EVEN BETTER AIRS IN MONTEVIDEO; BUT PERCUSSION FESTIVALS?

Uruguay is pretty sweet, like Argentina without (much) attitude. You get off the ferry in Colonia from Bs. As. and the first thing you notice is how quiet it is. The second thing you notice is how nice everyone is. When you go to Montevideo the comparison with Buenos Aires is even starker- there are no maniac drivers and no maniac pedestrians. Drivers wait to let pedestrians cross, the pedestrians themselves wait to cross, and there are still a few horses pulling carts, just like in the old days. The quarterback would probably still marry the head cheerleader, just like life’s supposed to be, except they don’t play American football here (only Thailand has cheerleading as a standalone art form). Okay, so maybe it’s not Boston to Buenos Aires’s New York, but it’s at least Philadelphia.

Uruguay belongs to a kinder gentler era (remember George Bush without the ‘W’?) when the middle class worked diligently to improve their conditions little by little and poverty was a condition of circumstance, not a social class to be forgotten or exploited. Some things are the same as in Argentina of course- 10am check-out time at hotels (wake up early!), the highest rate of baldness to be found in Latin America (yes!), and the Spanish dialect mutated farthest from the original, in its vernacular form on the verge of mutual intelligibility. This wasn’t so obvious until I said ‘gracias’ to someone and they responded ‘por favor’. Huh? But whereas in Buenos Aires they might hold this up in an outsider’s face for a cheap laugh at his expense (welcome to Thailand), in Uruguay they seem to make every effort at communication. Communication, now there’s a concept! So much for psycholinguistics…

Prices seem a bit lower in Montevideo. You can still get a No-Depression room for barely two figures (don’t try that in Bs. As.), and you can even sit down (sit down!) in an eatery and fill your belly for less than three bucks, on something besides hamburgers or hot dogs if you’re lucky, like maybe spaghetti or ravioli a la bolognesa of course, no baloney. You pay for the old-fashioned prices, though, in a reduction of selection. Chinese restaurants are almost unheard of here and the ones that exist still seem to be in ‘chop suey’ mode. That’s always a bad sign, as if they haven’t yet heard of anything ‘moo goo’ or General what’s-his-name and his famous chicken. The street food seems even more limited than Buenos Aires, and just as devoid of vegetables, what vegetables there are just as devoid of vitamins.

But there are plenty of fancy places too, almost like Buenos Aires, including a traditional market entirely converted to that use (pic #4). Those places are presumably of international standard, though obviously heavily invested in the beef industry. It’s a bit tough for a semi-vegetarian like my self. I hear the wines are good, but I don’t drink alone anymore, and if you thought Argentina was ahead of the game by offering mixed drinks on overnight bus trips, Uruguay one-ups them by giving free whiskey samples in the grocery store. Now that’s service! They don’t even do that in Thailand, and that’s party central! The coffee IS good and it’s maybe even a dime or two cheaper than Bs As. People dance tango in the parks (pic #3) and life is a sentimental affair.

There’s an old central core to the city which is surrounded by water on three sides, but struggling to make the transition to the modern era. Truth be told, somebody should have thought of that at least fifty years ago, before ugly 60’s construction moved in, including the ugliest building I’ve ever seen, right on the edge of a lovely central plaza. I don’t usually revel in ugliness, but this mother’s ugly (pic #2)! Still old town has some parts worth saving and, if realtors’ ads are to be believed, prices are not cheap considering its current mostly dilapidated state, like U$100K for a flat that needs total refurb. Ouch! And this is in a country that demonstrates in the street for a raise in the minimum wage to the equivalent of U$400 per month. It’s all psychological. There’s a sizeable Jewish presence in this part of the world, too, in addition to the well-documented German one.

So by some quirk of fate there just happens to be a ‘percussion festival’ going on this weekend in Montevideo. I couldn’t plan these things out if I wanted. I can’t help but wonder what a percussion festival would be like in Uruguay. With Seattle I got a pretty good idea, but Uruguay? That’s kind of like farms in Berkeley isn’t it? So I went, even shelled out good bucks for it. It wasn’t bad either, though more of a grad student recital than a festival I reckon. It was hardly a drum fest; let’s put it that way. With songs on the program from John Cage and Toru Takemitsu, you know that you’re probably in for something a little different, neither tribal drumming nor tablas. The fact that sheet music accompanied every piece was notable. Some of the same group members rotated through different line-ups and instruments, but PERCEUM, the Ensamble de Percusion de Montevideo, was the linchpin to the entire evening, weaving bells and drums and marimbas into an elaborate tapestry of sonic distinction, complete with choreography in the lighting also. These guys are well traveled and properly lauded in art and music circles and well worth the listen. Some of the students’ pieces were comparatively little more than filler and sometimes wallowed in cutesiness (pic #1), but still worthy efforts.

If I had more time, I might hang out for a while in MV, long enough to find a favorite café and bar and maybe a cheap hotel with wi-fi too. That’s crucial. People laugh at my insistence on cheap hotels, but there’s more than money at stake here. It’s part of an ethic, my own if not of backpackers, to see life as lived by regular people, not fancy tourists with their money and their cocaine... well, okay, maybe a little. But as it is there are other wild cards still to play. If they fall through, I can always come back here. The first wild card for this trip was Paraguay, but that’s long past now, filed away in the ‘forgettable’ category. The next even wilder card is Patagonia, written up many times from Theroux to Chatwin. I can’t remember what the big deal was; it sounds pretty boring, though the name is pretty and perfect for sportswear. For me the big deal’s the Arctic Circle, or in this case, the Antarctic. Maybe I’m an extremophile; I like those extreme conditions where the world becomes otherworldly. Of course you can’t go nearly as far south as you can north. Tierra del Fuego’s it. Any further and you have to hitch a ride to Antarctica. It’s only as far south as maybe Juneau is north, but still it’s farther south than either Tasmania or South Africa, the closest contenders from other continents. Hopefully temps will be warming up a little; what’s it like in Juneau in mid-May anyway? If I’m really lucky I’ll catch the aurora australis. That’s better than the midnight sun any day. You can’t have both, not in the same trip anyway.

