THE OTHER LA: CAMBODIA TO COLOMBIA, HIGH DENGUE FEVER & THE VALLENATO FLU

Oh, but last weekend was another sublime compilation of subtle pleasures in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula aka ‘L-A’! It’s not all just mindless fun and games, though, of course. There is a strong educational aspect to it also, at least in the ‘world music’ genre that I specialize in (you might want to hedge your bets with ‘death metal’ though). So I started the weekend off early at MacArthur Park with the Korean troupe Noreum Machi. This is a classical Asian genre, not unlike the ‘classic folk’ genres that exist in many other Asian countries- especially the most heavily Chinese-influenced- from Vietnam to China to Japan. Interestingly these are the Asian countries with little or no ‘roots music’ left in their repertoires. Like the others, this one is also heavily percussive, though maybe less then Japanese ‘taiko’ drumming.

But I was most anxious to see Dengue Fever at the Pasadena Levitt Pavilion Friday night, after not totally getting my fix at Cal Plaza the week before. Partly that’s because it was a show split with Bassekou Kouyate, so not really a long enough set to fully take wings, and partly because I just happened to be sitting in a ‘dead zone’ where the chopped-up lower level creates wave interference and certain frequencies are simply canceled out, leaving hums and rumbles in the place of the intricate keyboard melodies that would otherwise occupy the space between Nimol’s high notes and Senon’s bass line… Fortunately acoustics were no problem at Levitt Pavilion in Pasadena. That’s why band-shells are shaped that way. A couple thousand warm bodies in the grass don’t hurt, either. And DF did not disappoint, even though their sax player wasn’t present. Local Khmers were out in force, too, at one point threatening to disturb the peace up front in the over-excitement of the occasion… and maybe an overdose of Mekong whiskey. Good vibes usually win over situations like that, though, and this was no exception. The set was excellent, and included several new songs… or at least ones that I haven’t heard before. I can’t wait for the new album scheduled for release in Spring 2010!

So Saturday night I went back to Cal Plaza for the Latino-themed three-way bill that included Ceci Bastida, Mr. Vallenato, and Nortec Collective. Ceci was first up and managed to get the crowd at least half-way up and on their feet. Ex-sidekick of Mex-pop superstar Julieta Venegas, Ceci has learned her lesson well, and- judging by the amount of time spent in LA- would presumably like to accomplish here exactly what Julieta has accomplished in Mexico itself. For regardless of how ‘indie’ her packaging may seem to us here, in Mexico itself, JV is pure pop, and has been for years. So with that turf largely taken, Ceci’s got her eyes on the big prize, I believe. The formula is not difficult- good songs, Latina cutie, lively Mex-pop band- of which they’ve got at least 2 of 3 down pat already. Now I love a girl wearing cowboy boots, but if Ceci kicks any higher and harder, then we may have to relocate her shows away from the San Andreas Fault. At one point she even brought out a friend dubbed ‘la reina de anarcumbia’- presumably for street cred- but she hit her stride with ‘Ya Me Voy’ - ‘I’m leaving; I’m gone; I’m outta’ here’ (you get the idea). When all her songs are THAT good, then she’ll be ready for Letterman. She DOES speak perfect English btw, so that’s no obstacle. The delivery systems may shift with the paradigm, but a hit’s still a hit…

Mr. Vallenato was up next, but as the turn-around time seemed lengthy, I wandered down to Pershing Square to see what was up. Big mistake. By the time I got back up to the water court, his set was half over, and he was cooking, I tell you- I mean COOKING- eggs, smothered in salsa. Now I don’t have much experience with vallenato except what I’ve heard from Very Be Careful and this selfsame Mr. V sitting in with an otherwise less-than-satisfying Colombian techno group a couple weeks ago, but nothing prepared me for this (and I have listened to Toto la Momposina also)! This guy- and band- can WAIL! If they’re as slick as VBC is earthy, then he is as accomplished on the accordion as many others are dilettantes. These are no oompah-oompah polkas, either btw. If this is salsified vallenato, then add another spoonful on my plate, por favor. I could listen to more of this… and kick muyself for missing part of his set.

