Identities

Some of you may know that I do research and write program notes for the Chicago Sinfonietta. Their final concert of their 2013-14 season deals with how we maintain our cultural identity, even if we are, through choice or otherwise, many miles and generations removed from the places we call home. I thought I'd reproduce those notes here, as I found the research fascinating and rewarding. Always learning, always learning...

Read on.

_____

As both individuals and members of society, people are on a perpetual quest for identity. It brings order and perhaps even a sense of comfort to know who we are and what our place in the universe is. There are many ways to take measure of such things, among them what we do for a living and where we choose to live, what political or religious beliefs we adhere to, how we think about race, gender or sexual orientation. I would argue, though, that perhaps the strongest identifiers are those that have to do with culture and history.

For the final concert of their 2013-14 Season, the Chicago Sinfonietta looks at how traditions of art and culture define our sense of who we are as well as the way those traditions both connect us to our heritages and inform our present day lives. To do so, we look to two very different societies connected only by the Silk Road, China and Eastern Europe.  They’ll perform contemporary works that are deeply tied to their respective ethnic traditions that simultaneously say something new, and in the process perhaps share a bit of knowledge and cultural pride with those who are willing to listen.  

This journey of discovery starts in Eastern Europe, and more specifically, the small Jewish villages called shtetls that dotted Poland, Romania, the Ukraine and other countries for nearly 800 years, only to disappear almost overnight with the onset of World War II.  Our first two selections are both by the Russian-born composer Ilya Levinson, who is an Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia College Chicago. Levinson immigrated to the United States in 1998, and is a graduate of both the Moscow State Conservatory and the University of Chicago. His identity serves as rich material for his work.

Shtetl Scenes was written by Levinson in 2005 and it is, in his words, a “nostalgia cycle”. He wrote it “about a world that is lost [and] not coming back” and to “give a voice to those who cannot speak.” It was originally written for piano, but the version being performed by the Sinfonietta is a full orchestral arrangement. We will hear two of the cycle’s five movements. The first, Forgotten Dreams, imagines an idealized life in the shtetl, forever lost to the Holocaust, even as that dream slowly slips away with time. The second movement, Freylakh, is a lively dance of the type that was enjoyed in these long gone places, full of rhythm and exuberance. This piece starts slowly and suddenly its pace accelerates to a very fast tempo.

The stage now set, we come to the first of our two concert centerpieces.

Klezmer is a combination of the Hebrew words "kley" (vessel) and "zemer" (melody), describing musical instruments in ancient times. It came to be used to describe Jewish folk musicians sometime in the middle ages.  In the 1970s, “klezmer music” and “klezmer band” were terms coined to describe the revival of Eastern European dance music and Yiddish folk and theater songs. It’s a rollicking sound that shares much with jazz and Latin music.

Maxwell Street Klezmer Band

As a music professor and composer, Levinson’s research interests include klezmer music and the klezmer idiom in contemporary concert music. He was asked to compose a klezmer-based orchestral work in 1998 by Phil Simmons, the artistic director of the Linclonwood Chamber Orchestra. Because most klezmer tunes are a short 3 or 4 minutes in length, Levinson quickly settled on the genre of rhapsody. This allowed him to build a concert-length piece out of a series of exciting musical episodes, much like such works as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody.   Thus was born the Klezmer Rhapsody.

Once Levinson determined the form, he set about introducing the more dissonant harmonic and contrapuntal practices of the 20th century in the work, using these to break up the structure, rhythms and harmonies of the klezmer melodies. All the themes of the piece are original, but they were composed using certain rhythmic, melodic and harmonic idioms of klezmer music, and thus intended to bring to mind traditional melodies. He worked closely with the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band’s musical director Alex Koffman to insure the work’s authenticity, and it premiered in 1999 as an orchestral piece with Koffman as violin soloist. The story of Klezmer Rhapsody, however, doesn’t end there.

Levinson later arranged the work for violin and klezmer band sans orchestra and this version appears on the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band’s 2005 album Old Roots New World. Tonight, the Chicago Sinfonietta premieres a brand new version for klezmer band and orchestra. For this new arrangement, Levinson has thoroughly reworked and re-conceptualized the piece to take advantage of the dynamic interplay between the two ensembles. In this version, there is a bit of a musical joke going on, as the orchestra “learns” about klezmer and the band alternately supports or makes fun of their efforts. By the end of the piece, though, both ensembles speak in a unified voice.

___

Maestro Mei-Ann Chen is, as you might guess, no stranger to Asian music, but she is also someone who has rigorously mastered Western classical music as well.  The very first time she ever led the Chicago Sinfonietta, in October of 2009, her program paired two works from contemporary Chinese composers with works from Ravel and Rachmaninoff.  She might very well be the perfect conductor to introduce the evening’s third featured work, Identity: Zhongshang Zhuang, to Chicago audiences.

                                      

Su Chang

Identity combines the musical traditions of Western and Chinese culture in a piece that is accessible to international audiences. A romantic orchestral concerto setting provides the backdrop for the guzheng, a Chinese stringed instrument that is plucked and strummed like a harp. The instrument, which is nearly 3800 years old, is an ancestor to the Japanese koto, Korean gayagaeum and Vietnamese đàn tranh.  Its mesmerizing timbre and lightning agility blend the familiar and the exotic, and Identity showcases its unique sound. Tonight’s soloist, Su Chang, traveled to Chicago from China for this performance.

