This Mexican walks into a bar in Brooklyn...

There’s a tendency to view Brooklyn through the lens of hipsterdom. You know, white millennial creative types who populate formerly gritty neighborhoods, driving up real estate prices and driving out long-time residents, gradually transforming a formerly diverse ethnic neighborhood into a homogenous land of pour over specialty coffee, black frame glasses and mountain man beards.

There’s a glimmer of truth in all that. Neighborhoods do change as young people move to them. Sadly, this often causes rents to go up as long-time residents leave for someplace more affordable. What is also true, but not usually accounted for in these stories, is that these creative types are also surprisingly diverse. In some ways, Brooklyn is as it ever was: A destination for immigrants. Two of my favorite ‘world music’ bands, Chicha Libre and Red Baraat, call Brooklyn home. Dev Hynes, an Afro-Brit who records as Blood Orange, makes edgy yet strangely elegant 21^st century R&B. The Dutty Arts DJ collective mashes up all sorts of Latin American sounds to keep dancefloors hopping. The empress of carioca funk, Zuzuka Poderosa, also calls Brooklyn home, and even René Pérez of the Puerto Rican duo Calle 13 is rumored to have a place there. The close proximity of these musicians to one another all but insures that music coming out of Brooklyn often draws from unlikely sources.

And the, there’s Rana Santacruz, a creative if there ever was one. He was born in Mexico City and led an alternative rock band there called La Catrina. That band had an affinity for genre-jumping, sometimes in the course of a single song. Moving to Brooklyn in 2002 only accelerated Santacruz’s eclectic tendencies. He released a well-received recording in 2010 called Chicavasco and has just come out with a second, Por Ahi. 

What Rana Santacruz has most in common with many other Brooklyn artists is a drive to make music on his own terms. Colors and styles that engage him work their way into his canvas, but his music isn’t calculated to cross over in the direction of the mainstream. Instead, it asks politely that you travel a bit to get to where he’s at. If you do, there’s much to reward you.

I’m going to refrain from a track-by-track analysis, but depending on where you drop the metaphorical needle, you are going to hear bits of several musical styles going on at once. French chanson, bluegrass breakdowns, Celtic sea chanties, East European polkas and more are interwoven with Mexican and other Latin American forms like son jarocho, mariachi, cumbia and tango. This all might play out as an amusing diversion if not for the fact that Santacruz is a first rate songwriter of the storyteller variety, vividly creating characters with their various passions, desires and obsessions. In an Anglo context, both Randy Newman and Tom Waits are masters of this form. Santacruz aspires to be among them, and judging from the songs on Por Ahi, he’s got the chops to pull it off.

All of these stories are in Spanish, but if you’re an English dominant whose grasp of other languages is shaky (yes, my hand is raised here) you can follow along with a translated lyric booklet. To be sure, Santacruz has not abandoned Mexico. Rather, he’s expanded its cultural reach and found a new context in which an old Mexican form—the corrido—can flourish. The music is resolutely acoustic, but does not lack for energy. Banjo and fiddle figure prominently, as do mariachi horns. Santacruz leads on accordion, and though he’s no Flaco Jimenez, the instrument provides just the right amount of color to enliven the arrangements and lend credibility to other genres like tango, Irish reels and Gypsy jazz.

As long as Brooklyn keeps producing music like this, I’ll keep listening.

 

Only in Chicago

Only in Chicago. As a declaration, I realize that's likely not true. I know there are other cities around the globe where immigrants and the descendents of immigrants make up the bulk of the population. And while it is often said that Chicago is the most segregated city in the United States, I find that in the circles in which I move, that is not quite the case.

One of those weekends is coming up that remind me that I indeed live in a startlingly diverse city, even if the communities in which any given population resides tend to lean one way or the other. In a way, that's good. My life is enriched by the fact that I can spend time in neighborhoods that are heavily Mexican, African-American, Indian, Puerto Rican or Polish, knowing that they will be filled with businesses that cater to local residents and bring delight to me. Or, I can go to Albany Park, where the Middle Eastern, Central American and Korean storefronts are lined up one after another.

Ethnic enclaves are a treasure. It is only when economics and politics force people into one setting and discourage movement to another that it becomes problematic. That sort of thing brews distrust and fear and has a way of insuring that undeserved communities remain that way. But I digress. Sometimes I sit down to write one thing, and another emerges. I'll get back on point now.

I'll be running around a lot this weekend in a way that makes me glad I live in Chicago.