Ah, but not to worry, because Mr. V will be back this Friday playing for the homies at MacArthur Park… and I won’t be late this time, either, I can assure you. So what about Nortech Collective (‘presents Bosstich and Fussible yada yada’) last Saturday? Well, my mama told me that if I have nothing good to say then say nothing, so… if you like listening to a tuba player and an accordionist playing minimalistic nortenos while videos screen overhead and two others (Bosstich and Fussible?) stand in front of a backdrop like two geeks in a trade-show booth… then go for it. A cada quien sus gustos. For my money, it’s all pretentious crap. So I aborted the mission after a short couple songs and went back to Pershing Square to catch what I could of the Bo Deans… and was pleasantly surprised. I like the ‘americana’ genre, too, you know… but usually for breakfast, indie rock to get cranking, jazz for lunch, then the rest of the world for the rest of the day…

In addition to the aforementioned ‘Mr. Vallenato’, this week’s best bets look like Katia Moraes and Sambaguru at the Westside Farmer’s Market on Friday and Charmaine Clamor at MacArthur on Saturday… sounds like ‘American Model’, you say? Sounds like that go down easy. Me, I’m thinking Oscar Hernandez at LACMA Saturday afternoon, maybe followed by Turtle Island Quartet at Cal Plaza…doing Hendrix? Oooh, that’s cheating.

AFRO-BEAT, AFRO-TRAD, AFRO-DIASPO, & A TOUCH OF FEVER IN LA

Well, it doesn’t get much better than this past weekend for variety and quality in the LA free music department, some of it expected, some out of the blue. I’ll have to admit that I almost got my rocks off prematurely with the Budos Band last Thursday night at McArthur Park. I went expecting nothing, but apparently KCRW has been playing these guys regularly, so there was a pretty good crowd out there. Now there’s a concept- LARGE CROWD AT MCARTHUR PARK! I’d like to be able to say that more often. Too often I’m the only guero in a sparse crowd of homies with hot dogs and pupusas. What do I know? I’ve been busy traveling around the world, and then have to turn off KCRW when it’s fund-raising time lest my guilt complex destroy me.

Budos Band is hot! Now I’ve always politely respected ‘afro-beat’, but never followed it too closely for one simple reason- nobody can match Fela. Not even Femi can match Fela, but he probably comes closest, he or brother Seun. Listening to the various pretenders has always been more an exercise in endurance than ecstasy. The Budos Band raise the bar a notch in the ‘other’ department, a good healthy notch. What’s the difference? With Fela there’s always a variable there that can’t be predicted… Fela’s personality. This is something that can’t be taught… though it can be learned. It may be something as simple as coming in on the off-beat on one song… or slightly biting the reed on the next. Once it’s written in, then it’s no longer the spontaneous variable that made it so exciting in the first place, that subtle flick of the tongue that drives you wild. Budo’s got it, but I’m hesitant to speculate on its origin. It just may be that organ, though, which gives it a sound not typical of Afro-beat bands, and may be as close as the genre can come to rock & roll without going to lead guitar, because then it’s no longer Afro-beat. I Hardiely recommend a listen.

Next night was the Big Night Out, Cal Plaza water court under the Perseid showers with Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba opening, to be followed by Dengue Fever, one of my all-time favorite fusionistas, mixing up classic Khmer pop, Ethiopian jazz, surf-rock, and God knows what else those guys- and gal- have got buzzing through their brains. Well Bassekou Kouyate is on something of a roll after sitting near the top of the European world music charts with ‘I Speak Fula’ for many months not so long ago, so he’s doing the roll-out tour now, trying to sell some tickets, since not even Billboard’s Top 10 means that many bucks any more, and certainly not the WMCE. If you want bucks you gotta pack in the butts, not CD’s. Ngoni Ba did not disappoint, though hardly due to Bassekou’s ngoni all by itself, of common ancestry with the banjo, for those interested in the musical genome project. This is one tight band, doing things with talking drums that should have been done long ago- playing lead- not just some curious lilting blips in the background. That Fula/Fulani tradition (Ali Farka also spoke Fula) is well placed to fill the gap between the incredible raw stuff now coming out of Tuareg country to the north and the more citified Keita/Diabate stuff coming out of Bamako and beyond.