The work is a collaboration between Chinese producer and composer Victor Cheng and American composer Michael Gordon Shapiro, and as such, Identity bears the musical signature of both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Cheng composed the core themes and established the direction of the piece. The Los Angeles-based Shapiro, a graduate of the film scoring program at the University of Southern California, also has a graduate degree in music composition from New York University and a background in writing music for video games. Both of these fields demand a high degree of story and character-related musical skill. He took Cheng’s themes (and detailed story line) and scored them for orchestra and, of course, the guzhang.

Identity tells a fictionalized story of a family ripped apart by conflicting loyalties during the time of the Chinese civil war, sending some members into exile.  As such, it is divided into three movements, each of which tells a different part of the story: Peaceful times, conflict, victory, exile, remembrance. The versatility of the guzheng comes into play, as it alternately represents the pastoral beauty of the Chinese landscape, the harsh realities of war and the loneliness and despair that come from separation. Nostalgia, longing and resolution are all conveyed by its tone and timbre. Ultimately, the piece seems to say, even though civil war divides a people along political and philosophical lines, at heart they retain a common identity that survives and perhaps points the way toward reconciliation.

As noted earlier, when Ilya Levinson first approached writing a klezmer piece for orchestra, he immediately thought of the form of a rhapsody, something like Rhapsody in Blue or the Romanian Rhapsody. Thus, it seems only fitting that we close the Identities concert with George Enescu’s most famous piece. Enescu himself was a concert violinist as well as a composer and conductor. He was a bit of a prodigy, graduating from the Vienna Conservatory at the age of 13, continuing on to study in Paris. His compositions were influenced by Romanian folk music, and he was a champion of other Romanian composers. Enescu’s musical curiosity went beyond mere provincialism, though, and included Balinese gamelan and Indian music.

The Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 is the better known of the two he wrote, and he is said to have remarked that it “was just a few tunes thrown together without thinking about it". Though this is an incredible understatement of modesty, that model helped Levinson write Klezmer Rhapsody, based as it is on several traditional klezmer song forms, all of which are short in length. At any rate, Enescu completed the first rhapsody in 1901 at the age of 19. It is ebullient and outgoing, as is fitting for a work that takes its starting point with a folk song whose English translation is "I have a coin, and I want a drink".

This lighthearted work is perhaps the best way to close an evening which, while providing superb and often exhilarating entertainment, also gives us much to ponder about the sometimes tragic vagaries of history and the universal imperative to remain true to both ourselves and our heritage. Through this, we can draw strength from our own identities.

Dos Santos' pan-Latin brew

Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta

“When it comes down to it, the story of ALL music is one of change, of hybridity, of a diversity of experiences and encounters. So, when we talk about crossing musical borders, there needs to be the recognition that music has always been crossing cultural, social, and expressive borders. This is its history—one of multiple crossings. We shouldn’t try to fix music (or its audiences) in place, that is, construct borders around it.”

If you've read any number of this blog's articles over the past year, you might assume that I wrote that. I could have. It sounds like me. But it's not.

The above quote comes from Alex Chávez, guitarist, organist and songwriter for Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta, a stripped down, rocking electric cumbia group that's been playing all over Chicago for the past year. They are celebrating their first anniversary with a show next week at Beat Kitchen. I discovered Dos Santos about the same time I started writing this blog, and in fact I devoted a paragraph to them in a post about a festival in my neighborhood.

It may seem like I'm cribbing my Border Radio posts lately from stuff I've written for the Afro-Latin organization Agúzate, but I guess that just means that my passions and those of Agúzate are well aligned. Which is a way of saying that I interviewed Alex Chávez and the members of Dos Santos (who have roots in Panama, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the U.S.) to learn more about the band and why they play, of all things, cumbia.

My introductory comments are reproduced below, but to read the far more interesting stuff the band had to say, click on through to the original Agúzate post.
______

Last summer, I went to the Celebrate Clark Street Festival in Rogers Park and stumbled across a band whose musical style was simply described as ‘psychedelic cumbia’ on the festival website. I was intrigued by this description as well as the group’s name: Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta. I subsequently learned that the band had only recently formed and that this was one of their first gigs, but the tightness of their sound suggested a group that had spent years getting to know one another. The farfisa organ and fuzzed out wah-wah guitars that Dos Santos employed resonated with my rock n’ roll youth, while at the same time the deep cumbia rhythms compelled me, and a lot of other people, to dance.

They were playing what I identified as chicha, a Peruvian variant on a traditional Colombian sound. It’s a music that sprung up in the 1960s and 70s when Caribbean rhythms, Andean folk melodies, rock instrumentation and a strong dose of the mind-altering indigenous corn liquor called chicha mixed together in Peru’s newly urbanized environment. It’s a sound that only recently came to the attention of North American audiences through a handful of reissued recordings from that period. Dos Santos pretty much blew me away that day, and I’ve been keeping track of them ever since.

Click here to read the rest. But you might want to watch this first.

Sound Culture Celebrates its 5th Anniversary

This article was originally published at Agúzate, the website of an organization in Chicago that is dedicated to Afro-Latin music and culture. But, because it fits so well with the overall purpose of this blog, I'm reproducing it in full here. At one point in this interview, we talk about the Celebrate Clark Street Festival and my neighborhood, which I've written about before. Click here and here if you want to check that out.

