of course, to turn the idea of simplistic modern instrumentation on its ear — after all, technology inherently lends itself to complexity, not simplicity. If the artistry of the laser harp lies more in its programming than its manipulation, Aaron Andrew Hunt set out to create the opposite effect — and ended up with the Tonal Plexus (www.h-pi.com).
Mr. Hunt, a pipe organ technician-turned-instructor of music theory and composition at Eastern Illinois University, was frustrated by the mainstream musical mandate that 12 pitches in an octave — a standard piano keyboard — are all one needs to make music. His solution was add more pitches. A lot more.
His resulting keyboard is to standard 88-key pianos what Yankee Stadium is to a Little League park; they serve similar purposes, but on completely different scales. Mr. Hunt raised his pitch count to 211 from 12, each individually controlled, with a line of keyboards ranging in size from two octaves to eight. (That is a high end of 1,688 keys, for those scoring at home.)
The arrangement of the keys on the Tonal Plexus — buttons, really — looks like a series of Legos laid side by side in staggered columns to play sharps, double sharps, triple sharps and the corresponding flats, 17 in all (plus six enharmonic keys an octave).
But it turns out that mastering 1,688 keys is not 20 times more difficult than mastering the standard 88. Mr. Hunt created a layout in which the relationship between chords and scales is consistent, no matter which key one starts from; the fingering for a chord in C major, for example, can be transferred to any other major chord.
“It’s based on research over the past century in psychoacoustics, or human pitch perception,” Mr. Hunt said. “Our ability to perceive pitch is much finer than our sense of touch or sight. It’s the finest human sensory discrimination.”
The concept of the moving chord, however, is not unique to the Tonal Plexus. Other devices that use it include the Thummer (not yet in commercial production), which, approaching the concept on a much smaller scale, has 57 keys on each half of a split-plane model and can be hand-held.
Somewhat larger are C-Thru Music’s AXiS-64 and Opal, each of which has 192 keys. Cortex Design, at www.cortex-design.com, has the Terpstra Keyboard, which is not commercially available, with 280 keys.
Bigger yet, the Chromatone CT-312 has 312 keys and resembles an unmarked typewriter. One of the truly jumbo devices in the category is the 810-key Wilson 990 Generalized Keyboard — like Mr. Hunt’s creation, it is microtonal — from Starr Labs in San Diego.
Starr Labs, at www.starrlabs.com, is also noteworthy for another of its creations, the 288-key ZBoard ($3,000), with a 12-by-24 key arrangement that looks more than anything like an array of black and white dominoes. Like the other boards, it has chord and scale shapes that are transferable to any note in the spectrum; one of the program options creates the equivalent of a double guitar neck running across the 12-deep keys, with each key down the scale serving as the equivalent of a fret.
“It’s like playing a lap steel guitar,” said Harvey Starr, president of Starr Labs. “The main difference is that on a guitar, you can only play one note at a time per string. On this keyboard, you can depress as many buttons down the ‘string’ as you can reach.”
C-Thru produces versions of its boards for $1,700, available through its Web site, www.c-thru-music.com. It calls the keyboard a “harmonic table,” and the honeycomb (or hexagonal lattice) pattern of keys allows for surprising simplicity.
Major chords are simply triangle patterns that point to the right (any two stacked keys plus the key to the right between them, which can be played with a single finger pressing down at their intersection), while minor chords are triangle patterns that point to the left. Each note has the same relationship to its keyboard neighbors as every other note.
“If you find music theory difficult to understand or you want to think of a different way to approach composition of music, it completely takes you away from how you’re used to playing and understanding,” said Jacqueline Kandalaft, C-Thru’s director. “It lays everything out in a very logical fashion.”
And when it comes to producing ethereal sounds, logic is sweet music.
July 10, 2008
Basics
Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers
By JASON TURBOW
FIRST came the theremin.
In 1919, Leon Theremin, an electronics wizard who had migrated from the Soviet Union, created one of the simplest musical instruments in existence, all of two metal rods protruding from a base. It did not have to be touched to elicit positively ethereal sounds — spaceship noises invented before anyone knew what a spaceship was.
Its sound — a cross between human voices and violins — is created by the musician’s hands’ disturbing electrical fields that surround the dual antennas — one for frequency, the other volume. Because it is played with precise hand movements through the air, the theremin is notoriously difficult to master.
Nearly a hundred years later, theremins are still on the scene, with updated models and kits manufactured by established synthesizer outlets like Moog and PAiA. They range from less than $100 to more than $1,000. And just as Theremin did in his studio, modern electronic whizzes continue to create clever electronic instruments for the musically inclined gadget freak to play at home — with considerably more ease than Theremin’s device.