An interesting ‘compare and contrast’ could be made with Saturday’s African diaspora band ‘Tabou Combo’, originally out of Haiti, now (mostly) New York. While both bands can certainly rock, Bassekou’s is still clearly tied to the African folk blues tradition. You can almost feel the trodden earth under your feet. Tabou, on the other hand- full of brass and balls- has been freed by the very slavery which produced it, free to experiment with other nearby sounds and influences, free to fly with something of an ‘island sound’ claiming allegiance to no one. While that term may seem rather generic, any other description would require so many hyphens that I probably wouldn’t pass the grammar-check. Better listen for yourself. I bet they’re a regular at SOB’s in NYC.

Then there’s Dengue Fever. Then there’s always Dengue Fever, I hope, notwithstanding the real contagious disease which is currently inflicting so much misery on my sometime-home of SE Asia. This band has simply got to be seen- and HEARD- to be believed. When Nimol breaks into that high-pitch Cambodian squeal so indicative of 60’s pop music there, I get a shiver up my spine that implies that I’m now entering another dimension. Unfortunately the mix didn’t seem quite right last Friday night, as I could hardly hear Ethan’s organ at all. That’s a rather important component of DF’s sound, to say the least. Fortunately they’ll be back at Levitt Pavilion in Pasadena THIS Friday, so that may necessitate a double-dip, something I would not normally do for any lesser band. Cal Plaza may simply not be the best place for their sound, as the acoustics are rather uneven there. I think it’s better upstairs, though you sacrifice any close-up visuals, hardly a loss with the spectacular fountain background. Besides DF, best bets this week look like Nortec Collective and Mr. Vallenato at Cal Plaza on Saturday night, maybe Ceci Bastida, too, Tijuana yes! C U there.

‘SLEEPWALKING’ DVD DOCUMENTS MULTI-KULTI FANTASY

So maybe you’re a college student who listens to ‘indie’ music and you’ve heard a novelty song or two recently that you liked from the Cambo-American rock-a-delic ‘world music’ band Dengue Fever. And maybe you figured this is another case of some foreign model-cum-singer-cum-actress raised on English language and white bread working with some American musicians to provide her some backup and some LA street cred while she tries to parlay her good looks and sweet voice into some sort of Hollywood E-tainment career? Once she’s got some press, then maybe she’ll revert to the standard Celine solution of middle-road mainstream generic English-language pop mixed with an exotic foreign accent, maybe become an Anggun for America? Think again. For one thing, the band found her, not the other way around. For another thing, Ms. Nimol doesn’t model or act, so far as I know. She’s the real thing, niang srey Kampuchea jahk Battambang who’s seen her share of reality, and I don’t mean ‘American Idol’. Finally, and most importantly, this band is first and foremost about the music, not any hype that might rise and fall with the tides. Hopefully you listened to more than the one or two songs that made the college radio circuit and found in the larger oeuvre something that made you want to know more… and listen again…

