Sunday, June 29, 2008

WORLD MUSIC WEEKEND IN LA—TOO HOT!




The first weekend of summer here in LA last weekend was one for the record books, temperatures climbing way up into triple digits in the valleys and not much better downtown. I usually avoid such temperature extremes, but you get used to it after a few days and weekends aren’t so bad anyway what with less traffic and turmoil. The Seun Kuti show Friday night at Cal Plaza was even a bit warm though quite tolerable, considering the immense talent of dad Fela’s ‘Egypt 80’ band and son Seun himself. Saturday would be a challenge, though. Pasadena sounds cool whether it actually is or not, so my wife Tang and I said “damn the torpedoes” and charged with little trepidation out into the noonday LA sun. The choice of Pasadena was fairly easy since I’m a huge fan of Dengue Fever and also wanted to check out the Mexican groups there. Otherwise I might’ve seriously considered the ‘Bayou Fest’ in Long Beach, featuring the likes of zydeco stars Terrence Simien, Savoy Doucet and Geno Delafose, with plenty of Cajun, creole, jazz, and blues also for their diverse populace. Those bayous run deep after all, way up into north Louisiana, too. Downtown there was a major Latino reggae/ska fest called LA Sound Systems going on also, featuring groups from seven countries, including Maldita Vecindad and Anti-Doping (I expect names like that from Thailand, not South America). I’m no huge ska fan and never heard of ‘Reggae en Espanol’ (not to be confused with Reggaeton), and that festival was fifty bucks a head, so you know…

The others were free, including a ‘solstice’ 60’s festival in Santa Monica featuring Cubensis and other nostalgia groups. The first-year Pasadena fest was the only one with a ‘world’ stage, though, logical since it is affiliated with the multi-national ‘fete de la musique’ and partially sponsored by France through its local Alliance Francaise. It wasn’t exactly another Festivale Internacionale in Lafayette, Louisiana, but still a good start. For those who don’t know France is a major supporter of world music, part of its on-going efforts to promote Francophony and French-speaking countries around the world, most of them in the West African world music heartland. Unfortunately the world stage got the short end of the stick, located far from the others, and without proper shade, no small consideration on a triple-digit day. I hope that’s improved for next year. World music has enough problems without suffering promotional slights.

But the show must go on of course, so we all persevered in the heat. I got there in time for the acclaimed Tijuana group Nortec Collective, but found the experience, though not the music, disappointing. There’s something to be said for a group going Euro-style with a guy on stage tweaking the knobs of his laptop computer, but two of them, hunched over like a couple of video-game geeks? This is uninspiring. I go to a festival, or concert, to hear live music, not ‘sampling.’ A video display doesn’t help much in the bright daylight either of course, so this show would’ve been much better in the dark and indoors, where DJ’s have long established their turf with similar displays. Fortunately there was a continuous live accordion accompaniment with occasional horns, so that helped keep things lively enough for the mostly Anglo crowd. Make a laptop shaped like a guitar for on-stage use, though, and then you might have something.

Dengue Fever came on next, looking like assorted apostles, fishermen and farmers following Cambodian lead singer Ch’hom Nimol to the altar of entertainment, there to make sweet and savory offerings to lesser gods as they play out their fantasies in real life until it becomes legend. For the uninitiated the story goes that these guys discovered 60’s Cambodian pop while on a backpack tour there in the 90’s and subsequently delayed while recovering from… guess what? Dengue Fever. I myself listened to and watched old ‘Cambodian Bandstand’ videotapes for hours while in Sihanoukville; they’re killer. From there the Holtzmann brothers perused the Cambodian clubs of Long Beach looking for a lead singer, until they finally found Ch’hom Nimol. The rest is history, a slow climb to stardom, though poor Nimol’s flower looked ready to wither in last Saturday’s heat. Nevertheless it was a typically brilliant set, complete with encore. These guys write their own songs now, in Khmer and English, and are ready to break big on the world stage.

AfroBeat Down followed with some danceable rhythms, but by then I was hot and hungry and ready to get back to the main action on the other side of town. There the Raveonettes were finishing up their rave-on set to audience applause, so we grabbed a pizza to await the Kinky show. Kinky, like Nortec, is a Mexican group, this time from Monterrey. Like Nortec they play their own unique brand of fusion techno/ranchero, but unlike Nortec, it’s all live, and they had a large appreciative crowd. Considering there were six stages scattered around town, it was impossible to see everything, and world music is a large umbrella (more about that later), but Bobby Rodriguez’ large band closing the show at the jazz stage was probably the highlight for me. For one thing acts like this are hard to find these days. These guys, many advanced in age, were right out of the fifties and the heyday of Cuban-inspired Latin jazz. I almost expected a wacky redhead to wander out from the wings at any moment. For another thing, these guys are good, a sound as crisp and full as the rapidly cooling evening air. You can go to Hollywood Bowl and hear similar yet more famous more expensive music, but I don’t think you would hear much better. Arturo Sandoval’s got nothing on these guys.

This weekend may be a little less festive, but there’s no shortage of music. Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s Minister of Culture and veteran musical journeyman dating back to the Bossa Nova days, is headlining the Hollywood with quirky Indie-Folksters Devendra Banhart as part of KCRW’s ‘World Festival.’ They didn’t call it ‘World Music Festival’ so I won’t waste any space questioning their motives right here right now, but I’ll probably check out Kusun Ensemble and Quetzal at the Levitt Pavilion in Pasadena on Friday and Saturday nights respectively. Like most of the best things in life, it’s free.

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