This particular going to extremes should be especially significant, because that’s where I plan to vote in the US elections. I’ve already got the materials scanned to me and intend to fax them in from Punta Arenas. The people in Coconino County have been very nice and helpful. It’s ironic that that’s in John McCain’s home state. Till then I’ll spend my remaining day in Uruguay roaming the neighborhoods I’ve yet to see. Unfortunately it’s Saturday, so things shut down early. How many of us can remember when the US did that? If you closed all shops on Saturday retail sales would plummet in the US. You should see it here on Sunday. I finally found a warm jacket today so I’m ready for Patagonia. Now with the Uruguayan equivalent of two dollars left in my pocket to last me the next twenty-four hours, my options are pretty limited. Leaving a country with no extra currency to spare is an art. Of course having currency to spare is not the main problem. Having no currency at all is a REAL problem. This can happen even when you’ve got plenty of money in the bank and credit cards to boot. So I sit in the park ruminating, chewing the cud, where I’ve got a rogue wi-fi signal and I can plot trajectories on crystal balls, globes of the world every one, another country’s notch on my belt.

JAZZ BANJO? WELCOME TO BUENOS AIRES

I certainly can’t consider myself any kind of jazz expert, so the Buenos Aires Jazz Fest was as much of an educational experience as anything. The banjo was the first lesson. I was never really sure of how it was used before Earl Scruggs turned it into a picking machine. I assumed it was used in old-time pre-bluegrass ‘string bands’, but that’s about all. Being too lazy to Wiki the mother, I really had no idea that it was a jazz instrument. But sure enough there it was, live and in the flesh, in Buenos Aires’ Antigua Jazz Band a few nights ago. It seems back in the old days guitarists would frequently switch between guitar and banjo, playing both similarly, until Django Reinhardt began to change that, long before blues musicians and Earl Scruggs re-defined both completely. This became clear with my second lesson, a film retrospective on the career of Oscar Aleman, the genius Argentine indio moreno who was a contemporary of Reinhardt and in many ways his equal, some ways his superior. He was surely more of a showman, playing guitar behind his back long before Jimi and Stevie Ray. What do I know? I thought Emmett Ray of Sweet Lowdown was a real person until yesterday. That’s what I get for buying bootleg DVD’s in Thailand and not bothering to read reviews.

But I was afraid this festival was going to be too elementary even for me, as it was front heavy with swing and big bands, what we used to play in the high school ‘stage band.’ Of course I wasn’t paying or queuing for the big international acts like jazz stalwarts Randy Weston and Billy Harper, so had to be content with the local acts I could get for free. That’s why you travel anyway, right? to get the local stuff. Things finally kicked into a more modern gear Saturday afternoon with Escalandrum, a local band influenced by Monk and Miles, but with an unusual twist. I thought it seemed strange to see a drum trap set up on the front line with the other lead instruments, but chalked it up to the drummer’s primacy in the group’s creation. Then I saw drummer Daniel Pipi Piazzola take a solo. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard, an exclusively rhythm instrument totally transformed into something else, cut loose from its usual chores as the band’s internal time clock and given wings to fly. I can’t say it’s the best drum solo of its kind I’ve ever heard, simply because I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve heard guitars reduced to percussion in some African bands, but never the opposite.

Roxana Amed played some good Joni Mitchell-style folk/jazz, covering ‘Amelia’ thoroughly in Spanish, and Ricardo Cavalli played some real nice saxy jazz, but the next real highlight was with the aptly named PWR3. While beloved Argentine classic rock bassist Machi Rufino may be the spiritual heart of this jazz/rock power trio, it serves mainly as a showcase for the speed-guitar work of Lito Epumer, of equally long renown in Argentine musical circles. He does not disappoint either, inviting comparisons to some of the great lead guitarists of the US/UK-based world of rock & roll. Drummer Christian Judurcha played drums with equal intensity, reminding one of the golden era of Cream/Hendrix-style power trios, albeit without the lyrics, all grown up and gone to jazz. Does that make it jazz? Surely many if not most of these musicians got their start in R & R, and I’m reminded of one of the reasons I like jazz in the first place. I get tired of hearing about who’s doing whom. I’m grown up now and this is an art-music alternative to classical, which leaves my butt without a twitch. It’ll keep you awake.

So the festival finally moved beyond its sleepy beginnings as one lost in its history. I was afraid the DNA of music had taken a turn somewhere and re-speciated, but not so. Interestingly, what there was not much of was Latin jazz, surprising coming from a Latin country, no? That means percussion, congas and the like. The next day rectified that a bit. I’m not sure exactly what they were fusing, but Buenos Aires Jazz Fusion featured percussion more prominently, though the real standout was the multi-instrumental pyrotechnics of Bernardo Baraj on saxes and flute. This band was slick, with Bucky Arcella adding smooth bass grooves while lip-synching like a ventriloquist, and Alejandro Kolinoski wailing on the piano. Next up, Daniel Maza continued the Latin edge to his jazz while converting it to his own style of ‘Uru-funk.’ An excellent big-guy bassist who’s played with some of the world’s great artists, he uses that bass line to ground his thumping funk in something solid, while adding some nice Spanish-language vocals as the dessert’s topping. Walter Malosetti finished the show with the guitarist’s old-master’s touch.

As nice as it is to get any authentic display of the local culture while traveling, it’s also interesting to see how culture is created and evolves, across decades and across continents. It’s interesting to see artists with Italian surnames playing American jazz in Argentina. It’s nice to sit in my room in South America and listen to Thailand’s Carabao. I like crossing borders; I just don’t like the paperwork. Sometimes these trails get lost and re-surface as something entirely different and original, the primal influences as long lost as the grunts and groans that eventually became language. I like making discoveries like this. That’s what brings me here. That’s what keeps me going, that and the desire to fly one of Virgin’s new almost-orbital flights once they get the price down.