Or maybe you’re like me, and you’ve been wanting to see this documentary film ever since you showed up at the Bangkok International Film Festival almost two years ago, scanned the schedules and saw a title from a song you knew and realized that this documentary you’d heard of was screening… yesterday! ­*&^%$#! Being a world music fan, you’d heard the rumors and legends, knew it had been documented on film, but not that it had already had its premier at the Silver Lake Film Festival in LA earlier in that year and now was in the other ‘City of Angels’ (Krung Thep). Since then it’s been playing the festival circuit and universities and museums (never coinciding with my schedule btw), wherever there might be interest in an off-beat documentary that’s stylistically straight-forward, but about a real-life story that’s the stuff of multi-kulti musical fantasy. I mean, come on now- musician and friend wander through the Cambodian outback, then friend gets sick, whereupon they stumble on to an incredible long-lost musical genre? Musician and musician brother then search for a Khmer karaoke queen who unknowingly carries the musical gene, find her, and finally convince her to sing for an American public who have no idea what to expect when this band of freaks hits the stage? Yeah, right, and it’s coming soon to a theatre near me, starring both Harrison Ford AND Brendan Fraser, yada yada blah blah. Cut to chase scene. Cut to happy ending. FADE TO BLACK. Great log line yeah, but who’s gonna’ buy that script?

What’s that, you say? You’re not a college student who listens to indie music? And you’re not like me, some half-crazed hack with a laptop and a passport full of visas? Why not? So what in the holy Hell am I talking about? Perhaps a word or two of explanation is in order. Here’s the Reader’s Digest™ condensed version: musician DID discover an incredible long lost musical genre in Kampuchea, though it’s definitely a polished urban style, not rural gantreum. Now there are a lot of foreign musical genres out there that have yet to be properly documented, much less marketed, and many have come and gone with little notice. What makes 60’s Cambodian pop so unusual is: 1) this is from the early 60’s. Most Western pop music didn’t get heavily exported until the 70’s when R&R became Big Business; 2) 60’s Cambodian pop disappeared because most of its proponents themselves disappeared in Pol Pot’s myopic sui-genocidal attempt to remake Cambodian society in his own perverted image; and 3) the music is GOOD; I mean really really GOOD.

Dengue Fever’s early remakes only give you a glimpse into that era and a hint of the breadth of that genre. Fortunately the old videotapes still exist, can be ordered, and you can watch the Cambodian equivalent of American Bandstand for hours on end, the Cambodian counterparts to Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, Neil Sedaka, etc. singing some of the best pop music ever produced, apparently without a clue that what they were doing was something special in the cultural history of the world. Apparently they kept playing right up to the moment when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge/K’mai Grahorm mustered their forces on the city’s outskirts, without a clue as to what was about to happen. The rest is history; it wasn’t pretty. People had a hard time smiling the first time I visited in 1998.

Or you can go to Sihanoukville like me and instead of hanging out on the beach or in bars, you can watch it all on Cambodian TV nonstop. But you said you’re not like me, didn’t you? Then you might want to cut to the happy ending and get a copy of Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. To continue: After becoming hooked on the music, musician and brother musician DID look for a Cambodian singer and finally found one right in Long Beach’s own Khmer neighborhood. She’s Ch’hom Nimol. The rest is history, this time prettier. Not only did the band find a groove, but also a common cause in wanting almost immediately to take the music back to its source in Kampuchea, almost as if to ask for its blessing. By 2005 after all, Kampuchean people finally had something to smile about, what with beaucoup Chinese investment money and memories that had finally laid down their weapons after Pol Pot’s death.

This is the story that Sleepwalking Through the Mekong documents. Soon after forming, soon after finding a place on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s City of Ghosts about a foreigner’s misadventures in Kampuchea, but long before finding a real audience for their eclectic brand of music, Dengue Fever went to Phnom Penh to play for the locals during the Bon Om Dteuk water festival. Director John Pirozzi’s experience with music videos and as a cinematographer in feature-length films, including City of Ghosts, serves him well here, mostly in focusing on the esthetic potentials of both the music and the landscape, and letting the story tell itself. In the best documentaries after all a script emerges only after the shooting has taken place and available footage is diced and spliced. This usually involves reams of footage to be culled through, resulting in a very high footage-to-final cut ratio, vis a vis narratives. Here I suspect that ratio is much slimmer and may account for the rather unusual 67 minute length, too long for a short film and too short for a full-length one. If this is a problem for presenters, it’s certainly not for viewers. Why add filler to a story that tells itself in its own good time, or worse still, cut-to-fit? This is the MySpace era after all, the new musical democracy. Can a film democracy be far behind? Give YouTube some time.

