WHO NEEDS HOLLYWOOD? NOT CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL INSH’ALLAH

Cairo International Film Festival is the kind of film festival that I like, the kind where you can watch a lot of cutting-edge films- cheap. While many other film festivals concentrate on traipsing in some Holly Woodstars for a photo-op, while sending you to one end of town for this film, another side of town for that, Cairo concentrates its films on just three central venues running simultaneously and continuously, some films playing at multiple venues at different times, so you don’t miss much unless you want to. I’m good for two feature films a day- and that’s what they are, the idea of ‘art film’ or anything less than ninety minutes relegated to the catch-all ‘experimental’ dust-bin somewhere else, as if God invented moving pictures to go on big-ass spools or nothing at all. Tell it to YouTube. Most Indian films don’t even run over two hours anymore, so pervasive is the Hollywood format, India being the country most represented here, in addition to the Arab countries combined. Except for ‘Amelia’ and ‘The Soloist’ Hollywood is not represented at all, and ‘Amelia’ is Indian-born Mira Nair’s film. Jim Jarmush’s latest film ‘The Limits of Control’ is here, but he’s hardly Hollywood. The only thing missing is festivity (‘festival’ right?), which only comes from large crowds in a centralized location… but good price will suffice. Literature is sparse, so I have no idea who won what.

Okay, in Hollywood fashion, I’ll cut to the chase scene- expect more ‘Slumdogs,’ and expect them to be made by real live Indians, not British interpreters. They’re prolific, and they’re good. Some are regional, but most come from the Bollywood system, which itself is in a process of change. The ubiquitous song-and-dance number is rapidly becoming an MTV-style number to the point that the whole film almost becomes an extension of that. Thus it’s as if in Hollywood, instead of MTV becoming advertising trailers for feature films, feature films themselves are becoming collections of MTV-style dance numbers. Some films overdo this dangerously, such as ‘Summer 2007’, a film with an important message that almost gets lost in all the glitz and glissade. That message is about the serial suicides of farmers, particularly in Maharashtra state of India, coincidentally (or not?) the state of which Mumbai (Bombay) itself is the capital. It’s a problem elsewhere in India also, and is a phenomenon without precedent in my study of world history. These deaths occur as a result of the crushing poverty and debt of the rural agricultural population, a kind of slavery to which there is only one way out apparently.

‘Summer 2007’ could be considered a ‘masala’ film I suppose, and you gotta’ love any film that opens with a dealer-like joint-smoking scene, then follows the rich-kid medical students to their classroom, where our hero immediately shows off his Alpha-male behavior and ‘party hearty’ attitude toward life. ‘Easy Rider’ does ‘Scrubs’ maybe, or ‘Animal House’? That and more as the hero ruffles political feathers by running for class president as a joke, then volunteers (with his friends) for rural service to escape the political problems and to get a posting close to the resorts of Goa. Instead they land in a whirl of rural politics and almost get killed in the process, instead finding that their own inherited wealth comes from the same degenerate system of corruption and exploitation as the disgusting one they’ve stumbled upon, one that leads to land expropriation and worse, mass suicides. The film ultimately fails by trying to accomplish too much, running almost two and a half hours and interrupting the narrative flow with repeated MTV-style filler. Re-edit the film and you’ve got a powerful film and Hollywood contender there. ‘The Damned Rain’ deals with the same problem more directly and from the farmer’s point of view, the endlessly downward spiral of poverty and debt from which there is no escape except death.

Many of the Indian films deal with these and other social problems, including the Muslim/Hindu social divide of ‘Gulabi Talkies’, a nice film that plods along a little too slow for its own good. ‘The Man beyond the Bridge’ tells a touching tale of unlikely love and social rejection when a man falls in love with a mentally challenged woman, good story. ‘Haat the Weekly Bazaar’ deals with polygamy and the local Rajasthani practice of parading a woman through town naked if she cannot afford to pay compensation to her husband for a divorce of her choosing, though nothing is expected of the husband, even when he has multiple wives. There are more fundamental issues at stake here, also. The line that “the only independent woman is a prostitute” in Indian society says more than many tome-length treatises on either side of the political fence ever could. You can’t help but cheer at the end when all the town’s women strip down to bras to show solidarity with their beleaguered colleague. Lord help us males when women finally realize it only takes one male to fertilize a hundred females, and that the rest of us are little more than dead weight, our legendary muscles useless in a high-tech society. The Dash Riprock-style penniless consort of our heroine is great comic relief here, too. But all these movies deal with the psychological suffocation and economic exploitation of village society, particularly in India, but it could apply elsewhere, also. Unfortunately very few of these movies show that city life is hardly the easy solution.

The film ‘New York’ follows the Indian diaspora overseas, and attempts to tackle the terrorism issue. It tells the tale of an all-American Indian Muslim who is mistakenly jailed after 9-11, and who subsequently becomes a terrorist as a result. As realistic as that part of the premiss is, the part where the FBI frames his long-lost best friend in order to enlist him to spy on the suspected terrorist is pushing it. And while anti-terrorist actions and rhetoric have certainly unwittingly created many terrorists in the process- a worthy message btw- to reduce our villain’s actions to one of revenge on the FBI to restore his dignity is a bit of an over-simplification of a complex issue. Dignity is certainly an issue I’m sure, but I imagine most ‘terrorists’ think a whole lot more about Israel than they do the FBI. Thus for all its pretensions and Hollywood-style savvy, its high concept fails by the very flaws in that concept.