Tonight, a band I first heard at a street festival in my neighborhood less than two years ago celebrates the release of their first single and full length CD with a show at Martyrs' in the North Center neighborhood. Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orchestra started out as a electric cumbia band, modelling their sound and attitude around chicha, a variant of the Colombian music once it reached Peru in the 1970s and adapted by an indigenous urbanized population. That sound is still at the heart of the band, but it has taken a trip around the rest of Latin America as well, not surprising when you consider that its members hail from Texas (yes, I'm calling Texas Latin America - more on that later), Mexico, Panama and Puerto Rico. Each of them is something of a folkloric specialist in their respective traditions, but together they are a hard charging rock band with a fat, danceable groove. In something of an odd twist, they have invited a popular mambo orchestra to open for them. If I have the story right, the uncle of Dos Santos' Puerto Rican conga player is a trombone player in the mambo group. All in the family. It will be a long night. I'll wear comfortable shoes.

Tomorrow night, though, is when I'll really get a workout.

First I'll be running out to the Hermosa neighborhood where the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center (I've written about SRBCC before - you can check that here.) is presenting a big band tribute to perhaps the greatest of all Puerto Rican songwriters, Rafael Hernández, who passed away in 1965.  Humboldt Park born Puerto Rican bandleader Edwin Sánchez has put together a 14 piece orchestra of crack Chicago musicians to handle these classic songs. That's only half of it. The center is bringing in the son of Rafael Hernández, Alejandro "Chali" Hernández, to sing his father's songs. In the process, two, perhaps even three generations of Puerto Ricans, island and mainland born, will come together for one historic event. Tradition and cultural identity handed down, from generation to generation.

That, however, is not the last historic musical event of the night, nor is it the only one with strong cultural significance. I'll end my night in Lincoln Square at the Old Town School of Folk Music where two of Chicago's prominent ethnic communities, the Irish and the Mexicans, come together for something of a musical history lesson. The Mexican folkloric group Sones de México and the Irish Music School of Chicago will tell the story of the St. Patrick's Battalion (Los San Patricios). The battalion was a group of largely Irish immigrants who, stung by discrimination, found themselves sympathizing and then siding with Mexico during what we call the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Mexicans view it differently and call it the unjust invasion of Mexico by North America. It was a land grab, plain and simple, and Mexico lost. As a result, most of California, all of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and much of Texas became the United States, and Mexico became much smaller.

There I go digressing again.

Anyway, the St. Patrick's Battalion fought bravely but lost, and many of them were hanged as deserters.  The concert, then, will combine Mexican son and Irish jigs to tell their story. There will be songs both lively and lamenting. There will be dancing from both a Mexican dance company and Irish dancers. It's all not as incongruent as it sounds. Both traditions utilize 6/8 time, fiddles, harps, accordions and toe tapping. Both are handed down generation to generation, lest they be lost. And both are, at heart, ballad forms that tell stories. This will be quite a story. Chances are if you grew up in the U.S. you know nothing about this, but in Mexico Los San Patricios are heroes.

I'm not saying Chicago is the only place this can happen. But we uniquely situated in the middle of the country, and wave after wave of immigrants (including my grandparents) have been arriving and building lives here since before the city was incorporated.

¡Todos somos inmigrantes!

A little relief

It's been something of a grim spring and summer in Chicago. People are being shot and killed at an alarming rate. Monday morning headlines have taken on the regularity of box scores or opening weekend movie grosses. They are just that dependable.

Much of this carnage has been taking place in a concentration of poverty stricken neighborhoods where historical patterns of segregation going back over half a century have all but assured that those neighborhoods stay poor and violent. Rogers Park, where I live, has suffered a bit too, though nothing on the grand scale of parts of the south and west sides. I live in a "mixed" neighborhood in every sense of the word. There is a vast diversity of incomes, races and cultures. There is also a pronounced strain of progressive politics and community engagement that dates back to the 1970s. We've been gentrified, suffered setbacks, and re-gentrified. That progressive streak keeps the gentrification from getting out of control and, at the same time, keeps the violence mostly in check. It's a delicate balance, but one that we are generally pretty good at. This year, though, it began to feel that the violence, even here, was making a comeback.

People are on edge.

Devon & Glenwood, July 12

Hell, I'm on edge. Just a little over a week ago, on a Saturday afternoon, a man was shot and killed on Devon Avenue, just kitty-corner from a hip farm-to-table restaurant that I often eat at. I have no doubt that at least a few diners were still finishing up their brunch on the patio. I heard about it before the media reports broke because my girlfriend was on her way to my place in her car, and a bevy of police vehicles blocked her way. When she asked an officer what happened, the reply was (and I'm paraphrasing here), "One gang banger killed another."

Not quite. The gang member might have been gunning for a rival, but his indiscriminate hail of bullets found someone else. Later on, I learned that our alderman, who was doing some political canvassing right around the corner, heard the shots and saw the killer running away. My girlfriend, because she's chronically late to most engagements, was not in the middle of this. But she could have been.