This whole project must have come out of some late-night conspiracies during down time on location for City of Ghosts, and the aspect of ‘winging it’ is one of the endearing qualitites of the film, the killing fields becoming a field of dreams, gods willing. The tossed mixed salad of locations is a treat, too, from live Cambodian TV to dark dingy night clubs to remote production stages. The story of a country’s search for a future and a past intertwine with the story of a band’s search for its own voice and its audience. They’re planting new seeds where they found old roots in hopes that the tree will grow proud and strong and bear much fruit. They’ve got some help from the locals, kids and grannies too, and eventually another story emerges, our own universal love affair with pop music and the warm rich feelings that not only emerge upon listening, but can re-emerge to some extent with each successive listening. Thus the living library of pop music becomes a guided tour and an ever-expanding catalog of our own collective emotional lives and the complex psychologies that arise to explain and enhance it. While this may usually involve the typical boy/girl dynamic and the added extras that make everything so frustratingly triangular and inconclusive, still this is the best clue we have as to how our nervous systems actually operate and the basis for much subsequent philosophy. More importantly these same frustrations that threaten to tear us apart also bind us together as humans with common experience.

At least now you don’t have to learn Khmer language to listen to Dengue Fever in the original so much anymore, as they’ve added more songs in English to their latest album Venus on Earth. Still, if the number of plays is the final measure of an album’s worth to me, then Escape from Dragon House still remains the magnum opus. How they can create such hauntingly beautiful songs composed back-and-forth between English and Khmer is a mystery to me and no small feat I assure you. It’ll be interesting to see what they do on their next album. They’ve come a long way from their first album of Khmer-language covers. Me, I’m just looking for a lobotomist who can remove the title song from Escape from my own internal play list, not that I don’t like it, but just the opposite. I want to get on with my life. But on second thought, naaah… I like that feeling. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong is available now on DVD in all the usual places. Enjoy.

DENGUE FEVER OUTBREAK IN FLAGSTAFF- Dozens Will Die Happy

I’m sorry for the delay in this blog, but that’s what happens after a profoundly moving experience. I usually reserve such superlatives for Great Moments in Thought, Religion, or Love, but there are exceptions. That’s why I got into the music business after all, or why it got into me. I always knew it had the capability for profound effects on the region of the upper chest area, and Dengue Fever did not disappoint. I first saw this group on TV somewhere, either in Thailand, US, or UK, sometime either 2004 or 2005, long before they started climbing world music charts. The blurb was about a Cambodian group making waves in LA. They didn’t look all that Cambodian to me, but they were certainly memorable, a petite Asian with a monster voice singing in Khmer while a band of renegade Angelenos backed her up, playing a type of music I’d never heard before, 60’s Cambodian pop/rock. I planned to see them at SXSW in 2006, but that was before I’d ever been to SXSW and knew what a traffic jam it was. They got lost in the shuffle. So I started following their web site looking for a place to catch them in the flesh, all the while catching snatches of their songs. It wasn’t just that I liked them, but with our mutual connection to Asia, it was something I needed to be on top of. That opportunity came in September of the same year at Bumbershoot in Seattle on my way back from Alaska. If SXSW was a traffic jam, Bumbershoot was a certifiable cluster-fuck. Fortunately Dengue Fever came on early, and they were great, but nothing like last Tuesday’s show in Flagstaff. That was transcendent. Or maybe it was just because it was MY show. I guess I’ll have to catch them again soon, just to know for sure.