THE OTHER GOLDEN TRIANGLE

So the guy at the Paraguayan consulate in Corrientes says only the consulate in Clorinda, directly across the border from Asuncion, can give visas for a land entry, so it’ll have to wait another day, which is Friday, last day before a 3-day weekend. The only bus is at 8am and I’ve already booked a room anyway, so there is no choice really. The city bus I’m on runs over a motorcyclist caught on the inside track on a right turn, but other than that, there’s no real excitement, just the usual starchy food. Corrientes has nothing much to commend it so that’s when my laptop ol’ Betsy comes in handy for diversion. Only problem is there’s no wi-fi here and this is new Betsy, barely a month old, so I don’t have the encyclopedia nor much of the music yet. But I do have some. This is when that old 60’s Khmer stuff comes in handy. God only knows what they’re thinking in the next room.

Well the quickie two-hour jaunt up to Clorinda becomes a six-hour jaunt, so by the time we pull in, I’m stressing. One quick look around probably leads me to think I wouldn’t really care to overnight in Clorinda either. If that’s not bad enough, the skies are getting pretty uncooperative, the rain’s light hot licks quickly turning into determined drenching sheets. At least the Consulate is cooperative and soon I’m marching off with a proud new visa in my passport. Thorough that I am, I even looked at it before leaving. I should have looked harder. When I got to the Paraguayan side of the border, I wonder why they’re passing my passport around. “Typical Latino bullshit,” I figure. Well, yes, that’s right and wrong. Typical bullshit, but not on the immigration officer’s part. It seems the consul hand-wrote a typographical error, validating my visa today and expiring it yesterday. Huh? Do they want me to time travel?

Well sometimes a five-spot and a telephone call can back-fill the logic that was lacking in the first place, so soon I’m on my way again. If they’d made me go back to correct the visa, of course the logic may have worked out differently and I might have continued on back to Argentina instead. I DID stand on Paraguayan soil after all, so that counts for the country count. Everything counts. Of course if they hassle me on the way out or back in to Argentina, then I may wish I had re-booted. Welcome to Mexico. It would have been just as well, since Asuncion seems to have little of import. Mall culture hasn’t really caught on here yet, about like Phnom Penh. Supermarkets take your small items for purchase and lock them in a bag which can only be opened by the cashier. It kept me from even considering stealing a roll of toothpaste. Wages are higher than Asia, though, almost $350 per month minimum, according to the sign posted on the wall. That’s higher than the AVERAGE wage in Thailand, far above the minimum. So why do they have labor protests here and Thailand has none?

The big thrill is looking at all the chickens roasting on spits, that and people tossing coins down slot machines, hmmm…. Beef takes a back seat here I guess. Maybe P.J. O’Rourke was right the first time. Maybe there is nothing here. Some fine wining and dining always helps, I guess. We’ll see. There’s still time, so on to Ciudad del Este and the falls of Iguazu’. It’s a bit hot already here anyway, barely getting down to 20c at night if at all (that’s high for a low, Homes; trust me). Where’s my spare suitcase full of logic anyway, the old-fashioned Aristotelian kind? The Boolean stuff won’t work here. This world ain’t digital. The coffee sucks real bad, too. Maybe that’s why everybody drinks yerba mate, through a silver filtered straw. It’s not bad, seemingly with some laxative properties. You need it after all that starch and grease… there, I’m relaxed now.

Of course Ciudad del Este is no great shakes either, weird in kind of an Asian border-town sort of way, Chinese-inspired modern construction backing right up to the line that separates nations. But it’s Sunday, so no coolies trudging across the bridge with bundles strapped to backs. So I catch a cab in Paraguay to go through Brazil and on to Argentina. How many places can you do that? For those of you counting countries and too cheap to spring for a Brazil visa, this is a cheap way to cut corners, literally, without the formalities. In retrospect $50 for Paraguay visa and tip seems like a waste, but at least the hotel was cheap, so balanced out. Of course the hotel lady short-changed me while warning me about street thieves, oldest trick in the book. Last time that happened a Peruvian street artist replaced my good note with his counterfeit one while showing me how it’s done. Ouch!

Paraguay’s cheap like Peru and Bolivia, which means poor, and really Argentina’s not so dear outside B.A. Is there anything there worth hanging for? There is. Puerto Iguazu’ is a surrealistic little dream town where the three countries meet, maybe the other Golden Triangle in the Bizarro world of opposites. Something like a cross between Ensenada and Panajachel, it’s calm and beautiful and cheap by B.A. standards, but hardly overrun by backpackers or anything like that, though there are a few scraggly stragglers. The falls of course are to die for, certainly one of the ten great falls in the world if not all natural wonders included. The view of the cataracts themselves from garganta del Diablo is unbelievable, frothy and turbulent, aptly named for those suicidal among us, the walking wounded, future zombies, for whom the mid-air roulette wheels where water sublimes to vapor must represent some kind of witches’ brew of Kabbalistic digital speed dialing 01110100101010100101010 your bar code all or nothing millions of times per second to see whether you live or die, whether today or tomorrow. The Golden Gate is for wimps and wannabes.

For the rest of us it’s a view of God at work as light passes through a prism and light breaks up into an infinite number of possibilities, including life liberty and the pursuit of happy meals. This is the kind of place where you could meet your little brown-skinned third-world soul mate doppelganger, settle down, and pump out some little pot-bellied poopers till your pumper poops out… zzzzz… Huh? Did I say something? How long have I been dreaming? I gotta’ get outta’ here. Somewhere back there I found out there’s a jazz festival in B.A. in a few days. I’ve got work to do. Now where’s my suitcase full of spare logic?

BACK HOME IN THE LAND OF GOOD AIR

“Clear skies with unlimited visibility,” the pilot said as the plane descends for a landing in Buenos Aires. When’s the last time you heard that? I don’t think I have for, uh, most of my life, maybe since I was a child, and I’m from a rural state. So right away you know you’re in for something a little bit different here. I guess that’s how it got its name. Okay, so what B.A. gains is Santiago’s loss on the other side of that Cordillera in the smog department, so self-congratulatory pats on the back are probably not in order. But still the analogy holds. South America is the one continent that has yet to be ‘done’, or overdone that is, of those that are ‘doable’ of course, so that rules out Antarctica, and Australia is a single country no bigger than mainland US, so that doesn’t really count. But South America is big and beautiful and rich in resources and culture(s), and yet is still relatively under-populated, an empty continent, thick only around the edges, a half-baked pizza, the southern European counterpart to Uncle Sam’s predominantly northern European refugees. And so Buenos Aires patterns itself, an island of European civility in a sea of seeds and cattle, the biggest city in one of the world’s biggest countries, one of the few that could make some reasonable claim to self-sufficiency.