A couple days later, I was walking up to a cafe that I often go to for both the quality of their coffee and the community engagement that they practice. It's a very cool place and is located on Howard Street, which is still trying to shake a decades old reputation for shadiness and danger. Someone was shot on Howard just a few months ago.

That's when the edge got me. There's no dramatic punctuation to this part of the story, just the realization of the creeping unease that I was feeling walking this same street I have walked a hundred times.

Celebrate Clark Street

This isn't what I was thinking about last night, though. Because last night was the conclusion of an annual party that we throw called Celebrate Clark Street. Here is a festival that indeed celebrates everything that is good about Rogers Park, namely, its stunning diversity. It's about music and food and culture and dancing. It's a profoundly family affair. I've gone for so many years I almost take it for granted, but this year it felt especially powerful. My girlfriend remarked that attendance seemed higher than previous years. Another friend, a Mexican-American who lives in Lincoln Square and was visiting my 'hood for the first time, was most impressed by the family atmosphere.

Thousands of people gathered along a three block stretch of Clark Street, and the availability of cheaply priced Modelo Especial and Dos XX assured that many of them, including myself, were fairly well inebriated. There were definitely a lot of people acting the fool. But there wasn't a single fight. And nobody got shot. By the time Ricardo Lemvo and Makina Loca played their final notes for an impromptu conga line that featured, improbably, a life size cutout of the World's Most Interesting Man, I was exhausted, sweaty, elated and, I realized, relieved.

Ricardo Lemvo, sweaty dancers, the World's Most Interesting Man

Collectively, it was what we needed. Rogers Park residents have been holding their breath and treading cautiously for months. And I'm certainly not implying that being alert to possible danger is not an essential component to urban life. It is, every single damn day. But another essential component is community, and still another, hope.

Rogers Park has plenty of those, too. I wouldn't live anywhere else.

Celebrate Clark Street: The Music

I recently wrote about where I live and why I like it.  I concluded the post by mentioning that a festival called Celebrate Clark Street will take place in my neighborhood this weekend and that I was looking forward to attending it.  I was also asked by arteyvidachicago.com and chicagomusic.org to write a preview of the festival itself, focusing mostly on the music.

Here's the beginning of the preview. To read the rest, click on the link at the end.  Enjoy!
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Fans of world music would be wise to take the Red Line north to Rogers Park this weekend. That’s where the 8th Annual Celebrate Clark Street Festival takes place on Clark between Morse and Estes. The neighborhood is as diverse and eclectic as they come, and the fest embraces this with food, art and music.

About that music: For the past three years, it’s been programmed by David Chavez of the Chicago based global arts organization Sound Culture, which has brought world music artists to Mayne Stage and other venues around the city. Thus, what was already a fun street party has recently turned into a de facto world music festival that ranks among the best of the city’s musical offerings.

Some highlights include:

Click here to read the rest.

Lament for a lost festival.

Once upon a time (in the very recent past) there was something called Music Without Borders, an 8 week series of world music concerts that took place on Thursday evenings at Chicago's beautiful outdoor concert facility, Pritzker Pavilion.  It was programmed by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, an agency that, sadly, no longer exists in its previous form. Why it no longer exists is a complicated tale of political and bureaucratic intrigue, but that's not my point. At least today...

Those summer Thursdays were when I loved Chicago the most, and reveled in my good fortune to live in such a cultural crossroads. Pritzker has seating for a couple thousand people. The lawn behind it is a vast picnic area that can hold several thousand more.  Music Without Borders usually booked two artists per concert, and was curated in such a way that the music of each, while from different parts of the globe, complimented each other, allowing you to make the connection. Brazilian samba and African pop, Gypsy jazz and Congolese rumba, Cuban son and Indian bhangra. As a result, you had a sort of gathering of the tribes in the audience made up of the ethnic groups represented on stage, fans of world music like me, tourists, and folks who simply worked downtown and wandered over to see what was up.  And just like that, you had 6,000 people who shared little besides their common humanity dancing and sweating together.

It was glorious while it lasted. The series was discontinued at the end of 2011. There's still music at Pritzker, though. A Monday night series called Downtown Sound has picked up some of the slack, mixing in a little world music alongside adventurous pop, rock and hip-hop. Theoretically, I'm in favor of the concept. "World music" can be every bit equal to and as forward thinking as the best rock or jazz, so why shunt it off into its own little box? Music has always traveled back and forth. Fela Kuti listened to James Brown. Bob Marley listened to Fela Kuti. The thing is, the minds behind Music Without Borders knew this too, and they put it into practice 8 times a year, with a quality so consistently high that you didn't even have to look at a schedule to see who was playing. Just show up on Thursday and enjoy!