On to the article... 

This Saturday, May 3, Sound Culture Center for Global Arts will mark 5 years of presenting global music in Chicago with a party at Subterranean in Wicker Park. We at Agúzate know Sound Culture well, having partnered with them to bring Novalima, Orquesta Macabeo, Henry Cole & the Afrobeat Collective and several others to Chicago. I sat down with Sound Culture founder and Artistic Director David Chavez to talk about Sound Culture and the Chicago world music scene.

“I had done programming for different institutions, HotHouse, Uncommon Ground, and Morse Theater” says Chavez, a Chicago native of Salvadoran immigrants who makes his home in Albany Park. “I felt like I was always starting over at each of them…  I saw a chance to build my own community and institution around what I am most passionate about, multiculturalism and music.​  Sound Culture was a vehicle to realize my own vision and mission to expand the audience for international music.”

Sound Culture Director David Chavez

The organization began when Chavez and Amor Montes de Oca (of Arte y Vida Chicago) started programming global music by local and international artists for HotHouse after they vacated their South Loop venue, producing shows at various donated spaces throughout the city. They celebrated their first anniversary with the Nomadic World Music Festival, presenting 10 shows at 5 venues in April of 2010.

When Mayne Stage in Rogers Park opened in 2011, it became Sound Culture’s primary (though not only) venue. “Mayne Stage provides the perfect setting for the majority of my shows” Chavez states. “It's classic but not pretentious, it's open to all ages and accessible, the sound and AV are the best in the city, it's suitable for either a dancing show like Sierra Leone's Refugee All S​tars, or sit down show like the Eddie Palmieri Quartet.” He continues, “They've also been genuinely interested in Sound Culture's programming and as a brand, not just the  ​dollars and cents.”

Chavez had been involved in the Rogers Park community prior to starting Sound Culture. “I'd been programming Celebrate Clark Street (an annual summer festival in Rogers Park) for many years before Morse Theater turned into Mayne Stage. That festival is very special because it has defied the cookie cutter festival landscape that currently exists in Chicago.  It's not about selling beer and listening to cover bands.  It's about celebrating the cultural diversity of the neighborhood both on and off stage.”

As a Rogers Park resident, I can attest to Chavez’ assessment of the festival’s vibe as well as his description of the neighborhood’s diversity. In recent years the modest street party has evolved into a de facto second Chicago World Music Festival.  It’s one of the things I love about living here.

When I ask Chavez about some of his most memorable shows, it’s a pretty long list. “I really try to produce shows that are culturally significant.  And so when you start with that, you set the bar high for yourself from the get go.  Susana Baca, Eddie Palmieri, Gregory Porter, Sargent Garcia, Idan Raichel, Orquesta Aragón, Brownout, Wake Up Madagascar with Jaojoby, Bomba Estereo, O​rchestre P​oly Rythmo de C​otonou, Novalima, Juana Molina, DakhaBrakha… ​I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot.”

Chavez has also been a DJ since he was 18, and he changed his nom de disc to DJ Sound Culture after starting the organization. “The musical aesthetic and message in the artists that I presented on stage was the same as what I was spinning anyway.  So to me, they go hand in hand and provide two different vehicles to carry the same sound culture message, albeit to two different audiences in most cases.“ 

About those different audiences: “I feel like the world music scene is in transition, a good portion is graying but there's also an emerging generation coming into the fold.” Chavez continues, “Apart from wanting to expand the audience for world music across the city I also wanted to expand it to a new generation of globally minded music audience. I've been a key player in helping to develop a global bass scene in Chicago, a predominantly dance music oriented audience that tends ​to erase national borders and cross cultural lines both musically and on the dance floor.”

And that brings us to this Saturday’s anniversary party. The lineup is a slice of everything that makes Sound Culture unique and important.  For one thing, the event is timed to coincide with International Workers Day. For another, it features music from out of town as well as local artists. Finally, DJs will keep the groove going when the bands aren’t playing.  All of the artists fit it well with Chavez’ mission. I can hear the passion as he describes the lineup.

Boogat

“Boogat, from Montreal, is one of those artists that straddle the live and the electronic; his message is often one from an immigrant experience or one of self identity as a minority in an Anglo Francophone culture. Very in tune with the International Workers Day theme. Los Vicios de Papa is a hometown hero also championing human, worker and immigrant rights. They were probably the first real Latin band in Chicago that wasn't conforming to traditional salsa or Mexican regional music and resonating with young 1st and 2nd generation urban Latinos. DJ's Chief Boima and Geko Jones, from New York City, have a new Africa Latina project that celebrates the African diaspora in Latin America.”

Add in other local favorites like SOULPHONETICS, Esso! Afrojam Funkbeat, Las Selectas, the FEx DJ collective (collaborators for this event) and a set from DJ Sound Culture himself, and it’ll be quite a night.

I’ll see you on the dance floor!

How I became an expert on Latin music.

If you are chuckling at the audacity of that title, trust me: I am laughing out loud.

That said, it's a claim that, were I of the mind to do so, I could make with some justification. After all, I have been writing features on artists, concerts, recordings and other música latina topics for Arte y Vida Chicago for over three years. Just two weeks ago, I agreed to be a regular contributor to Agúzate, an Afro-Latin cultural organization. I've been approached by a couple of other Latino-focused publications about doing some writing for them as well. And, of course, this blog largely covers that very topic.