The new breed ranges from the laser harp — arrayed beams of light that, when broken by a player’s hand, signal programmed MIDI processors — which was used in concert by the French instrumentalist Jean Michel Jarre, to the Beamz Music Performance System, more novelty than serious instrument, found in Skymall and Sharper Image catalogs for about $600.
These electronica are the modern manifestations of musical progress: Jetsons-like technology combined with utterly simplistic interfaces in which the work has been loaded, beats and samples arranged, ready for someone to wave his finger through a beam of light. (“The Beamz lets music lovers be musicians,” shouts the Sharper Image catalog.)
The popularity of Guitar Hero, the video game in which participants compete by playing a guitar-shaped controller along with the music on a screen, may also popularize new instruments to a wider audience. “Guitar Hero’s combination of an alternative controller, an alternative music notation and an interactive pedagogy has doubled the number of instrumental music makers in the U.S.A. in just two years,” said James Plamondon, chief executive of Thumtronics, maker of a keyboardlike device called the Thummer.
Take the Buchla Lightning II ($1,995), which relies on infrared light to read the spatial coordinates of a pair of wireless wands that can be waved by the user as if conducting a symphony. Triangulating and mapping as it computes velocity and acceleration, the Lightning registers the wands’ every position to generate arranged notes and samples. This is the road, it seems, to the melding of music and dance, something until now strictly the realm of tap shoes.
Modern musical development is not all about no-touch technology, however. The Haken Continuum Fingerboard ($3,390 to $5,290), the Doepfer R2M Midi Ribbon Controller ($299) and the Persephone from Monster Synths ($1,499 to $1,699) have pushed the one-touch idea, each featuring a long rectangular pad or ribbon that is manipulated by running a finger across its surface.
It is easy, of course, to turn the idea of simplistic modern instrumentation on its ear — after all, technology inherently lends itself to complexity, not simplicity. If the artistry of the laser harp lies more in its programming than its manipulation, Aaron Andrew Hunt set out to create the opposite effect — and ended up with the Tonal Plexus (www.h-pi.com).
Mr. Hunt, a pipe organ technician-turned-instructor of music theory and composition at Eastern Illinois University, was frustrated by the mainstream musical mandate that 12 pitches in an octave — a standard piano keyboard — are all one needs to make music. His solution was add more pitches. A lot more.
His resulting keyboard is to standard 88-key pianos what Yankee Stadium is to a Little League park; they serve similar purposes, but on completely different scales. Mr. Hunt raised his pitch count to 211 from 12, each individually controlled, with a line of keyboards ranging in size from two octaves to eight. (That is a high end of 1,688 keys, for those scoring at home.)
The arrangement of the keys on the Tonal Plexus — buttons, really — looks like a series of Legos laid side by side in staggered columns to play sharps, double sharps, triple sharps and the corresponding flats, 17 in all (plus six enharmonic keys an octave).
But it turns out that mastering 1,688 keys is not 20 times more difficult than mastering the standard 88. Mr. Hunt created a layout in which the relationship between chords and scales is consistent, no matter which key one starts from; the fingering for a chord in C major, for example, can be transferred to any other major chord.
“It’s based on research over the past century in psychoacoustics, or human pitch perception,” Mr. Hunt said. “Our ability to perceive pitch is much finer than our sense of touch or sight. It’s the finest human sensory discrimination.”
The concept of the moving chord, however, is not unique to the Tonal Plexus. Other devices that use it include the Thummer (not yet in commercial production), which, approaching the concept on a much smaller scale, has 57 keys on each half of a split-plane model and can be hand-held.
Somewhat larger are C-Thru Music’s AXiS-64 and Opal, each of which has 192 keys. Cortex Design, at www.cortex-design.com, has the Terpstra Keyboard, which is not commercially available, with 280 keys.
Bigger yet, the Chromatone CT-312 has 312 keys and resembles an unmarked typewriter. One of the truly jumbo devices in the category is the 810-key Wilson 990 Generalized Keyboard — like Mr. Hunt’s creation, it is microtonal — from Starr Labs in San Diego.
Starr Labs, at www.starrlabs.com, is also noteworthy for another of its creations, the 288-key ZBoard ($3,000), with a 12-by-24 key arrangement that looks more than anything like an array of black and white dominoes. Like the other boards, it has chord and scale shapes that are transferable to any note in the spectrum; one of the program options creates the equivalent of a double guitar neck running across the 12-deep keys, with each key down the scale serving as the equivalent of a fret.
“It’s like playing a lap steel guitar,” said Harvey Starr, president of Starr Labs. “The main difference is that on a guitar, you can only play one note at a time per string. On this keyboard, you can depress as many buttons down the ‘string’ as you can reach.”