Of course that unlimited visibility is not without some testing by Bonairenses. The tradition of smoking is very much alive and well, thank you, with a passion and a vengeance. People don’t just smoke, they SMOKE, complete with nasty butts flicked to the floor as is the custom in the mother country of old, a world with many bars, and I don’t mean cell-phone signals. Oh sure, they put up signs and cordon off sections, but you know how that works. They put up ‘wi-fi’ signs everywhere too, in cafes especially, even when there is none. It’s just a fashion statement. All the US cafes have them, so it must be cool. The plate glass for cafes comes that way, pre-engraved, Visa and MC too, smokers’ section also. That’s a cruel hoax for us wi-fi users, all plugged in and no place to go. Where’s the consumer protection?

The food sucks; read: ‘too similar to American food’, at least pre-Chinese America. The Chinese don’t seem to have gotten here yet, not in any significant numbers at least, and the ones that have seem to run the inner-city ‘supermarkets’. If there were more, there’d be more Chinese restaurants, long established farther north and west as chifas, and long incorporated into the Peruvian national cuisine, not to mention the business culture, as common members of the Pacific Rim. That’s too bad. Looking for a Chinese restaurant is usually the first thing I do when I enter a new country or city. As it is the food, particularly fast food, is pretty boring, basically variations on starch starch and starch, with a little meat thrown in for flavor in the ubiquitous pizza, hamburgers, and ‘panchos’ (hot dogs) that line the walls of perception. At least they still have empanadas, so I can remember what continent I’m in. The more expensive meals seem to merely shift the meat: starch proportions upward. They have tango and tenors, too, singing and dancing for tips in the pedestrian malls, along with the obligatory hippies peddling their hippie accoutrements. There but for the grace of God…

But it’s a little cold this early in the October springtime, barely hitting 20C if at all (that’s pretty low for a high, Homie; trust me). People crowd the north-facing slopes (it’s the southern hemisphere, remember) at midday like turtles on logs to soak up what they can get for free. At least space heaters are not an unknown item in Argentina, so that helps. Still I’ve got four countries to see in six weeks, so maybe I should head on up to Paraguay where temps will soon be scorching souls and soles. By the time I get back B.A. will only be warmer as summer approaches (they give the running countdown on TV). Paraguay is the trip’s main wild card also, a place where the unexpected might happen. On paper of course it’s the nowhere country, nowhere nothing never no how, the only landlocked country in South America besides Bolivia. But Bolivia of course has some spectacular Andean culture. Does Paraguay have something comparable? They DO have the co-official state language of Guarani’, the only Amerindian language to have crossed over to its conquerors and survived to the present day. I better check it out. Best to play wild cards early in case they take wings. A new law is being proposed in Argentina also which would require visas for Americans. I should make tracks before that goes into effect.

So I do. Fortunately the B.A. bus station is conveniently located, so connections are easy. I like cities with central stations. I’ll just catch an overnighter north to Corrientes and get my visa there, continuing on to Asuncion or Iguazu, whichever works best, then circle back through the other. You’d think in this day and age, visa requirements would be decreasing, but that’s not necessarily so. Part of the problem is ‘reciprocity’, in which countries want to require visas of those countries which require visas of its own citizens, even to the point of charging exactly the same fee. This usually hits US travelers hardest, and then Canada and UK, as these are the strictest countries for entry and the most popular for illegal immigration, not coincidentally. I understand their point but they may be shooting themselves in the foot, as some travelers DO make decisions based on such considerations, like yours truly.

And then of course some of the consequences can be a bit bizarre. While my generally well-funded ex-pat buddies in Thailand sweat and scramble to deal with new toughened immigration requirements there, a little known fact is that citizens from several South American countries can get far more favorable terms of entry there than they, all for free, including those of Peru, one of this continent’s poorest countries. The irony of course is that there are few or no South American tourists there, nor vice versa any Thais here. Thais love to travel, and visas are a hassle, but still South America is hardly at the top of their list, not pretentious enough. In the case of Paraguay though, US citizens are almost alone in the visa requirement, but if I want to visit every country in the world, then that’s the deal. If it’s getting worse before it’s getting better, then I’ll have to hurry.

I get a front row seat on a double-decker bus and head off into the Argentine night. Any thought of missing the scenery is probably misplaced. Argentina rolls under the bus like Nebraska and her mother-in-law, just going on and on about nothing, vast plains dotted with towns and cows. It’s big and it’s beautiful, but in that subtle American way, vast and brooding. It resembles both the US and Mexico in fact, almost equally, Spanish in culture, American in agriculture. Occasionally you can even see a real live gaucho, like a European dandy compared to his US counterpart, but they look cool. I vaguely remember a river passing under us, so that must have been the Parana’ but I couldn’t swear to it. Bumps in the road become minor collisions in my semi-lucid dreams, but at least the Burmese didn’t attack. That’s only happens when I take sleeping pills.

HARDLY STRICTLY SAN FRANCISCO; ROOTS TO THE PAST

Good ol’ San Fran; I love it. Where else can you go and find a parade celebrating the so-called ‘Summer of Love’? Where else could you go and find that same parade in the fall, a full week after summer’s demise, a full year after an anniversary ending with a 0 or a 5? Where else could you go and find that parade punctuated by cross-traffic maintaining the same red-light/green-light schedule, as if the parade were just an elaborate wedding procession, designed for a hoot and a holler and a quickie in the Mission District before the rigor mortis of marriage sets into your joints and you forgot why you came in the first place. At least it keeps any competition with LA friendly, not like the venom that spews forth with any mention of Nueva York, Towers to Nowhere or that mayor Julie Annie. Vicious rivalry only occurs between equal matches diametrically opposed, contenders to thrones and royalty rights. Esthetically of course, San Fran has no equal, not in this country anyway. LA’s hippest neighborhoods would hardly rate a mention up north. So what if the clocks run a little slow?