The film that scores big on my list, though, is a non-Bollywood-style film called ‘Kanchivaram’, a ‘Communist film’ in which a silk-weaver is persecuted for trying to better living conditions for his fellow weavers at the same time that he himself is resorting to thievery to keep a boastful promise that he never should have made in the first place. Director S. Priyadarshan creates moody Bunuelian images that manage to be both lush and stark at the same time, all in a context that conjures up the best of Italian neo-realism, a tale of remembrance, as the main character returns home on parole to deal with his daughter’s sudden paralysis. I couldn’t give away the ending if I wanted to. You wouldn’t ‘get it.’ The one musical number in the film hypnotically re-inforces, rather than distracts from, the narrative flow. Catch it if you can.

Cairo International Film Festival had more than Indian films of course, but those were what caught my attention the most, as remaining faithful to their native realities while striving for universality in their narratives. The Arab films I saw were of mixed quality, ‘Pomegranates and Myrrh’ maybe the best, a very realistic ‘terrorism’ film about Palestinians whose land is in the process of being expropriated for new settlements by Israelis, and whose heir apparent is jailed for assault in the process. But the secondary theme is one of my favorites, i.e. love in the ruins. ‘Season of the Machouichi’ is a period piece about wrestlers fighting for the hand of a woman, the style going back even further than the 1900’s setting, exaggerated and stagey. ‘Casanegra’ goes into the dark seamy underbelly of Casablanca, but almost goes too far, depicting a place far more sinister than anything I can remember, almost ‘Mean Streets’ in its rudeness and barbarity, but significant shock value for an Arab Muslim film about an Arab Muslim place to an Arab Muslim audience, more like a Mexico to Europe’s US than a member of the Islamic Brotherhood.

Beside the Arab and Indian films, there were an assortment of other nationalities, particularly East European and East Asian. The one that stands out to me is ‘Twilight Dancing’ by Joshua Tong, a film with absolutely no dialogue that attempts to tell a story, through pictures, of an old man and a young attractive deaf girl with a problematic life. Parallels to ‘The Bow’ are obvious and likewise the meaning is as elusive as the images are attractive. Whether he succeeds or not is an open question, but the movie is certainly worth watching. Considering that Tong’s own written explanations reveal things that I couldn’t surmise visually, I’d say let’s keep language for the time being, uh huh.

It’s a whole new world out there, cinematically speaking. The golden age of Hollywood indie films has been supplanted by indie films from the rest of the world. Hollywood is left with its action movies, high-tech thrillers, and high-budget epics. Unfortunately these aren’t always the best movies. But it’ll survive. Meanwhile let’s feast on what the rest of the world has to offer. It’s a big world out there. Go see it.

NATIVE SPIRIT FESTIVAL- Beliefs Are for Sale, the Inca Returns, and a Local Dine’ Girl Shows Her Stuff

If combination is the essence of creativity, then it’s also key to enjoyment of it, the more incongruous the better. It’s interesting to see a ‘Native’ event in London, not exactly a crossroads of ‘native’ activity (except for a few homeless Druids). In this case the ‘native’ in question are the world’s native peoples, with the accent on Native American, both North and South American, thus making the Native Spirit Film Festival an effectively bilingual English/Spanish language event. That is not surprising, considering that it is heavily supported, if not outright presented, by Tumi UK, which is primarily a world music company. This was not a musical event, though, and if there was a focus, then it was political. The event is also affiliated with Amnesty International.

Unfortunately I didn’t arrive until the next-to-last day of the festival, so I missed much of it. But there were films about Maoris and Endoros, Igorots and Saamis, Inuits and Evenkis, and that’s just the NON-Native American groups represented. The Native American groups shown ran the gamut from Mapuche Chileno to Bolivian Aymara to Peruvian Q’ero to Brazilian Karaja’ to Mexican Zapotec and Yaqui to American Dine’, Cree, Ojibwe and Shoshone. Most of these are documentaries, frequently by people outside the tribal groups themselves, though always sympathetic. They typically detail the struggles to adjust and adapt, sometimes in unwilling submission, oftentimes in defiant resistance. In all cases the results are similar, culture clash. Other prominent themes detail the efforts to retain and revive dying traditions, often in death throes after only a few generations of clash with the dominant European culture.

A notable exception to the documentary objective treatment of natives and their struggle was a narrative reenactment of a historical episode, “In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman” by Camille Manybeads Tso, a 14-year-old Dine’ (Navajo) girl in Flagstaff, Arizona. Started as a class project, the twenty-seven minute narrative is a semi-autobiographical piece that documents a young Dine’ woman’s struggle to survive during the Long Walk in the 1860’s from Arizona to New Mexico, as told from the point-of-view of the filmmaker’s great- great- great- great­- grandmother. In other words Yellow Woman’s great-granddaughter is recounting the story told by her great-grandmother to her own granddaughter (or something like that; I lost count of the ‘greats’). This was a hard time for the home team and many died along the way, while a few brave souls hid out and survived clandestinely in Arizona.

