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.
Category: Writing
“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.
The 10 Rock Commandments Of DavÃd Garza, or, The Book Of Dah-veed:
For Minnesota-Mexicana Lila Downs, the “standing o” at the Old Town School stands for resounding cries of “OTRA!” — as in, “Sing another song!” — echoing from the audience which is at its feet applauding for more from the spellbinding chanteuse. Her five-piece band weaves new-age-textured splices of pre-Columbian-flavored world music with lite jazz as backdrop for the female lead’s invocations of native spirituality and Latino social conscience to interpret Mexican/American folk music. As performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña would say, Downs goes from Aztec to hi-tech without skipping a beat.
“En la vida, dos cosas ciertas/Son la muerte y el cambio,” say Ozomatli on “Dos Cosas Ciertas,” a mix of Cuban son with drum ‘n’ bass rap, from their second album Embrace The Chaos (Interscope). The Los Angeles combo of seven musicians (including MC and DJ) seem older than their actual ages (ranging from 25 to 34 years old) and certainly more mature than the band’s lifespan (going back to 1995) to be commenting with such sonic eloquence on the certainties of death and change as life’s only guarantees. Typical for the group, this observation goes beyond existential weariness; personal change intersects with social upheaval, while physical death can be the culmination of spiritual and moral fatality, unless one takes action to create meaning and seize dignity in life.
“What is the influence of Latin rhythms on my music?” David Sánchez says during an interview between sets. “That’s a hard question — I think in lines and melodies when I’m playing, but I’m feeling rhythm even when I’m doing bar lines.” After playing two shows at Jazz Showcase during a five-night stint, he’s charged up as he taps out a typical Puerto Rican plena rhythm with his hands to demonstrate how he absorbs the folk music of his native island while interpreting straight-ahead jazz from Wayne Shorter, opening up a Caribbean-folk/urban-American jazz dialogue with free influences from Ornette Coleman. “Plena and straight-ahead jazz have been done,” he explains, “so I want to give a new vibe to plena and a new vibe to jazz.”
War-torn, bombed-out urban landscapes give root to plants and trees that sprout from the rubble, according to San Diego artists Helen and Newton Harrison. The Trummerflora Collective take the Harrison’s name for this foliage as nom-de-guerre, though their improvisational excursions are equal parts explosive-plow and seed. Coagulating around common interests in free jazz and world music, seven post-national musicians found their niche together as Trummerflora while fomenting interest in experimental, non-commercial sound-artistry in late-’90s San Diego.
A return to the solo acoustic peregrinations of 1998’s Don’t Blame Me, Marc Ribot’s recent Saints (Atlantic) likewise takes standards and contemporary compositions as conceptual springboards for wending, warped sound-art that realizes the potential sonic surprise hidden in the corners of every melodic digression, missed note, and false start. What Ribot does with his arrangements of such traditional pieces as “Go Down Moses” parallels his instrumental attack, actualizing peripheral parts of the guitar that others might only hit on accidentally — for example, using the body as a treasure trove of percussive possibility, plinking and plunking out harmonic netherscapes from sections of the strings not (necessarily) meant for strumming, setting pickups along the fingerboard to catch incidental scratches and hangnail-sustain shakes, and extending the use of plastic or fingernail pick to tools and toys.