This ‘Love Fest’ was the third-cousin twice-removed anyway, kids who got hip in the early nineties, helping the Grateful Dead rake in millions before Jerry ascended. Wavy Gravy wasn’t there, nor any of the old-timers, musicians included. They were all out at Golden Gate Park for the ‘Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival’, featuring some of the best roots music, broadly defined, from both coasts. Where can you find that in LA? LA has some of the best alt-country musicians in the world, but they have to act freak-folkie to sell themselves, while the hard-core worship at the temple of McCabe’s, have Sunday socials at the Echo and try to get a quorum once a year at Safari Sam’s for the dog-and-pony show.

There must have been at least 20,000 people in Golden Gate park last Saturday for a free show, hardly advertised, with a line-up that would rival the Folk Festivals of any major western Canadian city, all splayed across five major stages and many minor ones. LA’s ‘Indie’ fanaticism serves it poorly in this regard, throwing out the old folks with the bath water, while hanging on every word coming out of an infant’s precious precocious mouth. Welcome to Thailand. As if to add insult to LA’s injury, last Thursday Ry Cooder, LA’s own native son and patriarch to both world music and alt-country, played a benefit show at Great American Music Hall, something he swore he’d never do again in LA, for love or money. Ouch!

Of course with five stages going simultaneously, regardless of how staggered the set times or the carefree gaits, you just can’t see everything. If you try you’ll just end up seeing nothing, lost in the crowd and getting tripped in the pee-pee lines. The list of the acts I saw and heard last Saturday afternoon pale in comparison to the list of who I missed, to wit: Peter Rowan, Richard Thompson, Desert Rose Band (Chris Hillman), Del McCoury, and Global Drum Project were my hits; Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Laurie Lewis, Emmy Lou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Guy Clark, Nick Lowe, Dave Alvin, Robert Earl Keen, Jerry jeff Walker, Steve Earle and Asleep at the Wheel my misses, just to name a few. And that doesn’t even count Friday and Sunday, with such country stalwarts as Robert Plant and Elvis Costello to liven up the vibes. Like the name says, it’s ‘hardly strictly’. My God! What a summit meeting! Some Republican nut with a bottle of anthrax and an ax to grind could have wiped out Palin’s most down-home opposition right then and there. That’s truly scary!

Of course this is a world music blog and most of that wasn’t really world music, but I guess the definitions get looser as the desire becomes greater. Hunger speaks all languages. But Global Drum Project, featuring Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain, IS world music at its best and I’d never seen them before, so that was great. Zakir Hussain is the great Indian tabla master of course, who already did a solo show at Grand Performances in LA a few weeks ago, so if there’s anything better than seeing him alone, it’s seeing him with others of like mind and talent. If nothing else they prove definitively that percussion is something to be enjoyed for its own sake up front and center, not something to be relegated to the back line, largely forgotten until it’s not there, unusable if ‘rusty’. Think percussion’s easy, just banging a drum? Try it some time. They’ll be in LA next week. Check them out. Myself I’m going home to Argentina; I hear it’s nice there. I’ll be back.

LIVING LIFE IN 4-D: THE DOUBLE HELIX OF MUSIC AND LANGUAGE

Yes, you know the economy really sucks when you turn on the TV at 8am Sunday morning and find Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson on three different channels talking simultaneously to three different interviewers, giving the same little dog-and-pony speech to all, explaining that the $700 billion bail-out is not government spending like health care or education (i.e. BAD) but is actually something like a long-term investment, a sweetheart deal complete with parachutes for those bailing out (i.e. GOOD). No, Republicans don’t raise taxes on your wallet; they raise unholy Hell. So even if Obama gets elected he’ll never get any social programs passed anyway, since all the money’s already gone to Baghdad and Wall Street. At least the surge has pacified Iraq, you say? Not if the funding dries up, since that ‘peace’ apparently has been bought just like that of Israel and Egypt before it. Fortunately this is not a political or economic blog, so I mention all this strictly for entertainment value. No I’m not a conspiracy nut. Yes it’s a good time to be a Communist. Russia just might win this thing after all; witness new deals with Evo ‘Coca’ Morales and Hugo ‘Che’ Chavez. “Without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is.” You heard it here first.

So the Sixties may not have accomplished jack shit politically, but it certainly left musical DNA over a hugely scattered landscape, the mestizo bastard sons of which are only now coming back to face the folks here. If the first example of that was Dengue Fever with their kick-ass Cambo-rock otherwise previously only available on old B&W ‘Battambang Bandstand’-style videos, then the latest is Chicha Libre and their genetic modification of a lost-in-time Peruvian style of ‘Cumbia Amazonica’ that is as dreamy and psychedelic (under the influence of yage maybe?) as it is exotic. The sixties were about more than psychedelia too, including folk and blues and protest, which also caught fire elsewhere. A good example of this would be Thailand’s Carabao (in direct descent btw, no GMO stuff), but they’re just too freakin’ famous in Thailand to take a pay cut and come play for us Homies here in back yards and parking lots. Having lyrics at the Dylan-Lennon-Marley level of accomplishment will do that for you.

Chicha Libre was at the Japanese American Museum here in LA to open a show for Etran Finatawa, and I think they probably landed a few new fans with their quirky yet compelling music. In fact the only real concern about Chicha Libre is authenticity, the lack of a real physical link to their subject matter. None of these guys singing in Spanish is Latino, after all, and they’re apparently from Brooklyn, not Pucallpa or Iquitos. Maybe the Pistolera girls taught them; or witness Dan Zanes’ DIY ethic. Whatever’s fine with me; if it takes PhD musicologists to give world music a shot in the arm, then that’s cool with me. They could punch it up a bit though. It’s almost a little bit TOO dreamy. Of course missing a key member of the band doesn’t help, especially when it’s the vocalist and leader, so they performed admirably. I’m just trying to figure out why Joshua Camp was playing a squeezebox that he never squeezed (squoze?).