The incredible Malian singer, songwriter and guitarist Fatoumata Diawara headlined Downtown Sound this past Monday. Though rooted in the traditional music of Mali, her approach is completely her own. Her band churned out polyrhythmic jazz-tinged hard rock (or was it the other way around?) behind her highly charismatic singing, dancing and magnetic stage presence. It was stunning. And yet, the audience seemed a bit homogenous, not the
gathering of the tribes I cherished. That probably has something to do with the way Downtown Sound is marketed. Still, you did have thousands of people dancing and sweating together, and they were doing it to African music. That's no small thing.

I miss Music Without Borders, and I hope the city figures out a way to revive it. Our mayor seems obsessed with the idea of culture as a way to boost tourism dollars, and I'm all for it. What better way to market Chicago as a world class destination than a regular showcase of world class music?

Home is where the heart is.

I'm not sure that I can adequately express my fondness for the neighborhood that I live in. Rogers Park is a sublime combination of inner-city grit crossed with the atmosphere of a beach town. To get there, you head north along Lake Michigan out of downtown Chicago on the train. It's a fairly long ride, and when it's crowded, it can be pretty unpleasant. You'll pass through many neighborhoods on the way there, some wealthy, some not so much: Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Uptown, Edgewater, until the tracks angle slightly to the west, following the shore. Rogers Park hugs the lake, long and thin. Loyola is the first stop, adjacent to its namesake university. Morse is next, a commercial crossroads. Jarvis is mostly residential, Howard is the city limit.  

I moved here about 6 years ago, but until I did, I was a little afraid of it. The median income is around $39,000. That's not an especially low figure, but it doesn't adequately convey the sheer variance of the community's demographic. Walking around, you begin to see a fair amount of grand old city homes and rehabbed vintage apartments and condos, even some new construction. But the view from the elevated train has long been of blighted commercial strips and the rickety back porches of brick three flats. When you get off of the train, you see the community's diversity. There are a lot of low income families in Rogers Park, and a good many of them are immigrants. Poorer neighborhoods are often like that because they are affordable.  All big cities have their equivalent of a Rogers Park.  Heck, Chicago has more than one, although a few enclaves have already been extinguished through gentrification.  Somehow, though, RP has become a truly mixed neighborhood, economically as well as ethnically. Maybe it's the parks and beaches that line the shore, providing a soothing glimpse of nature on an evening stroll and a gathering place for families on summer Sunday afternoons. Or maybe we just got lucky when the real estate market crashed, slowing the pace of condo conversions and in the process preserving the neighborhood's character.

It has what urban planners call a high walk score: just about everything you need is a short walk away, and when more people are out walking, neighborhoods are safer. That's not to say we're crime free, quite the contrary, but most of it falls in the "oh, well, that's city life" property crime category.  I'd like to think that we're too far away from the action downtown (and that miserably long train ride) to ever fully gentrify. At the same time, I'm grateful for the positive changes that have occurred: crack houses wrested away from negligent landlords and converted to fashionable housing, new restaurants and nightspots, renovated streetscapes, farmer's markets. Friends, neighbors and merchants tell dark tales of "10 years ago", confirming my initial, outdated qualms about moving here.

Perhaps the best way to describe Rogers Park is a peek inside my local grocer. There's plenty of organic produce, but there are also ethnic staples like limes, 15 for a dollar. Lots of produce (chayote, plantains, jackfruit, casava) that you won't find at the supermarket. Tortillas share shelf space with kosher baked goods and Jamaican hard dough bread. Meat pies. Canned and bottled goods run the gamut from Hispanic to African to Caribbean. Dried chilis and Greek oregano. Chorizo and kielbasa. Free range chicken and cow foot. Yep, it's all here.

Clark Street is the main commercial strip, running parallel to the lake about a half mile to the west. It's not the prettiest of boulevards. Every block has a few vacant storefronts.  But what is there is fabulous. Packed with modest ethnic restaurants, it turns into an aromatic paradise around dinnertime. And there's not a Starbucks in sight. OK, to be fair, I don't think there are any cafes on Clark, but you'll find an indie coffee paradise just down intersecting Morse, Jarvis and Howard and along Sheridan Road by the University.  OK, maybe one Starbucks.

We (officially) gather on Clark Street once a year to celebrate our diversity with food, music, beer, art and kids activities. In recent years, Celebrate Clark Street's two music stages have turned this modest neighborhood street party into a de facto world music festival thanks to the energetic talents of David Chavez, a DJ and head of the fledgling global arts organization Sound Culture. This weekend, my neighbors and I will be out in force to dance, drink and, yes, celebrate. I can't wait.

You can come, too. We like to share.