But an expert? I'm still more of an apprentice. And that, dear reader, is the beauty of it.

The question, as David Byrne might put it, is "How did I get here?"

The bio summary that accompanies this blog references my studies in sociology, for which I earned a degree from the University of Illinois. And, surely, it is my grounding in that social science that informs my writing and, come to think of it, my life. The story begins a bit earlier, though, with a working class childhood as the grandson of Czech immigrants and the first in my family to go to college. It also includes being an eyewitness to the ugliness of racism and injustice in 1960s America, including my own neighborhood and even family. Identity, I believe, is formed in childhood, and crystallizes as you enter adulthood. That entrance in my case coincides with community college and the aforementioned discovery of sociology.

What does any of this have to do with Latin music? In addition to those sociology courses, I also enrolled in a basic Latin American history course. I really don't remember much about it. Truth be told, there probably wasn't much to remember. After all, this was the mid 70s. Vietnam still dominated foreign policy discourse, and the dirty deeds of the C.I.A. in Latin America really hadn't come to light yet to anyone but the closest observers. I'd love to say I was radicalized by that course, but it wouldn't be true. I do, however, remember the Mexican girl that I had a huge crush on. (There's always a woman, yes?) We talked a lot over coffee in the student lounge and went to a couple of parties where we danced. Eventually she told me about her Puerto Rican boyfriend. The romance that I had constructed in my mind was over, but no matter. I had crossed my Rubicon.

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, I had always liked rhythmic music, and as I've detailed elsewhere on this blog, you can trace most of American popular music like R&B, jazz and rock n' roll back through Cuba and beyond to Africa. So, even though I was listening to Otis Redding, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Marvin Gaye, I was being subliminally exposed to that Latin tinge. And, of course, there was Santana. The decade following college is a bit of a blur (draw your own conclusions), but somewhere along the way I was exposed to salsa music, yet still didn't know what it was or where it came from. Then Rubén Blades got his big major label crossover push and for the first time I was hearing not only the rhythm, but also the complexity of the songs and, perhaps most importantly, Blades' incredibly incisive lyrics, which the record company thankfully translated for people like me. That was when I began to understand much more than I was told back in community college. By 1988 I was traveling to Guatemala with a human rights delegation and finding common cause between civil rights struggles at home and abroad. Inequality? Check. Racism? Check. Violence and repression? Check. The distance between What's Going On and Buscando America wasn't that great.

I've subsequently discovered, much to my delight, that there's a lot more to Latin music than salsa. Well, duh, you might say, but believe me, that wasn't so obvious a few decades back, where everything 'south of the border' was viewed through the same foggy lens. By and large, I'm indebted to gringos like David Byrne, who used his clout as the face and voice of the Talking Heads to get his record company to issue collections of essential Cuban, Brazilian and Afro-Peruvian music.

Twenty-plus years later, I'm still learning. In an earlier blog post, I talked about my lack of Spanish language comprehension and my feeling of being walled off from certain experiences because of it, but for a long time simply accepting that and merrily going along my way listening to Latin American music without a clue as to its context, just digging the sound. Music is a universal language, right? Sort of.

Last week, I was asked to review a concert by the legendary Cuban ensemble Orquesta Aragón for Agúzate, which you can read here. I own some of their classic music from the 50s as well as a couple of their more recent releases. I even saw them perform live 14 years ago, and since then have learned to discern between various eras and styles of Cuban music.  It was a great show, which I experienced in my typical fashion; smiling, drinking and dancing. The next day, though, I had to write something, which of course required reconstructing the previous evening in my mind. I was missing some details, mainly song titles, so I wrote Agúzate's publisher with a few questions. He told me what he remembered and also translated the gist of a spoken tribute to Cheo Feliciano, who had died suddenly the previous day.

So, here's the really cool thing. The act of writing the review and conducting a little research in order to do it vastly enhanced my understanding of everything that went on that night. Despite everything I've learned about Latin music in the last couple of decades, I know something today that I didn't ten days ago.

Ultimately, I think that's why I write and why I'm thankful that publications like Arte y Vida and Agúzate ask me to do it. I can't just cruise through a concert and fail to understand what I'm hearing if I have to write about it. Similarly, I can't just cruise through life because writing this blog forces me to sift through my memories and assumptions and arrive at a fresh understanding of myself and the world I live in.

Now, that's the real beauty of it.

Hugh Masekela's 50 year journey

If you've read more than one of these Border Radio posts, you know that the subject of migration is endlessly fascinating to me. What happens to people when their lives, culture and art are relocated? I often examine the way the forced migrations of the slave trade brought various African traditions to the Americas, and those traditions formed the basis for so much music, specifically Afro-Latin, jazz and blues. Between those three, you pretty much have the entire foundation of Western popular music, everything from salsa to rock n' roll to hip-hop and electronic dance music.