The music business is pretty flakey, and ‘World Music’ is even flakier, probably because no one really even knows what it is, or what it should be. For an English-speaker, it tends to be “none of the above” in the ‘multiple choice’ of listings, and considering the English-speaking world’s dominance of the music and entertainment industries, that’s probably the way it should be. Tell that to the people who book world music festivals. Whether because of their legendary quirkiness or more likely to provide backfill logic to the fact that world music is going nowhere fast, there’s always someone who’s going to book a bluegrass group or a blues band or something, explaining dryly, “America’s still part of the world, isn’t it?” This does not help promote the genre, though it might help promote an otherwise struggling bluegrass band, of which there are many in the US. Ditto for Mexico where groups who are nowhere near the top of the charts in their own country find themselves written up in encyclopedias as representatives of their respective genres, all because at least one member of the group fearlessly promotes them in the English language, while an all-Spanish group like Mana’, who hit number 4 in the US charts overall with millions of sales, gets no mention whatsoever. So world music execs toss out big words like ‘indigenous’ while simultaneously falling right into the hands of those with the best marketing department. Dengue Fever certainly is second to no one in the category of ‘mixed origins’- they hired her after all- but then they mix metaphors in time as well as space and offer no apologies, nor should they. This is psychedelic surfer sixties Asian pop, remember. If some critics sniffed “wayward eccentricity” after their GlobalFest showcase in New York in 2007, tell that to the hundreds of Cambodians who flock to their shows when ever and where ever they play. I wish we’d had them in Flagstaff, for while the show was a huge critical and sensory success, the Tuesday night crowd was not enough to turn a profit. But that’s my problem.

Ch’hom Nimol is a wonder to behold. While not the group’s founder, she is its pretty face, and the direct link to the group’s spiritual origins in Kampuchea. Nimol is a cross between Cinderella and an Asian Janis Joplin, the fragile soul in the glass slippers boozily belting out Asian pop hooks in a voice much larger than her own small frame should logically accommodate. It’s not an act. For a girl from Battambang raised in refugee camps (she speaks good Thai btw) to now be touring the world at the head of a LA rock group is truly the stuff of fantasy and legend. Maybe they’ll let me write the book some day. If the Khmer lyrics leave you wondering what she’s really singing about, then have another drink. Isn’t that Asia’s biggest attraction anyway, tradition and family and folk wisdom packaged in a shroud of mystery for sale to the highest bidder? If it all seems chaotic and frenetic and frenzied under the harsh glare of sunlight busily cracking through urban skies, it’ll get better when the sun goes down and the little multicolored twinkling lights come on and you listen to sweet melodies reminiscent of Chinese brush paintings in misty country sides. Or maybe you’d rather pretend that the lyrics are about Zen enlightenment or Triad treachery. The Khmer lyrics let them be whatever you want. So what if they’re mostly silly love songs adapted and modified to many different beats, similar but different? That only proves what I’ve known for a long time: it’s about the music, not the lyrics. Only a very few artists depend on lyrical content, if you can even understand all the words anyway. Dengue Fever can do well on that count, too, what with lines like, “you called me up because I’m sober and you wanted me to drive.” But however much Nimol may want to ‘connect with her audience,’ the bottom line is, mysteries sell well. Most Asian girls have Teddy bears back home on the bed, not whips nor opium pipes, but you don’t need to know that. Mysteries sell. These guys play infectious entertaining, and downright addictive indie pop with an Asian flavor, and that’s the bottom line. Think tom yam rock and roll.

I don’t usually include pictures in this blog, simply because there are too many of them out there and their content is too easy to slosh around the mouth and then ultimately spit out, while the US populace becomes increasingly illiterate by the day. But this time is an exception. For one thing I want it to be clear the headlines refer to the music, not the disease. For another thing I want to show the band backstage, rather than their usual publicity photos, which you can find anywhere. These are a bunch of really nice people after all, driving their own van cross-country and then playing their hearts out like it all has meaning. It’ll be a sad day when I book them or see them and it’s ‘just business,’ playing the set lifelessly and then going on or going home. It’s probably inevitable, though. I don’t see how they can maintain such an energy level forever. Actually I’d probably include some concert pics here also, but my wife Tang cut off Nimol’s head in the photo, so that’s that. I’m sure that was no Freudian slip, though I confess to enjoying my quick hug. They enjoyed Tang’s massages, too. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Jack Free and Thai girl in America.