Since its performance space opened in 1990, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum has featured artists across the spectrum of time and tradition, from folkloric to avant-garde, through regular events and spring/fall festival series. This season’s ninth annual Del Corazón Mexican Performing Arts Festival features a diverse multimedia lineup, including a solid musical component with two Chicago debuts.
Category: Music Reviews
People danced! Though the roots of the music take that for granted, ¡Cubanismo!’s recent visit to Chicago thankfully found a venue that welcomed and encouraged a full floor of couples and gyrating loners to feel the rhythms moving through their bodies. Cuban musicians from storied groups, such as Orquesta Aragón and Irakere, have appropriately been hosted at the Chicago Theatre or the Symphony Center, and though such swank venues seem appropriate for the acts’ distinguished profile, these auditoriums tend to quell dancing unless someone ventures to crowd the aisles with a partner. But the Park West made for comfortable digs for those sipping at cocktails and venturing out onto the floor.
“I don’t understand a word of Spanish,” says Abstruse Tone (aka Seth Rich) of local hip-hoppers Earatik Statik. Neither does his partner-in-rhyme C-Lo (Carlos Polk), but that doesn’t stop them from grabbing the mic and freestyling in honor of tonight’s guests from the Oeste Side of Buenos Aires who, depending on perspective, are probably the farthest Down South group to come through Chicago. El Sindicato Argentino and Earatik Statik speak a common language of beats and flow from the mother tongue of hip-hop; neither outfit understands the specifics of what each other is saying tonight, but they embrace like homies meeting at a turntable land-bridge. “I can tell the production and rhymes are real tight,” says Abstruse Tone after ripping it on stage, “and they got a good mix of commercial and underground going on.”
A co-worker once summed up Shakira after “Whenever, Wherever” molested our ears for the 20th time on the same day: “She’s the Brazilian Britney.” “But she’s Columbian,” I corrected, and then I immediately felt like an ass. What ‘s the difference in this context, really?
The boys of Kardoid play music from their ranchera-loving parents’ nightmares. Mostly Mexican-American teenagers native to Chicago, these four up-and-coming rockers prefer Slipknot and Molotov — bands that can sound like airplanes taking off in their near-Midway neighborhood — instead of the rural ballads and bandas of México lindo y querido.
Like Ozomatli, San Diego’s B-Side Players observe the fateful September 11th release of their latest album, which in this case is a full-length debut for a septet that has been moving booties since 1993. Given the group’s new-school, pan-Latino-groove similarities to los Ozos from L.A., the disc’s title seems to describe a cultural phenomenon rather than political program.
An interesting future experiment with international roots music will someday feature a bluegrass rustic on the banjo, a Cuban guajiro on the tres, a Puerto Rican jibaro on the cuatro, a Mexican ranchero on bajo sexto, and perhaps a Tejano on accordion. Maybe such singers as Freddy Fender and Ibrahim Ferrer will contribute vocals. After all, country’s country, no matter what hill the billy calls home, and developments in alternative “insurgent” country music, for example, point to the continuity of roots folkways as they adapt to contemporary sounds, historical change, and, in some cases, cultural mix.
“There have come to pass these agents of deconstruction and thank God they’re here or else everybody’d be on a square lunch and nobody’d eat,” says Chicago percussionist Kahil El’Zabar.
Twenty-four-year-old Pilsen poet AidÈ Rodriguez seems “stuck between cornfields and prickly pears,” as she says in one of her compositions, looking down the barrel of a microphone with rows of audience on one side and her own arsenal of words on the other. She has the tough job of opening for middle-aged veteran David Hernández and his perennial spoken-word combo, Street Sounds, at their CD release party for Satin City Serenade (Street Sounds Media Group). Her poems evoke images of nopales wrapped with barbed wire rooted in Midwestern concrete, referencing indigenous and Illinois literary touchstones in the same breath. But she doesn’t want to get stuck on her own words — she just wants to get offstage so she can watch the main attraction. Her unassuming presence fits the evening’s theme — “Poets Across Generations,” as the Guild dubs it — because she is the humble rookie whom the elders always put out first to break the ice.
Brazilian hardcore veterans Ratos de Porão (Basement Rats) spit metal and bone splinters on this “Holiday In São Paolo” romp, managing in a spare 16 minutes and 55 seconds to barnstorm such topics as ethnocide (on the title track, “Cannibal Civil War”) and corporate science (“Biotech Is Godzilla,” copped from Jello Biafra and Sepultura), while throwing in goofs on samba and poser metal/hardcore.