Near the end of his set at the Old Town School of Folk Music last Friday, South African legend (and really, somebody with a 50+ career in contemporary music is quite deserving of that honorific) Hugh Masekela introduced his late 60s hit Grazing In the Grass by joking that the people in the audience could find it by by looking through their grandparent's LP collections. Me? My copy was on a 45, the little record with the big hole in the middle.

photo: Scott Pollard

Grazing came out in 1968. It's an engagingly cheerful record and one that fit on the radio nicely at a time when the means of music discovery was Top 40, and the charts had room for a little bit of everything: Motown, the Beatles, the Doors, Sly and the Family Stone, the Ramsey Lewis Trio and odd little bits of reggae (though nobody knew what that was yet) like Desmond Dekker's Israelites.

photo: Scott Pollard

I was a kid at the time and had never heard the word apartheid. I didn't know that the creator of these three minutes of aural pleasure was a political exile from his home, and would remain so for another 26 years. I just heard a grooving song that always put a smile on my face. Being 1968, I always assumed that the grass of the title was marijuana. Good times.

Some journeys end up, happily, back home. The crack multigenerational band that Masekela brought to the Old Town School was entirely African and almost all from Cape Town or Johannesburg, the sole exception being a percussionist from Sierra Leone. The music they played was firmly grounded in South African rhythms and harmonies, but to these ears percolated along like really good 70s-era jazz fusion (think Weather Report), mixing pop smarts and showmanship in with funkified bass and a barrage of electric keyboards. Masekela himself doesn't play his flugelhorn much anymore, but it doesn't appear that it's from lack of energy, as the 74 year old danced, sung, played cowbell, joked and otherwise commanded attention with a rough charisma the entire performance. A joy radiated from the stage, but that was set aside for an extended performance of Stimela, a stark song of remembrance that came out in 1974 and was most decidedly not a radio hit, from an album entitled I Am Not Afraid, and later rerecorded as apartheid fell for the album Hope. For a few minutes, Masekela bared the pain in his soul, and his introduction acknowledged that the conditions described in the songs lyrics still applied to far too much of the world.

photo: Scott Pollard

The pictures that accompany this writing were taken by my friend Scott Pollard, and I think they do a tremendous job of capturing Masekela's joy, but also, more importantly, his dignity. I'm glad that I had the fortune of witnessing this performance and its implied message of perseverance in the face of daunting odds. Sometimes, justice prevails and things do get better.

photo: Scott Pollard

A global dance party

I'll get the 'full disclosure' part out of the way first. I used to work for the Chicago Sinfonietta as their Communications Director, and I still do some research and writing for them for which I am compensated. I have a great deal of respect for what they do, both philosophically and creatively. But I should be clear: This respect flows from an alignment of my values with their activities. I don't say nice things about them because they pay me to do so.

I previewed their most recent concert for Arte y Vida Chicago, and you can read that here. I attended the concert a couple of nights ago and have had some time to think about what I heard and saw. That's what this blog post is about.

A few quick words about the Sinfonietta for those of you who didn't click the Arte y Vida link. They are led by a woman from Taiwan, who inherited that role from the African-American conductor who founded the orchestra 27 years ago. They play a mix of standard repertoire (that's what most people think of when they hear the words 'classical music', leaning heavily on music written by dead white guys) with newer works by living composers who are often the complete opposite of dead white guys. Somehow, they make this work, finding room for both in a single thematic concert. It probably helps that they shy away from dissonance and extremes. There's a populist aesthetic to be sure, but it doesn't cross the line into pandering.

photo by Chris Ocken

Their most recent offering was titled Global Dance Party. Given that the concert was presented at Chicago's Symphony Center, you can rest assured that dancing is generally not encouraged. The orchestra's marketing addressed this contradiction with some gibberish about 'dancing in your seats'. Nonetheless, there was a reason for the title: A focus of the programming was built around Indian-flavored hip-hop dance music of DJ Rekha, whose style makes liberal use of Bollywood and Bhangra sources from her cultural and ethnic background. Hip-hop being what it is, though, lots of other sounds make their way in: dub reggae and dancehall, Latin and Brazilian, and of course fat beats. It's music designed for sweaty dance clubs and street parties, not concert halls. Integrating a live orchestra into that was an audacious and unlikely experiment.

Did it work? For the most part, yes. The centerpiece was a tune called Pyar Baile, a song that was released a few years ago by Rekha and her writing and production partner (and Indian percussionist) Dave Sharma. It's a thick slice of carioca funk seasoned with Bollywood touches and features vocals in both Hindi and Brazilian Portuguese. Unfortunately, technical difficulties with Rekha's deck forced everyone to hit the reset button, and even after they did an uneven sound mix found the orchestral arrangements overpowering the electronics.  The arrangements weren't interesting enough by themselves to encourage any dancing, in the seats or otherwise.

I'll get back to Rekha later, but it's the rest of the evening that provided context for this 'DJ with an orchestra' thing, taking it beyond novelty. There were not one, but two guest conductors leading the orchestra (usually not at the same time). Both are rising young stars gaining a lot of notice, but on the surface have little in common. Alexandra Arrieche was born in Brazil and brought South American works with her from Astor Piazzolla and Hector Villa-Lobos. The 30-something African-American conductor Joseph Young selected works from the equally young African-American composer Jonathan Bailey Holland. The wild card was something from the Hungarian composer Erno Dohnányi.