It’s still a hard time for many on the ‘rez’ and in town and this is the other story, that of a new generation coming up with one hand being dealt to them, another being theirs to play. Camille plays hers skillfully, writing and directing a story that needs to be told. Whatever it lacks in professional chops, it more than makes up for with teen spirit. The chops will evolve with time. This story is not to be confused with the Keresan Yellow Woman story of Laguna Pueblo by Leslie Marmon Silko, though it may indeed ‘follow in the footsteps’ of it and her success. This one’s even got a killer soundtrack, including songs by Radmilla Cody and Blackfire.

One of the best films was “Q’ero: In Search of the Last Incas” by Zadoc Nava and produced by Tumi UK’s founder Mo Fini. Though listed as a 2008 film, apparently it was actually made in 1993 and details the search for- and revelations of- this remote group of Quechua-speaking natives. It seems that since then much has changed and ‘Q’ero Tours’ are now standard tourist fare, with all the good and bad that that entails. But of the films I saw my favorite was probably ‘Spirits for Sale’ by Folke Johansson, documenting the use of ‘Native American wisdom’… by non-Natives for non-Natives. This is a touchy subject, and even touchier after the sweat-lodge deaths in Sedona, AZ a few weeks ago, but you can’t help but get a little chuckle from watching sweat-lodges being erected in Scandinavia while their own Lapp/Saami populations are as marginalized and ignored as natives ever were and are in America. ‘Sauna’ is a Saami word and its original use and intent is almost exactly the same as that of Native Americans (hint hint). Aside from any religious implications, it doesn’t take a modern genius to realize that many bacteria and viruses are not going to survive the heat of saunas, or fever. The irony of course is that at the same time they’re being marginalized, natives are still being exploited and even glorified en absentia. The other side of the coin is that non-Natives are an important part of many native communities and vice-versa, and progressive peoples on both sides can easily see beyond false divisions and false inclusions. Nietzsche of course said that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but then he said a lot of stuff.

Native Spirit Festival was NOT an academic event, and that might be the festival’s weak point, the fact that some dubious science was presented, only lightly supported by evidence, e.g. the claim that Native Americans numbered some 120 million souls at the time of conquest, a number much larger than any evidence can really support, “compared to only 80 million Europeans,” as if reproductive success carried the same weight for cultural evolution as it does for biological. Another speaker claimed that Aymara culture was the base for Inca culture, news to me, probably them, too, not to mention that Evo’s election to the Bolivian presidency signals a “return of the Inca(s), as foretold in prophecy.” But this is a ‘Native Spirit’ festival, not ‘native science,’ so not a biggie. The spirit was good. Certainly there’s always a bit of ‘wannabe’ attitude in anything like this, whether it’s ‘wannabe’ Indian, or Spanish-speaker, or Aboriginal, or filmmaker, or primitive or intellectual or journalist or whatever, but that’s given; otherwise none of us would be there.

The only real problem with the Native Spirit Festival that I can see is that it needs more publicity… and attendees. I only knew about it because they sent an advert to to my e-mail inbox, and for a town the size of London, you should be able to expect more than a couple hundred viewers. I don’t think it even made the daily Metro ‘zine. To be sure these are not Holly-docs with a crew of dozens flying in and setting up camp and catering for a cast of hundreds… but that’s the beauty of it. Many of the people involved would not let even a Nat Geo crew come in and have their way… then leave. These are films made by people intimately involved with their subjects. Show ‘em some love. Irony is cool and juxtaposition sublime, but love is what makes the old heart tick.

TOTO LA MOMPOSINA’s “La Bodega”- the Missing Link?

I’ve always wondered at the musical concept “Afro-Latino,” usually expressed as “Afro-Cuban” with no ensuing explanation, as though the meaning were obvious, even though there is little or no documentation of this. Presumably the existence of a full range of drums and percussions indicates an African origin to most ‘Latino’ music, the hows and whys and wherefors interpolated to fill in the gaps. They may very well be right, of course, but almost no weight is given to Native traditions, which also have strong drumming traditions. Just because few indigenous people are left, at least with their original disease-susceptible DNA, does not mean that they didn’t play an important role in the early mix of cultures, nor that they didn’t survive in a more vigorous hybrid with imported Africans, a fact which IS documented, though the extent of it subject to speculation. Cuba is NOT majority African, and is in fact one of the least African of Caribbean islands, most of which tend toward reggae, or even gospel (yep) in their musical tastes. Go figure.