Etran Finatawa (‘stars of tradition’) themselves played at Amoeba Music on Tuesday and again at the Museum on Thursday. Whether you like their music or not, you’d have to admit that these guys from Niger have got to be the coolest-looking band in show business, what with their Tuareg desert robes and their Wodaabe tribal costumes. The music is highly listenable also, if not quite as compelling as Tinariwen’s hooks nor as musically accomplished as some others. This was as much a cultural performance as a music concert. The Wodaabe are famous for their men’s beauty pageants in which men will flash big toothy smiles and roll their eyes to impress the women, and they do some of that in concert, too. While there’s nothing especially musical about these cultural affectations, it DOES add to the overall hypnotic atmosphere, which is what Etran Finatawa does best. They’re best seen and heard in the overall context of their relation to ‘Saharan Blues’, a genre which maybe took a cue from Ali Farka Toure’, but found its voice in the rebel training camps of Moammar Kaddafi. In addition to the aforementioned groups, other members of the genre include Tidawt and Toumast.

With DNA as the metaphor we now come to its analogy to language, not music. For me the best multi-cultural confluence of the past week was the All Roads Film Festival sponsored by National Geographic at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, featuring films, photography, and music by and about the world’s endangered minority cultures. The program I saw was called a ‘Wave of Change’, about ‘new challenges and changes’ to traditional cultures, but the underlying theme was heavily about their imminent acculturation and demise of their language. The best of the lot was a film entitled ‘The Linguists’, about two linguists David and Greg in an Indiana Jones-like quest to document endangered languages before they die and their encoded way-of-life with them. This they did in four widely scattered terrains and circumstances- Arizona, Bolivia, Siberia, and northern India, united only by the essence of their timeliness. For as they say, “a language disappears every two weeks.”

I myself having spent large amounts of time in the study of language as well as in Arizona and Bolivia, not to mention world travel, all this is of enormous interest. Fortunately the narrative was as authentic as it was dramatic, the long searches down winding roads, the serendipitous encounter, the limitations of one’s own body. Gut instincts give way to gut reactions give way to gut aggravation that all must be finalized by the deadlines of circumstance. Unfortunately no distinction was made between the demands of different circumstances. Why is it so necessary to document the Sora language of Orissa in India, whose 300,000 speakers place it far out of the immediate danger of extinction? Why is it so necessary to document Kallawaya, which has long been a secret jargon of Bolivian healers, never used at home in the family, and definitely a mish-mash of Quechua, long-extinct pre-conquest Puquina, and magical incantation? Why is it so important to document any of this anyway? Obviously the metaphorical DNA at stake here holds no cure for cancer.

Its importance is a matter of debate among linguists, the psycholinguists led by Noam Chomsky long holding dominance over the sociolinguists with roots deep into the origins of anthropology and the holy triad of Boaz, Sapir, and Whorf, whose famous hypotheses were essentially that a language represented a way of life and a way of thought, a notion long eclipsed. That may be changing, due not so much to Chomsky’s foolish Einstein-like preoccupation with politics, nor to the imminent demise of his personality cult, but to genetic researchers’ discovery that for some strange reason, only He knows the details, the biological evolution of species and the cultural evolution of language function in eerily parallel ways. Those same genetic researchers have found no basis for the inheritance of some Chomskyan hypothetical ‘meta-language’ btw, notwithstanding the fact that Broca’s area is where it all goes down.

Psycholinguistics finds a better outlet in the quasi-psychotic manifestations that surround a language and its ‘acquisition’, a subject ‘The Linguists’ dealt with in a humorous and enlightening way, e.g. the fact that one of their drivers actually spoke an almost-extinct language without revealing it for fear of losing status; the fact that the few speakers of Chemehuevi rarely speak it to each other for reasons equally obscure and pathetic; that languages are frequently used as weapons of control and dominance by one social or governing class over another; that Sora speakers held up the lingo-party to negotiate payment, etc. Welcome to Thailand.

Given the average person’s lack of interest in the minutiae of linguistic science, the movie might have played up their protagonists’ potential star quality a bit. For instance, if they can speak twenty-five languages between them, as advertised, why did we hear only Russian, where they’ve done research for many years? Their lack of any Oriya, the Indian Orissa state’s dominant language, or even Hindi or Spanish for God’s sake, two of the world’s five most-spoken languages, frankly diminishes their impact on the story as protagonists, not just compilers. Louisiana ‘Lingo’ Jones would have I bet. Given that 96% of the world’s some 7000 languages are spoken by only 4% of the population, there is a lot of room for choice there for languages on the verge of extinction.

If they didn’t want to deal with languages that they actually know some of themselves, then they might at least have wanted to choose far-flung languages that not only span continents but that might actually be related to each other, such as the macro-Penutian languages on both American continents or ethnic Siberians from Russia to Greenland or ethnic Austronesians scattered from Hawai’i to Madagascar. In this way linguistic DNA truly imitates the bloodlines of its human vectors. They hardly had the time or space to deal adequately with four entirely distinct subjects anyway. The highlight of the evening came when one of the last speakers of Chemehuevi, hardly an academic or filmmaker, spoke it live for us after the show. He was the evening’s true star.

Don’t know where to go for world music or film this week? Me neither. If you want to stay in LA, then maybe check out the ‘Schooled in Song’ festival in Long Beach. Dengue Fever is headlining. Myself I’m going to SF for the ‘Hardly Strictly Bluegrass’ festival, petrol gods willing. I need to get in touch with my roots. The Global Drum Project with Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain among others will be there, then here in LA next week. That’s ‘hardly strictly’ enough for me. Then there's Gogol Bordello co-headlining downtown's 'DETOUR' festival Saturday if that's your thing. World music has got its village people, too. Catch you on the rebound.

THE NEW ECONOMIC 9-11 HITS; AND THE BAND(S) PLAY ON

9-11-08 to the day, the U$D exchange rate was at its highest in many moons, the price of oil was down below $95 (not coincidentally) after startling rises just a few months prior, and the world seemed like it just might proceed with something like an orderly process after all the recent psychological clusterf**k of high gas prices and mortgage foreclosures and oil wars. A week later that had all changed as the Twin Towers of the US economy took deadly aim and shot themselves squarely in the foot, feigning suicide for the free hospital care, rocking foundations and sending inestimable fallout to the streets below. This may be my last blog if the lights go out and the Dark Ages begin, so just let me say that I’ve enjoyed it. You’ve been great. I’ll miss you all. So Bush’s administration began with planes crashing into psyches and apparently ends that way, too, as Congress contemplates what could be called the Economic Patriot Act, i.e. think fast and toe the line or lose it all. Fortunately we have fiscally responsible Republican ‘businessmen’ in charge, not those free-spending Democrats, or we’d really be in trouble.