All the selections shared upbeat tempos and sonic brightness. Piazzolla is the inventor of nuevo tango, of course, and his Fuga y Misterio is a whirlwind of rhythmic strings. Villa-Lobos is a Brazilian national treasure, and the orchestra sounded wonderful on his Bachianas Brasileira No. 2. Holland's work is harmonically and structurally complex, but it's inspiration here on The Party Starter and Motor City Dance Mix were the great disco and soul records of the 1970s, heavily flavored with hi-hat, suspended piano chords and glistening strings. Even the outlier, Dohnányi's Symphonic Minutes, proved a lively choice, based as it is on Hungarian folk dance.

What everything had in common was that all the composers took something popular (in the "of the people" sense) and interpreted it through another musical form. The conductors, clearly relishing the opportunity to lead music that was dear to them, coaxed sustained inspired playing from the orchestra.

photo by Chris Ocken

That brings us back to DJ Rekha. In sourcing her sounds from ethnic traditions, she translates them into dance floor fillers. The Sinfonietta experiment took this one step further, bringing Rehka's mixes into the realm of, quote-unquote, serious music. But it is a party, after all. Rekha returned for the finale, her deck fully functional and sound balance fixed, for a three movement suite comprised of material originally developed for a DJ set in a club. The orchestral arrangements were uncluttered, giving the beats and samples room to breathe and do their intended thing. A crucial extra element was inviting an orchestra violinist who is also a noted jazz musician to grab the spotlight and inject several energetic improvised passages in a sort of duet with Rekha. In a final touch, the Sinfonietta organization had cleverly invited a number of young Indian dance students to flood the aisles and edges of the stage. Turning up the house lights blurred the distinction between stage and audience. Now the party had, finally, started in earnest.

A total success? Um, maybe not quite. Worth doing? Depends on your perspective. Mine is that great things can happen when you mix cultures. I'm not only talking about ethnic culture, but also the increasingly meaningless distinction between high and pop culture. If the unfettered shared joy in the hall at this concert is any indication, this was certainly a welcome achievement.

photo by Chris Ocken

Border Crossings: A Musical Conversation

In my last post about the Palestinian-American composer and musician Simon Shaheen, I made reference to a violinist friend who leads a number of jazz ensembles. In the piece, I attempted to show a cultural timeline that connected Arabic music to that of the Caribbean, via both Spain and Africa, and further went on to be an ingredient of jazz. I rather shamelessly concluded the piece with a plug for my friend's upcoming performance. Consider this the follow-up.

Proyecto Libre at Constellation Chicago, March 7, 2014

Violinist James Sanders presented his Proyecto Libre, or "Free Project", for only their second performance since being formed in the fall of 2013. Sanders has led a Latin jazz band in Chicago for many years, but he also works frequently in mainstream jazz and collaborates regularly with several members of the Chicago avant-garde collective Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The connective tissue to all of this is the art of improvisation, and a huge influence is Sanders' Dominican heritage and the Afro-Caribbean music he grew up listening to. The commonality is African music, or more specifically, what African music became when it reached the Americas.

In the Caribbean and South America, African traditions mingled with Spanish and Portuguese culture along with indigenous sounds to form cumbia, merengue, samba, bomba y plena, danzon, son jarocho and so on. In the colonies settled primarily by the English (you know, the United States) Africans encountered something different: Scottish ballads, military bands, European classical. And then there's New Orleans, which had a little of everything: First ruled by France, then Spain, then briefly back to France before being given over to the United States, and everyone passing through Cuba and Saint-Domingue before making their way there. "Same ship, different ports," is how New Orleans jazz musician Irvin Mayfield describes this cultural migration imposed by the slave trade. Military brass bands were especially popular in New Orleans too (a side effect, I suppose, of all those competing countries jostling for dominion). Jelly Roll Morton took it all in as he began to invent what would become jazz, but he was careful to cite the "Spanish tinge" for giving the music that extra syncopation.

Congo Square, New Orleans

Jazz, of course, grew and mutated as subsequent generations sought new artistic challenges. Those changes often took the art form down divergent paths. There's Latin jazz, of course, which had its beginnings when be-boppers of the 40s and 50s experimented with Afro-Cuban rhythms. Post-bop, you had the giants of free improvisation taking jazz into entirely uncharted waters, often reaching all the way back to Africa for inspiration, but mostly skipping the islands in between. The AACM collective more or less descends from these Afrocentric explorations. Meanwhile, back in Africa, innovators were listening and creating their own homegrown African jazz.

What Sanders is trying to do with Proyecto Libre is have a family reunion. He has organized it as a collective, but the driver is the idea that there is common ground between these disparate musical languages, and by bringing together musicians fluent in one language but not as much another, they could engage in fruitful conversation. The current line-up includes an Afro-Cuban percussionist plus a drummer and bassist from the AACM side. In the middle, moderating the "discussion", is Sanders and his violin, using his rigorous classical training and experience in both languages to open up space for everyone to contribute. Jazz is as much about listening as it is playing, and nowhere is this more true than in free improvisation.

James Sanders' violin.