As Toto herself would say on her new album “La Bodega,” these are “Cosas pa’ pensar” (‘things to think about’). Of course history is purely academic, but identity is not. Much of what we enjoy comes from the meaning and identity it has for us, whether punk or hiphop or salsa or rock or classical. Toto ‘La Momposina’ offers an interesting glimpse into the history of Latino music, hers being an archaic style which has generally been superseded by more modern forms for modern listeners. Thus it offers an interesting glimpse into the past. Toto acknowledges Native contributions up-front, also, and though Colombia was hardly the locus of the ‘high’ Quechua-speaking cultures of the Andes, it was a mix-and-mingle area for those and the locally advanced Chibcha and the Caribbean island cultures and even an Amazonian culture which has yet to be well documented. Colombia’s choppy terrain and diverse regions has allowed much of those cultures to survive in one form or another.

The original musical format is flute and drum as in song #2 ‘Margarita’ and grows in complexity from that starting point. In Toto’s case that means brass, and Toto uses much of that. The album leads off with it on “Manita Uribe” and never strays far. Guitars have no place here, not as a lead instrument anyway. Toto loves traditions and stays close to them. She also loves her country, too, a common theme throughout her work, as in the third song “Sueno Espanol” (‘Spanish Dream’), “Soy Latinamericana… de mi tierra no me voy olvidar,” (‘I’m a Latina; I won’t forget my land’). In “Yo Me Llamo Cumbia” (‘My Name Is Cumbia’) the theme gets extrapolated into a hierarchy of belonging, the local cumbia acting in the role of first person- “soy la cumbia, soy Colombiana… soy Barranquillera… soy de aqui, donde naci’” (‘I’m cumbia, I’m Colombian… I’m from Barranquilla… I’m from here, where I was born’).

She loves her times as much as her place, the old times and traditions, wasting no words about her feelings for those who have usurped them. “Recuerda los Tiempos viejos… cosas van cambiando…no hay tierra para cultivar… no hay tobacco ni para fumar… la riqueza se han llevado” (‘remember the old days… things now changing… no land to cultivate… not even tobacco to smoke… the wealth has all been carried off’) she sings in ‘Cosas pa’ Pensar’. But beyond the time and the place and the right or the wrong there is an air of unreality to it all, or rather the magical reality of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, also native to the area, she singing about “jardines de mis Amores” (‘gardens of my loves’) in ‘Duena de los Jardines’ (‘owner of the gardens’), which sounds like a title right out of his oeuvre.

Like vallenato, another archaic Colombian style, Toto’s songs don’t even sound like they should be coming through microphones and speakers, much less iPods and laptops. You should be listening in the evening’s first cool breeze in a hot sultry jungle town, sitting on the porch and sipping a drink while the band plays and the lights come on one by one around town. This is music that carries its world with it, setting up camp and staying a while, until its time to move on. It WOULD be nice to see what some big-city producers and mixers would do with the raw material, though, but I guess we’ll have to wait for that. That’s “La Bodega” by Toto La Momposina. Check it out.

MUMIY TROLL’s “Paradise Ahead”- New EP, Live in SD

If you were a Russian, what would you do after seventy years of stifling Communist domination? Probably the same thing you’d do if you were a western European after fifteen hundred years of Catholic domination, you’d go a little bit crazy. That’s only natural. Still it’s nice to know that the sworn enemy we were once facing down and squaring off with in a little game called ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ are in fact not only nice people, but… know how to party. The challenge is to channel all that newly unleashed energy into something creative… like Mumiy Troll. Now if you’re thinking that this is Gogol Bordello II, well… not exactly. These guys party, but not exactly like that. Whereas Gogol Bordello is essentially an act, an updated ‘village people’ if you will, this is legitimate rock-and-roll (Gogol B’s Eugene Hutz is a good actor btw; check out ‘Everything is Illuminated’). Eugene will get over his bitterness at not heading up a Putumayo ‘Russian Wedding Album.’ That’s a joke, and if you don’t ‘get it,’ then read his MySpace rant.

Mumiy Troll is the real thing, though, good ol’ fashioned R&R, Russian style. Appropriately enough, they’re from Vladivostok, surrounded on one side by China and the other side by… a view of Sarah Palin’s house, maybe? They’ve worked the clubs, too, not unusual at all to see their flyers decorating the light posts all over East Europe, especially in the CIS, where everybody still speaks Russian. Now, after years of working the old Warsaw Pact, they’re ready to take on the States, and they’ve got a new English-language EP to facilitate it. It’s called ‘Paradise Ahead’ and is full of their trademark eccentric rock. Beyond the silliness, though, lies some good story-telling and imagery, much of it documenting the hilarious horror of the Cold War, at least in metaphor if not in fact. The song ‘Nuclear Station’ is a good example of this, a metaphor for millenial love and romance- “It’s a whole new sensation, in our nuclear station. Only I know the secret to melt two hearts… chain reaction.”

Remember the Russian submarine incident? Listen to ‘Smog,’ i.e. smoke, “cold and dark underwater, I’m feeling drunk, it’s getting hotter… once more chance to kiss my sweet baby daughter.” They can also get semi-philosophical, as in ‘Mothers and Daughters’ about the futility of war and human plans in general- “go through this world in peace, where oceans rage and roar, lighting darkness with our dreams, we still can’t see the shore.” And of course sometimes they can be just plain silly, as in ‘Polar Bear’-“… you polar bear, me Eskimo.” The title song probably sums it up best- “you gotta’ like it… this planet is fun, yeah.”