Yep, you know the econs really suck when I listen to Georges Will and Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning instead of Chris Morris and ‘Watusi Rodeo’, just possibly the best and most unique radio show in the greater LA area, putting the triple rrr back in roots music, encompassing the best of CBGB- that’s country, bluegrass, and blues you know, Americana around its edges- without ever repeating itself. Who else can say that? Where else are you going to hear Rodney Crowell’s ‘Sex and Gasoline’? Where else can you hear Lucinda, Smokey, B.B., Elvis Costello and Hank all in the same program? Who says the non-urban American majority can do little more than field-dress a moose? My favorite ‘world music’ is the rootsy kind also, the other being the slower more classical studied kind, better for listening than dancing. There were good examples of both this week in LA, Cava the first, Savina Yannatou the second.

But I’m sorry I missed the Ozomatli-Spearhead-Lila-Nortec show at the Bowl. I’m sure it was good. Reports from Globalquerque where Lila headlined two nights before were superb. I’d definitely like to hear her new version of ‘Black Magic Woman’, as she moves on from a Frida Kahlo heart-of-darkest-Mexico obsession to a more one American one, or at least the border. Not unsurprisingly the new album has many more songs in English, following the lead of LA’s Dengue Fever and Ozomatli themselves. This is one of the problems with ‘world music’: you can apparently only go so far in a non-English format, and Lila’s tried. Still she’s little known to the average Mexican OR American. To make the circle complete, not only does she do more songs in English, but she adapts English-language compositions to Spanish, like Lucinda Williams’ great “Yo Envidio El Viento.” But she’s the only act at the show I hadn’t seen before, so I passed. I’ll catch her somewhere. Very few acts do I see more than once. Now if Nortech were to ‘present’ Clorofilo and Hiperboreal, then that might be different. Anybody can play a QWERTY f***ing keyboard. I want to hear somebody who can play accordion like Flaco.

But I DID see Cava live at Amoeba, so that’s not a bad substitute for Lila, especially considering that front-woman Claudia Gonzales is in somewhat the same circles, having sung with Charanga Cakewalk, Lila’s frequent opening act. She’s great too, a natural born showman, totally charming and unaffected. She’s a good singer and musician too, manning a Taiko drum when she’s not otherwise banging (and sitting on) her cajon, not to be confused with my cojones. She gets strong right-arm support from whiz keyboardist Walter Miranda and other assorted percussions and… trombone? I was skeptical, but it sounded good, fit right in with Cava’s own unique blend of cumbia, son y salsa. This is not your typical Latino trombone and Taiko group. Still I couldn’t help but wonder what the group would sound like with a guitarist and now I see they’re supposed to have one, his absence at Amoeba unexplained. Power struggle? Love spat? Upset stomach? Only someone’s hairdresser would know for sure, but I imagine it could significantly alter the sound of a band accustomed to one. But for all the attention given to Cava’s use of Taiko drums, I was most captivated by the live on-stage use of the quasi-mythological theremin. For those who don’t know, this is an instrument played by hand-waving the frequencies surrounding an antenna, and famous for the eerie ‘vibe’ in the closing sequence of the Beach Boys ‘Good Vibrations.’ These guys will be at Pasadena’s Zona Rosa on Thursday. Check it out.

Savina Yannatou’s show at the Japanese-American Museum in Little Tokyo Thursday evening was something totally different, a refreshing change from the huge doses of Mexican food we get for world music here in LA. At least it’s filling. But her music is that of the Mediterranean, including her native Greece, but also including the surrounding Muslim and other Middle Eastern countries. Still her music encompasses so much more than that, not only interpreting different regions but different eras and different uses of the voice, gargling and squeaking out sounds that I didn’t even know a person was capable of, and somehow it all fit. She frequently introduces her songs with poetry, too, usually a bit romantic and wistful, setting the tone for the music to come. She stopped in LA on her way to Globalquerque! and the Chicago World Music Festival. I hope she was a hit there. She deserves it. The show here was opened by Mamak Khadem of Iran doing classical Rumi-like musical ruminations on the human condition, textured and soulful, ethereal yet down-to-earth. It was a good evening.

As the air gets a nip in it and the sun starts rising later than I do, it gets harder to find the really good stuff, the stuff from overseas and back East that you’d die to go to bed with, die to have come out of your own radio 7/24, world music par excellence. But it’s still there, even if you have to look a little bit harder for it. It goes underground and indoors for the winter, down dark alleys emblazoned with strange Chinese characters. You gotta’ start reading HOY and checking the Guatelinda website. You gotta’ start checking the local Ethiopian, Armenian, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Thai-language presses. Want to see something totally authentic and not filtered through the industry people of world music’s own private Interzone? Thai luke toong superstar Tukkataen is over here stateside and playing at the Thailand Plaza restaurant on 10-10, tickets on sale at all Dok Ya Bookstores. LA Weekly won’t tell you that.

But this week’s best bet is Etran Finatawa, Niger’s own Tinariwen and cousin to all the other Tuareg ‘Saharan Blues’ bands currently en vogue, and for good reason. Their stuff’s good, unique, and authentic. EF is different from the rest in that they combine Tuareg and Wodaabe (Fulani) riffs and traditions, no small feat in the Sahel where water is in short supply and Tuaregs want it as much for their goats as much as Fulanis do for their cows; no small feat considering that Tuaregs are Semitic Mediterraneans and Fulanis are dark sub-Saharans; no small feat considering that Wodaabes pride themselves on their rejection of Islam. They’ll be at Amoeba on Tuesday evening and again with Chicha Libre at the Japanese-American Museum on Thursday. But the big deal this week is the All Roads Film Project at the Egyptian Theatre from 9/25-28, which features third-world and ethnic filmmakers' documentaries and narrative films. Somali hip-hop star K'naan opens the show Thursday night. See you there.

