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| Los Texmaniacs |
Music
festivals are one of my favorite things in the entire world, 'world'
music especially, music originating outside the dominant
Anglo-American English-language pop juggernaut that gets exported
everywhere. It's nice when it even trickles down to the provinces,
further proof that good things can happen outside large cities.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, is good for that.
It's
nice to hear what traditional cultures can do on their own, and its
especially nice to not have to search so long and hard for it at the
source. You already know how hard it is to go to Cuba. And these
days you might find more Malian music outside the country than
within. That's convenient, considering that the country itself is
largely destroyed, victim of Muslim fundamentalism. Mali is one of
world music's greatest success stories.
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| Oumar Konate' |
That's
where Oumar Konate' is from, and he was one of the brightest lights
shining at the recent Globalquerque! Music Festival, held last
weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Oumar pays tribute to tradition,
while simultaneously ripping it to shreds, shredding his electric
guitar, that is. The acoustic set is just a warm-up of things to
come. By the time he's finished, you're probably wondering if Jimi
Hendrix was by any chance reincarnated on the continent of Africa,
and if by any chance he speaks French now.
Other
highlights from the show included Los Texmaniacs, featuring local
'Querque boy Max Baca and his 22 y.o. nephew (if I remember
correctly), Josh Baca. That kid is good. I think Flaco may have met
his Gordo (no, he's not really fat, just big). This is conjunto
tejano at its finest, and southern Texas's gift to music,
forming—with Appalachian country, Delta Blues, and southern
Louisiana's jazz, zydeco, Cajun folk and Creole—a musical continuum
across the USA's poverty-stricken southern states that reconfirms
their preeminent role in the country's larger culture and cultural
legacy to the world as a whole.
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| Beto Jamaica |
Rey
Vallenato Beto Jamaica (or something like that) was one of the
unexpected surprises of the event, reaffirming Vallenato's emergence
upon the world music scene, and its likely descendence directly from
African sources, apart from its now-trademark accordion lead. It's
too bad they didn't jam with Los Texmaniacs. That could be nice,
since the two are quite similar in many ways.
The
Afro-Cuban All-Stars shined from behind, and brighter than most, they
at the very origins of 'world music' or at least its second
post-Marley wave, right there with Ry Cooder and the Buena Vista
Social Club, they with roots going back into the origins of
pre-Castro Cuban son, salsa, rumba, etc., you name it, led by Juan de
Marcos Gonzales, that guy with the dreads and the funny hat (dude!).
It doesn't get much better than that, even if the cast of characters
has gotten a bit nepotistic over the years, i.e. two daughters and a
wife, at last count. They're good, and this is one of the few 'world
music' acts that are true headliners.
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| Afro-Cuban All-Stars |
Then
there's Gaby Moreno, something of an anomaly at a 'world-music'
festival, since that isn't really her brand. She's playing all
angles, I guess, but at her best singing in Spanish and riffing
ethnically on that guitar that's almost as big as her own petite
Guatemalan frame. She's squarely on Lila Downs' turf (if not in
face) with songs like “Quizas” ('perhaps', sounds better than
'maybe'), but she can do St. Vincent, too, without all the artsy
fartsy crap, or Julieta Venegas, substitute guitar for accordion. Or
maybe she'll just carve out her own niche. English-language indie
pop can pay off big with the right songs.
But
that's not all. Rocky Dawuni, “the future of reggae” (my words)
was there, as was Czech Republic's Dva ('two', at last count), who
tend to make up their own high-energy music and their own lyrics to
their own languages in a way that is best described as, “Go.
Listen.” Then there's the venerable French group LoJo, who, in
addition to their own tunes, have done much to bring Mali into the
scene, and assorted cowboy, Indian and Latino groups that put the
'quirky' in Albuquerque.
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| Robert 'Tree' Cody's dancers |
And
that's what I liked best, specifically Robert 'Tree' Cody and his
all-Indian dancers, in which he's basically bringing the Indian
pow-wow circuit on stage. This is something of a direct descendent
of the Wild West shows of yore and something that you just can't
duplicate on YouTube. Everything else can be retrieved from multiple
sources, downloaded and duplicated. You really can't download an
Indian dance. Albuquerque's nice in September. Go.
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