The live show is even better. I saw them do a one-hour set last night at The Casbah in San Diego and it was… f***ing great. They opened with ‘Nuclear Station’ alternating in Russian and English, and took it from there. Most of the set, in fact, was in Russian, and if that seems strange, you have to consider that the entire Russian ex-pat community (under 40) was probably there. How do I know that? Did I check ID’s? No, but the fact that the audience could sing along to nearly every song was a clue, that and the fact that they presented the band with flowers. That’s not normal. There were plenty of blondes and their green-card husbands in the crowd, too, some with word bubbles over their heads reading, “What the fu…” Real live Russian girls! How often do you get that at your local club?

Frontman Ilya Lagutenko, in addition to being a good vocalist, is a natural-born showman, though more of the cutesy cuddly silly kind than one of Gogol’s dead souls re-born (imagine Dana carvey fronting a band). The band is no-nonsense, though, kicking ass at speeds sometimes approaching warp. I was afraid someone might lose it (his mind, that is). It was impossible to sit still, and surveillance footage showed that even Hardie K’s feet both left the floor simultaneously more than once, and that doesn’t happen every day, I’m tellin’ you, son… Alas, it all ended too soon, and without an encore, boo hoo. I intended to stay up and watch them on Craig Ferguson for that, but… you know, zzzzzz…… Forget the PR rap about the ‘Russian Rolling Stones.’ I’d say… maybe… Talking Heads? Check ‘em out.

CESARIA EVORA- The ‘Barefoot Diva’ Returns with “NHA SENTIMENTO”

One thing nice about world music is that it not only respects its cultures, but it respects its elders… AND its women. While pop and country tend to ditch their forebears once they’ve passed their reproductive prime, world music’s leading songstresses just get older and wiser. If you need proof, just look at Omara Portuondo, Cesaria Evora, and Toto la Momposina (hint hint: my previous present and future blogs). You’d think that after a stroke and pushing seventy, Cesaria would be slowing down, but no… not yet anyway. Her new album “Nha Sentimento” (“My Feeling”) not only lives up to the standards of her previous work, but takes it in important new directions. At the core, though, as always, is that voice, that voice that goes down like the cognac a younger Cesaria so loved to drink, rich and smooth and deep with emotion.

Emotion lives at the heart of all Cesaria’s music, whether old or new, and it doesn’t matter whether you call it mornas or ‘Verdean blues’, it obviously shares affinities with Portuguese fado, both in style and content. There’s always that longing and nostalgia for something, not something other, but something familiar, usually the past, youth, a romanticized era that may or may not have ever existed. For it is not a longing meant to be fulfilled, but a longing that is a way of life, as if our expanding universe allowed us only to look back from where we came, never to where we are going. It’s cozier that way. Personally I prefer Cesaria’s style over the sometimes over-dramatic fado, more like a ‘folksy fado.’

For this album, in addition to local musicians Cesaria includes tracks recorded in Cairo with Egyptian conductor Fathy Salama and the Cairo Orchestra. But don’t start thinking that she’s ‘gone Arab.’ If anything, she’s ‘gotten slick,’ with a background instrumentation lusher than what we’ve come to expect, most typically an interplay between guitar and drum, with occasional strings and brass. This album has that, too, but also adds Arab instruments like the Egyptian zither and flute, prominent on the title track ‘Sentimento.’ In fact if this album evokes a nationality foreign to her, it would be Italy, thanks to the Italian-style accordion of Henry Ortiz that weaves in and out on the song ‘Ligereza.’ It becomes her, adding another dimension to what is essentially a southern European style to begin with, despite the African connections, and balancing out with new ‘folksiness’ a sound that is tending toward light jazz.

If the album starts out a bit meandering with the aptly-titled ‘Serpentina’ it quickly gets right back on track with ‘Verde Cabo di Nhas Odjos’ (‘Green Cape of My Eyes’) obviously a play on Cape/Cabo Verde’s name and an invocation of ‘greenness’ as a symbol of hope, ‘verde vida, verde sonho… verde verde manha’ (‘green the life, green the dream… a green green tomorrow’), and when coupled with ‘Esperanca di Mar Azul’ (‘Hope of the Blue Sea’) becomes a one-two punch of synesthesia, color evoking emotion and vice versa, establishing hope as a positive counterweight to the more prevalent melancholy. Chanting ‘vento di norte, vento di sul’ (‘northern winds, southern winds’) Nature’s malleability thus offers much of the reason for that hope. The third song ‘Vento de Sueste’ (‘The Southeasterly Wind’) continues right in that vein, lilting sad and nostalgic- ‘innocencia foi grande… curacao fica isolado’, (‘my innocence was great… my heart remains isolated/an island’), a nice play on words. ‘Ligereza’ bats clean-up and by now we’re firmly on Cesaria’s turf- ‘amor ta va, amor ta vem’ (‘love comes and goes’), unrepentantly philosophical.