C-Thru produces versions of its boards for $1,700, available through its Web site, www.c-thru-music.com. It calls the keyboard a “harmonic table,” and the honeycomb (or hexagonal lattice) pattern of keys allows for surprising simplicity.
Major chords are simply triangle patterns that point to the right (any two stacked keys plus the key to the right between them, which can be played with a single finger pressing down at their intersection), while minor chords are triangle patterns that point to the left. Each note has the same relationship to its keyboard neighbors as every other note.
“If you find music theory difficult to understand or you want to think of a different way to approach composition of music, it completely takes you away from how you’re used to playing and understanding,” said Jacqueline Kandalaft, C-Thru’s director. “It lays everything out in a very logical fashion.”
And when it comes to producing ethereal sounds, logic is sweet music.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Tavira, Mexican one-handed violinist, dies at 84
AP
Tavira, one-handed violinist, dies at 84
By ALEXANDRA OLSON, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 44 minutes ago
Angel Tavira, a one-handed violinist who dedicated his life to Mexican folk music and won a Cannes Film Festival award for his first movie at age 82, has died. He was 84.
Tavira died of kidney problems Monday in a Mexico City hospital, said Eugenia Montiel, a spokeswoman for Camara Carnal Films, the company that co-produced Tavira's 2005 film "The Violin."
Tavira was born on July 3, 1924, into a family of musicians in the southwestern town of Corralfalso, and started playing the violin at age 6. When he was 13, he lost his right hand while setting off fireworks at a fair. He pursued his music career nonetheless, playing the violin with the bow tied to his stump.
"Being a Tavira meant being a musician," said his cousin Javier Tavira. "It's the family tradition; there were instruments in his grandfather's house. His uncles and cousins helped him work out a way to keep playing."
Mexican director Fernando Vargas made a documentary about Tavira in 2002, and two years later cast him in the fictional film "The Violin." With no previous experience, Tavira won an acting award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for his role as the patriarch of a family of street musicians who support an armed rebel movement.
In the documentary, Tavira describes the frustrations of learning how to play with one arm, saying he often wanted to hurl his violin to the floor.
"Just seeing myself tied to the bow, I only wanted to cry," he said. "I started practicing again just like I was learning to play."
Tavira was committed to traditional calentana music from his native Pacific coast state of Guerrero. He taught music to school children and led the Hermanos Tavira Banda folk band.
At 60, he enrolled in the Music Conservatory of Morelia in Michoacan state, studying musical scoring in the hopes of preserving calentana for future generations.
"He is a man who fought his whole life to keep the music of his region alive, teaching new generations and doing it with only one hand," Vargas said in a statement released by the National Arts Council.
Tavila is survived by his wife and 12 children from two marriages.
___
Associated Press Writer Istra Pacheco contributed to this report.
Tavira, one-handed violinist, dies at 84
By ALEXANDRA OLSON, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 44 minutes ago
Angel Tavira, a one-handed violinist who dedicated his life to Mexican folk music and won a Cannes Film Festival award for his first movie at age 82, has died. He was 84.
Tavira died of kidney problems Monday in a Mexico City hospital, said Eugenia Montiel, a spokeswoman for Camara Carnal Films, the company that co-produced Tavira's 2005 film "The Violin."
Tavira was born on July 3, 1924, into a family of musicians in the southwestern town of Corralfalso, and started playing the violin at age 6. When he was 13, he lost his right hand while setting off fireworks at a fair. He pursued his music career nonetheless, playing the violin with the bow tied to his stump.
"Being a Tavira meant being a musician," said his cousin Javier Tavira. "It's the family tradition; there were instruments in his grandfather's house. His uncles and cousins helped him work out a way to keep playing."
Mexican director Fernando Vargas made a documentary about Tavira in 2002, and two years later cast him in the fictional film "The Violin." With no previous experience, Tavira won an acting award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for his role as the patriarch of a family of street musicians who support an armed rebel movement.
In the documentary, Tavira describes the frustrations of learning how to play with one arm, saying he often wanted to hurl his violin to the floor.
"Just seeing myself tied to the bow, I only wanted to cry," he said. "I started practicing again just like I was learning to play."
Tavira was committed to traditional calentana music from his native Pacific coast state of Guerrero. He taught music to school children and led the Hermanos Tavira Banda folk band.
At 60, he enrolled in the Music Conservatory of Morelia in Michoacan state, studying musical scoring in the hopes of preserving calentana for future generations.
"He is a man who fought his whole life to keep the music of his region alive, teaching new generations and doing it with only one hand," Vargas said in a statement released by the National Arts Council.
Tavila is survived by his wife and 12 children from two marriages.
___
Associated Press Writer Istra Pacheco contributed to this report.
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