When I heard Proyecto Libre in their first performance in December at the Afro-Caribbean Improvised Music Festival, I was impressed by the artistic give and take, but I had a sense that the Afro-Cuban element was looking for a way in to a scene that was being dominated by the other players. Well, what a difference a couple of months can make. For their second performance, which I witnessed this past Friday night, all four members were on equal footing from the start, having found time to musically get to know each other during the interim. Sanders started things off with a few plucked notes on his violin, soon joined by the bass and little cymbal accents on the drum kit. Within a minute or so, the congas joined in, and the gentle interplay between the four musicians suggested the elegance of a danzon without precisely sounding like one. This suggestion, but not imitation, of the classic Cuban sound showed how much the players were learning about each others specialties and finding something new to say together. Soon, Sanders was using his bow while the drums and congas played interlocking rhythms and the bass negotiated the space between them, gently prodding things in one direction or another as the intensity built.

What followed was over an hour of straight music making, and all of it improvised, literally being created as it was happening. To use the conversation metaphor, one player would introduce a thought that would take the discussion in a particular direction, each participant offering their contribution. After that line played out a bit, there would be something of a pause to take a breath and reflect on what was just discussed, allowing someone else to contribute a fresh idea, which would take the conversation in a new direction. Passions ran high, but mostly joyful ones, as one thought inspired another. It was especially compelling to watch the two drummers, brothers from different mothers if you will, lock eyes and smile as each new idea surfaced.

As an intellectual exercise, it was impressive. As music, it was nearly transcendent. This was the sound of borders being breached, of walls being torn down. African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and African languages were all spoken, but more importantly, also listened to, responded to, moving the music forward.  When music works, it does so on a level that bypasses intellect and is experienced by the entire body. This certainly happened Friday night. Hell, there was even some dancing at the end. This was fun. It wasn't until the following morning that I thought about Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, whose legendary jams would go on for hours and hours, music that combined the fierceness of John Coltrane's fiery explorations, the out-and-out funk of James Brown and a cry against injustice that frightened the authorities. And doing all of that in a big, sweaty dance party.

Sanders has a website that is packed with video and audio performances that touch on all the facets of his musical journey. Proyecto Libre already have another performance scheduled in April. I talked to James after his Friday performance, and he hinted that he was already planning on experimenting with different voices to see where that particular conversation will lead. I'll be there listening.

Hearing global history

I had the good fortune to attend a concert by the Palestinian-American composer, violinist and oud player Simon Shaheen this past weekend. It’s not the first time I experienced his music. Over a decade ago, he was touring with his fusion band Qantara and I had the privilege of introducing him to the audience at a world music festival less than 10 days after the September 11 attacks. More recently, an orchestra that I worked for presented the Chicago premiere of his Oud Concerto, and I conducted a Q&A with him and the orchestra's conductor prior to the concert.

Both of those were great experiences, but neither prepared me for this weekend.  Simon and his traditional ensemble of string instruments, flute and hand drums performed at the intimate Old Town School of Folk Music before a predominantly Middle Eastern audience. And while it was traditional in the sense that it was acoustic and the selections performed included many older songs, the approach was thoroughly modern, involving new compositions written by Shaheen, a high degree of improvisation and much instrumental wizardry. 

I knew that Shaheen played the violin and was considered a virtuoso, but I had never heard him play it. When I saw Qantara, with its mix of instruments drawing from Arabic, African, Latin, jazz and pop sources, he led on his oud. And, of course, his Oud Concerto featured his solos accompanied by a Western style orchestra. 

In the years since I first heard Shaheen play, I became friends with a violinist who is well versed in classical and jazz improvisation who further incorporates his Afro-Caribbean heritage into his approach to jazz. So, when Shaheen picked up his violin and began to play on the third song, I was almost shocked to hear what sounded like my friend’s playing. The deft improvisation, the insertion of space between notes, the playing inside and outside of the rhythm, and all of it built on a foundation of pan-Arabic music.

And then I heard something else, for in fact pan-Arabic and pan-Latin music share the same source and are merely different stops on an ever continuing journey. Several years ago, I read a book called Cuba and its Music by Ned Sublette. On the first page of the first chapter, Sublette references the Phoenicians.  A people of Semitic origin, they arrived in what would become the Spanish port city of Cádiz in 1100 B.C. (and North African port cities like Casablanca and Algiers).  Over two millennia later, that port would be the European gateway to the “New World”. In between, the Muslim empire grew to encompass the Iberian peninsula, but by 1492 both Muslims and Jews were being expelled as a nascent Spanish identity took hold. The Spaniards began to colonize the Americas, bringing with them a culture heavily influenced by the Arab world. And they also brought slaves from Africa, including North African Muslims and sub-Saharan Yoruba peoples. 

This mix of Spanish and African cultures met various indigenous peoples first in the Caribbean islands, then Central and South America. Arabic musical instruments like the oud had already begun a transformation into guitars, lutes and mandolins. In Cuba, the oud became the laud.

I heard it all at once this past weekend, and it was triggered by not by Shaheen’s oud, but by his violin. He explained that this particular violin was from 18^th century Italy, and to hear Shaheen coax sound out of this very European instrument was akin to hearing my friend coax sound out of his of similar origin, but both serving a non-European purpose. Both musicians are classically trained, and both use that training to express something of themselves and, by doing so, their heritage. All of a sudden, I heard the continuum that connects the Phoenicians to the Spaniards and then on to the Americas, absorbing African sounds, mixing with indigenous traditions, becoming jazz in the U.S., reaching back so that jazz becomes a universal language used by many cultures… well, it was kind of mind blowing. 