From there on it’s all downhill and down to business. If the album flirts a bit with almost-too-slick over-production at first, ‘Zinha’ shifts gears into some nice brassy no-nonsense up-tempo Latin jazz, to be taken up again on ‘Tchom Frio’ and ‘Holandesa co Certeza’, interspersed with Cesaria’s more typical ballads. Last but not least is ‘Parceria e Irmandade’ (‘Partnership and Brotherhood’), apparently a throwaway track that barely made the lineup, but for my money maybe the best track on the whole album, both philosophical AND up-tempo, haunting and beautiful and carrying an important message, i.e. that closeness among family and friends is not only more important than wealth, but is also a source of it. Maybe a bit angry and even more determined, this stands in contrast to much of the more passive content of many of her other songs, and seems to sum up much of what Cesaria’s life has been all about, overcoming poverty with dignity. I can’t get it out of my head. I hope it’s not her swan song.

There are enough similarities to other Portuguese-language music here to make a Chomskyite go running back to his textbooks, but there are many other things that are just Cesaria, unique and inimitable. That’s “Nha Sentimento.” Check it out.

OMARA PORTUONDO SERENADES CALIFORNIA, BAJA Y ALTA TAMBIEN

It’s always nice to pick up some quality music while traveling, but the timing seldom works out unless I’ve actually planned it that way, and even then… suffice it to say that some people’s big festive ideas for big ideal festivals don’t always work out. The Crossroads moveable fest in southern Africa a couple months ago was good, if small and a bit provincial. The Sauti Za Busara fest in Zanzibar in February should be much better, while covering some of the same East Africa musical turf. It’s good, and a bit different from the West, from whence most of the African genre of ‘world music’ derives, more of a reggae feel, as opposed to the Latino (Cuban-Africaine?) feel in the West. I’m looking forward to it. Then there’s the legendary Festival du Desert in Timbuktu and its sister fests in Segou and elsewhere in Mali, but lately they’ve been looking a little more generic than originally, almost like WOMAD Sahara, but that’s probably mostly because so many Malians are successful outside their home country.

Individual shows are harder to come across, and you’ve got to be an avid signpost reader to make that happen, or a lucky MySpace peruser/pursuer. Still it can happen. This year alone I’ve caught Oliver Mtukudzi in Addis Ababa and Ba Cissoko in Marseilles, while missing (only by inches) Lura in Wroclaw and Tinariwen in Paris and Rachid Taha in selfsame Marseilles. Okay, so I missed them, big deal, but at least I KNOW that I missed them. Of course the magic can occur closer to home also, like catching Omara Portuondo last week in Tijuana. In addition to its own great classical sounds, Buena Vista Social Club accomplished nothing so much as a feeling of great loss at the ‘missing generation’- or two- of the hemisphere’s greatest popular music (after the US). Fortunately it also released a handful of aging musicians for one last go-round on the world stage, one larger than they ever had before. Omara Portuondo is one of those. Fortunately Cuba has excellent health care, the pride of the Caribbean, and Omara Portuondo looks as radiant as she ever did in her youth. If the feet and hips have slowed down a bit, the upper body sways with the rhythm as smoothly as ever, not bad for a woman pushing eighty fast.

And what a rhythm it is! It’s as smooth as… the cheap imported rayon that passes for silk these days in Cuba (but the health care’s good!). Led by guitarist and musical director Swami Jr., Omara went through her entire new album Gracias song by song, note by note. How’s that for a Communistic approach to a concert? But while the songs and notes may have been weighed and measured to original specs, the emotion was real that came from ‘la novia del filin,’ featuring such chestnuts as ‘O Que Sera’ (What Will Be), ‘Amame Como Soy’ (Love Me as I Am), Adios Felicidad (Bye-bye Happiness), and the title song of course- Quiero agradecer a quien corresponda… no quiero guardarme lo que siento… (I just want to thank whoever it concerns… I don’t want to keep these feelings inside…). And for the encore, can you guess? Guantanamera, of course, guajira Guantanamera if that helps you distinguish it from the notorious torture chamber that passes for a US army base, funded by US taxpayers and located on Cuban soil, in case you didn’t know. I’d be willing to bet quite a few don’t, but that’s the region where the best Cuban music originates, and not coincidentally only a stone’s throw from Haiti.

Given a previous song in praise of Che and her striking resemblance to a terrorist’s grandmother, it’s amazing she can even get a visa to sing in the US, but she still can… sometimes. On Oct. 20 she’ll be at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts and Oct. 23 in Royce Hall at UCLA, so I guess the visa came through. I hope she’s not sitting in TJ waiting for it, though I thought I saw a woman at the Calimax with a basket of fruit on her head… Angelenos are so lucky, the best music in the world right there on the doorstep, offering itself up for little or nothing, so anxious are so many musicians to carve out their little niche in the Fantasy Factory for subsequent export. Hey, there’s got to be something the Chinese will buy… if only we could teach them Engrish ranguage. They kicked the big O a century ago… R&R wars anyone?

It’ll take Cuba longer. For all the glossy six-color tourist rap, downtown Havana ain’t pretty. But Omara is, and with a voice like a songbird in the morning. Hopefully the tourists will be crossing the Straits soon, and not just to Varadero’s sometimes-sunny beaches. And hopefully the new generation of musicians will get caught up before the ketchup. But it’s not yet, because Omara still hasn’t gotten a visa for the Grammys in Vegas next month. Of course if I’d known she’d be in LA… but naah, CECUT in TJ has a Cubanosofia cultural series going all month, worth checking out. The revolution started in DF, after all. I wonder where it’ll end?

Slide to FreedomII: Make a Better World- "Dobro means good in any language."

That’s an old motto of the Dobro Manufacturing Corporation- for any of you non-industry people less than 100 years old- the word ‘dobro’ itself a trade name, now property of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which intends to vigorously defend its exclusive rights to the name btw. So sue me. If you’ve ever spent time in a Slavic country you might be excused for imagining that they’re a race of resonance-guitar lovers, but no, in fact the word DOES mean ‘good’ in nearly all of them, so you hear it frequently. I used to jokingly refer to this for my dobro-playing younger brother without even knowing that the Slovakian-born DOpyera BROthers indeed had this also partly in mind when they named their new company. The rest is history, but only part of it.

The intimate connection between blues-based slide guitar and country-based dobro doesn’t get talked about very much, much less expounded upon, but the connections are there, and it’s more than just the ‘tude. It’s the tunes. At the same time that the Dopyera Bros. and the National String Instrument Corp. were trading secrets, designs, and patents in factories and courts and board-rooms, Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Robert Johnson, and others were doing something a little bit different with their guitars in the Mississippi delta. All of them had probably played with the ‘diddley bow’ (as in ‘Bo Diddley’) as children, a one-string toy instrument eerily reminiscent of some one-string African designs, played with a glass or metal slide…

The connection with Hawaiian slack-key style slide guitar is more remote, though, and India’s slide tradition hardly even known… until recently. Canadian slide guitar and Dobro master Doug Cox knows them all… and loves them… and can play most of them. But on this album he had to dig deeper into the corners to get just the sound he was looking for… on his gadgie, a resonance guitar even more obscure than a Dobro™ (satisfied now, Gibson?). “Slide to Freedom II: Make a Better World” is his latest collaboration with Indian sitarist and veena player Salil Bhatt, son of the master Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.

One of the nice things about ‘world music’ is that because of the plethora of regions and cultures represented, there are no sharp divisions between classes, simply because they no longer have much meaning outside the local context. And I don’t mean social classes as much as I mean classes of anything. Everything’s connected. This is a good thing. Best of all you can be a nerd intellectual and still be cool, or you can be urban and still be country, or you can live simultaneously in about three different countries signing your e-mails with your current GPS co-ordinates (or maybe that’s just me). So you’re in a funny mood tonight and can’t decide whether you’d like to listen to some classical Indian music or some down-home folk blues? With the album ‘Slide to Freedom II: Make a Better World’ you can do both, where various versions of Indian slides on strings intermix effortlessly with their American counterparts.

The album leads off with the title song “Make a Better World” by Earl King and that pretty much sets the redemptive tone for the album- “sing sing sing… join hands, do yo’ thing, make a better world to live in,” or at least about half of it anyway. In some act of cosmic symmetry, whether accidental or intentional, the album is pretty much divided between modern covers and classical-Indian-inspired instrumentals. I personally probably reached my ‘Amazing Grace’ saturation point long ago, but I can always get up for one more, and the one here is a nice to-the-nailhead-point version. And it’s always nice to hear someone cover the late great George Harrison- another Shankar disciple, along with Salil Bhatt’s father- in this case ‘For You Blue.’ But the real chestnut of a cover song is ‘I Scare Myself’ by Dan Hicks. When’s the last time you heard someone cover that? They nail it, too, its spookiness only augmented with eerie gospel vocals.

A special note needs to be said about the accompaniment to the major collaborators Salil and Cox. Salil’s father and mentor Vishwa delivers a stinging almost ungodly solo on ‘For You Blue’- as though some buddy still had another lick to lay down- and Ramkumar Mishra maintains a tabla rhythm throughout the album without which it would not have been the same, nor nearly so successful. But the real revelation is New Orleans blues and gospel singer John Boutte’. After listening several times to the album without carefully perusing the notes and credits beforehand, I kept thinking, “Who is that ballsy blues mama doing the vocals?” Well ballsy indeed, imagine my surprise at seeing John Boutte’s name- and face. Little surprises like that are magical, like imagining that maybe Michael Jackson’s soul divided around 1990 and the sane half went to New Orleans and became a kick-ass blues-and-gospel singer, while the other half… you know. Tenors are not that rare, but for a blues and gospel singer? As with the tabla-based rhythm, it is excellent and serves to help define the album.