My violinist friend James Sanders plays on March 7 at Constellation Chicago with his new ensemble Proyecto Libre (Free Project). In his various musical endeavors, Sanders is a member of an orchestra, leads a Latin jazz band, plays mainstream, composes music for a dance company and collaborates with improvisors from the avant-garde wing of the house of jazz. 

He's trying to bring all of that to Proyecto Libre.

When I attend, I'll also be listening for the Phoenicians.

Monolingual in a multilingual world

I've been an avid listener to global music for something like 25 years. One might even say I'm somewhat of a fanatic. It started when I picked up my first Ruben Blades record, or maybe Bob Marley. In all that time, I haven't had the slightest idea what most of the artists were singing about. (Thank you Mr. Marley for being born in Jamaica.) There were always a few artists that were explicitly trying to crack the Anglo market and thought it advantageous to include printed English lyrics or detailed liner notes with the package. Other than this, I was on my own. For a long time, though, that was fine. Whether it was Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic... I considered it all part of the music, an aural element in the mix, one more texture and color. I even told myself it was better that way, that I could dig the music more because I wasn't distracted by the lyrics.

I've come to realize that's bullshit. But it might be too late for me.

I've been fitfully trying to learn Spanish for several years. I dropped almost $500 on Rosetta Stone software, lured by their promise of fluency. It didn't go well. I was a good student for several weeks, dutifully donning my headphones for a half hour a day, running through the lessons. I think I made it to Level 3 of the first chapter. Much of it, though, was excruciating. I was good enough at picking out the right word, and my pronunciation skills weren't half bad. But when it came time to freestyle, to actually think, to figure out the right response to a question, I froze up, my brain rapidly tumbling into panic as I grasped for a lifeline.

After a while, I gave up. And, mostly, that's OK too. I live in a country and society where it's more important for non-English speakers to figure out my language than for me to understand theirs. So, despite my interest in cultural exchange, my fascination with issues around migration, my wanting to have some understanding of how the world works, I muddle through.

I've traveled to Puerto Rico several times, a few of them by myself, taking advantage of the fact that over a century of American colonialism will ease my gringo way. Hell, I can read road signs, and tourism insures that in places like San Juan, I'll find plenty of folks who will humor me. But I have a memory seared in my brain of visiting the La Guancha boardwalk in Ponce and looking for a table in a lovely open air restaurant. La Guancha isn't exactly locals only, but as I tried to figure out where to sit (the restaurant seemed to be divided into casual and more formal sections) I was a bit confused. So I asked for help. The waitress (hostess?) didn't speak English, and you already know about my Spanish. Panicked, I left and got some pinchos de pollo and a beer at a stand a bit farther down. Hey, anybody can point, signal quantity and pull out their wallet. Even me.

I began dating a woman from Guatemala three years ago, and have fallen deeply in love with her. I have every reason to believe we will be life partners. My fondest wish is that we'll retire somewhere in Latin America, living out our days in some idyllic coastal village that will somehow also have access to all the great things that urban life provides. And, given my lack of Spanish skills, I'll be somewhat lost.

When we started dating, I thought, OK, this is it, I'm going to be spending a lot of time around Spanish speakers. I'm finally going to learn some Spanish. (I should mention here that I took two years of the minimum required high school Spanish plus two semesters in college. It's not like I wasn't previously exposed to it.) Indeed, many of my girlfriend's friends are also from Latin America. Further, many of them are writers and poets in their native tongue. They are also by and large wonderful people, so when I'm around, they speak in my language. I'm grateful, of course, but I also have an awareness that they are doing me a favor, that they'd rather be speaking Spanish.

I regularly attend something called Palabra Pura, a bilingual spoken poetry and literature series that takes place above a Puerto Rican restaurant in Humboldt Park. That doesn't mean that everything is presented twice - it means that the writers use the language in which they can best express themselves. Many are Latinos, born in the US, growing up speaking English in public, Spanish at home. And then, of course, there is Spanglish, that fluid movement between two poles, using the one that has exactly the right word. Unlike music, there are only words for me to process at Palabra Pura. So, when Spanish predominates, I struggle, listening intently, catching random words, missing meaning. I've come to realize that I am missing the meaning of all that music as well.

I've begun to think that I'm suffering from the Michael Jordan syndrome. You know, Michael Jordan. Supremely athletic, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. At the age of 30, he decided that he wanted to play professional baseball. It was a disaster. See, Mike didn't learn how to hit a curve ball when he was young, and by 30 it was too late.

I'm way past 50. When I took those Spanish classes 30 something years ago, I was more interested in getting by than learning. I had no curiosity. I barely squeaked out of high school on schedule, and though I got a bit more serious in college, I still did the minimum, relying on superior test scores instead of hard work and studying. Now, I fear, I've lost the ability to make up for my youthful negligence. I look at my Rosetta Stone headphones, curled up on my nightstand, gathering dust, and I'm frustrated and angry with myself.

I generally celebrate that which I don't know, an essential component of learning. When it comes to language, though, I feel the presence of this thick, gauzy wall. It gives a little bit from time to time, only to close up once again, with me on this side and knowledge on the other. There's a whole world out there that I might never quite understand because of this, nuances I'll never grasp, poetry I'll never feel.

I suppose I'll keep muddling along and perhaps, with time, the gauze will begin to wear thin and show a few holes, revealing the mysteries beyond. Until then, I'll keep pointing and signaling.