The album’s other half is pretty much straight-ahead Indian string-based instrumental, heavy on the slide, which, according to Salil Bhatt, has always been an element of its use. Thus “A Letter Home,” “Blessings,” and “The Moods of Madhuva” all allow your mind to wander while simultaneously blowing it, as you meditate on origins and endings and the ways and means to it all. The beauty is that- as Doug Cox put it- you really don’t know who’s doing what all the time, the parts fit so seamlessly together. Albums like this are more than just happy accidents and brilliant mistakes. There is purpose and vision behind it. As Cox himself says: “…the future of traditional music really lies in the coming together of cultures. Folk music until now came from isolated cultures developing their own unique style of music. That’s not going to happen anymore.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The album ends with “Freedom Raga” by Cox, which sets the still-yearning closing tone for the album, “I touch freedom, I smell freedom…” as if by simple affirmation we could correct all the slights and injustices that have ever been perpetrated in the history of the world. Would that it were that easy… Listening to “Slide to Freedom II- Make a Better World” is easy. Check it out.

'IMIDIWAN: COMPANIONS' by TINARIWEN- the Desert Bears Fruit

Mali’s Tinariwen is one of only a handful of artists in the history of modern alternative popular music- The Beatles, Stones, Bowie and Elvis in the UK; Dylan, the Dead, Springsteen and Patti Smith in the US, Marley in Jamaica, Manu Chao in Europe, Carabao in Thailand, Mana’ in Mexico, and maybe… maybe… Cheb Khaled in Algeria- that is/was truly larger than life, whose reputation precedes them, that the term ‘classic’ becomes affixed to without hesitation. Of course first they must make it past the bewitching age of twenty-seven without self-destructing or fading away into uselessness, but most of all these are all bands or artists that mean something. There is something more important than album sales going on in each of these cases- politically, socially, and artistically- though the musicianship is never in question for any of them.

Of course as a band already well into middle age Tinariwen hardly has the oeuvre that the other artists had at a much earlier age, but then much of their best work probably still lies ahead. How many of the others can say the same? I bet they’ve got some of the best stories. And if life growing up in the desert seems like a curse, consider that they’ve also been very lucky coming from one of only a handful of places- besides Mali, maybe only Cuba, New Orleans, and where else?- that is truly musically magical. Thus when the Festival du Desert in Timbuktu was first getting off the ground less than a short ten years ago, you had the likes of Ali Farka Toure’, Oumou Sangare’, Justin Adams, and Robert Plant… yes that Robert Plant, there as participants and witnesses to something extraordinary about to take place, the unification of Mali by music, something still only tentative politically.

When I first became aware of Tinariwen only three short years ago, they were my big discovery of the year. Out of some 100+ CD’s that I gathered as part of my birthright as a first-time paying member of the World Music trade conference WOMEX, a short 3-song sampler by Tinariwen was my favorite. I turned other non-industry people on to it. Little did I know then of their preceding legend, guns and guitars and revolutions and revelations and all that, even less that they were about to break BIG, or big by world music standards anyway. Within a year they were opening for the Stones and touring small clubs in the US non-stop. Then I found out that not only had they already played the Festival International in Lafayette, LA, but they’d played for coffee at NAU in my own adopted home town of Flagstaff, AZ, courtesy of Blackfire’s Benally family, they themselves also veterans of two Festivals du Desert. I still have black-and-blue marks from my self-inflicted back kicks over that one.

Fast forward to the present and Tinariwen is past the heady days of their triumphant international debut and ready to prove their staying power. To take twenty years to produce an album or two is one thing. Can they do it every year or two? If their new album is any indication, I suspect they can. Imidiwan (‘Companions’) shows no signs of the slowing down, toning down, self-conscious caution, or the- God forbid- cover album that frequently afflicts a red-hot band’s senior thesis. Too often a real ‘thriller’ gets followed by something ‘bad.’ And they now have to contend with many imitators and band-wagoneers, too. Anybody can do their version of ‘desert blues,’ but there’s more to it than that. Many bands play ‘Afro-Beat’ also, but how many can sound like Fela? It’s the same with Tinariwen. If they were a one-trick pony, they’d have washed up on the sand long ago. Imidiwan shows the full range of their repertoire.

In my lifetime, most of the albums I’ve listened to I’ve only heard once, and maybe half that many again only twice. Though I listen more than that to any album I review, I probably listened to Imidiwan five times… in rapid succession. That’s the highest compliment I can pay any album. They’ve still got the magic. The opening song ‘Imidiwan Afrik Temdam’ is classic Tinariwen, meditative and reflective as the desert wind, and the second song ‘Lulla’ follows in the same vein, adding those soothing female background vocals that balance the sometimes-raw Tinariwen sound so nicely. ‘Tenhert’ is a rap-and-boogie-woogie number and ‘Enseqi Ehad Didagh’ a slow earthy blues. ‘Tahult In’ follows in the boogie vein, which is a pleasant evolution to the Tinariwen repertoire, an enhanced down-to-earth melodical feel. In general, the album maybe veers a bit toward Ali Farka’s earthiness, and away from raw desert edginess. Chabiba sounds so much like an American folk lament that I halfway expected to hear Townes Van Zandt join in on a verse. Maybe success is mellowing Tinariwen out… or maybe not. Maybe it’s rounding them out. The closing song ‘Desert Wind’ is a five minute instrumental that needs no DJ remix version to define its sense of space. The space is infinite. That’s Imidiwan by Tinariwen. The desert just got less lonely. Check it out.