SEASON’S OVER FOR OUTDOOR MUSIC (ALMOST)

I guess it was fitting to have Poncho Sanchez close out the MacArthur Park music series for the summer, today being Mexican Independence Day and all, he being a native of Laredo and long one of LA’s foremost jazz and salsa percussionists. The audience responded by turning out in force, something that cannot be said of all the shows there. He did not disappoint either, with a nice mixture of both styles, for dancing and listening too, both concrete and abstract. His band featured some especially inspired trumpeting in addition to his own poly-rhythmic conga drumming. He makes it sound easy, but it’s not. The fastest drummer is not necessarily the best, and ditto for the music. Jazz is all about phrasing and subtle nuance. Salsa is all about rhythm and danceability. These guys have both. Nothing else is needed or desired.

This is in marked contrast to the band that proceeded Poncho on Saturday, Marito Rivera y su Grupo Bravo from El Salvador, not coincidentally Central American Independence Day, notwithstanding the fact that there is no such thing as an independent Central America. But no matter, they obviously have some regional solidarity, so that’s cool. But the music’s another thing. Though their cumbia and Latin pop is certainly related to Poncho’s by genre, the extra cutesiness and quasi-choreography is something to behold, keyboardist and lead guitar and various singer/percussionists swaying and dipping to the music. It’s enough to almost make you think that Central America is hopelessly ‘small time’ in comparison to its big brothers in Mexico, South America, and the ‘mother country,’ Spain. Still it’s all good fun and definitely the ‘real thing’, if such concerns are important. There weren’t many gringos in that crowd, just me and one other group conspicuous by their presence. Turns out that was Ms. Levitt herself, sponsor of the whole schmear, alive and in the flesh. Thanks, Ms Levitt. Cutumay Camones started the evening off with some socially conscious lyrics to some folk music Latino style, a bit limited and repetitive, but still significant considering El Salvador’s tortured past and the FMLN banners in the crowd. Grupo Bravo did a rap version of ‘Juana la Cubana,’ too.

More interesting musically was the group Gongmyoung from Korea. An all-instrumental group featuring various percussions and even guitar, they were able to weave sonic landscapes that were quite compelling, creating melodies where by logic melodies don’t normally exist. With some finessing and adapting, these guys could be a hot item on the world music scene. With some ethereal vocals added to taste, they could even be the next Sao Dingding, not to be confused with the Ting Tings. They were there to celebrate Chusok, the Korean harvest festival, and were preceded by HanNuri, doing Korean dancing and drumming. The Korean community turned out for this event larger than I’ve ever seen, so it was a fitting end to the season, each week a new process of discovery. It’s a shame more people don’t take advantage of it. Okay, it ain’t Temple Bar or Largo or Safari Sam’s, but who’s posing with a mai tai? The music was generally good, so that’s the main thing.

It’s pot luck. One night you get the students, another night you get the masters. That’s the good and bad of free music, but that’s the way it’ll have to be. I have yet to pay a peso or peseta, pound or punt, libra or lira, real or riyal, dinar or dirham, ruble or rupiah, yen or yuan, kyat or kip, won, ringgit, dong, baht, or dollar to hear any of the music I’ve heard 4-5 days out of every week this summer, so I reckon that’s way cool. Every week is like a little mini-fest, roaming from stage to stage, loving some and leaving others. Sounds like romance. And I haven’t seen the half of it really, being too scattered to encompass it all. I tended to concentrate on my own little golden triangle that starts around Hollywood & Highland where I live and catch the ‘Rumble and Hum’ Tuesday evening jazz series, continuing on to randomly scattered Grand Performances at Cal Plaza just two red line stops past MacArthur Park, where I see more music than any other one place, usually wrapping the week up at LACMA with its Friday and Saturday evening jazz and Latin music series just past the Farmers’ Market with its Thursday and Friday music series. So it’s route 217 and the 720 and the Red Line, where I pick my wife up in Thai Town every evening on the way home. Don’t mess with me. I’ve got a system.

But, I guess I could’ve just pitched my bedroll at MacArthur Park, since I was there two-three nights almost every week for over two months. I probably wouldn’t be the only one, and I’m not talking about Levitt Pavilion volunteers. It’s not the classiest of music locations to be sure, but isn’t that part of the attraction? Estas’ en el barrio, hombre. So what if someone’s pissing on a tree somewhere over there? They don’t charge extra for that. Most ads don’t mention MacArthur Park any more, just the street address, as if people wouldn’t go if they knew. This is justified if you have bathroom anxiety. Check out the port-a-pooper and you’ll know why. Reminds me of the first time I went to Mexico over thirty years ago. Remember the crapper at the bus station for the bus from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido? They are (or at least were) despicable, and I’ve got low standards. Ask my wife. Sometimes you gotta’ get down and dirty. Sometimes you don’t. A little ‘atmosphere’ is great with world music, but not that. Since they can’t figure it out, I’ll have to say it.

The water court at Cal Plaza is the exact opposite, if that’s possible, cool and abstract to the point of distraction, a pond in front of the performers and shooting fountains behind. I guess it’s a yin/yang thing and aesthetically inspiring, but almost distracting. And then there’s that yawning gap between you and the performer, as if you’d have to walk on water to get there. It’s only inches deep, but security would probably get there first, unless you hip-hopped the islands. That might be a shortcut to stardom after all. Hip-hop? Hey, wait a minute…

There are many others, many of which I have yet to fully explore, including the Santa Monica Pier, the Skirball and the Autry, but probably my favorite of the summer freebie venues to which I regularly go for world music is LACMA by the tar pits. It’s not a proper stage really, the sound system is basic, and the acoustics are non-existent, but the audience is always as good as the music. They’re warm and appreciative and most importantly, they’re there, even if this is not exactly their ‘there.’ I don’t think that many people actually live right on Museum Row and there’s no convenient subway line, but there’s always a crowd, black and white and all shades of between-ness, munching and dancing and playing with the kids. And the stage is right there in front of you on the same level. You can’t more intimate than this. If only that sun would just go on down…

It ain’t over yet. The Festival of Sacred Music still has a two-week run to go. On Thursday Savina Yannatou will be at the Japanese American National Museum with songs from the Near and Middle East; sounds like a good bet for us red-line sewer snakes. Cava and Gomez are at Amoeba in Hollywood today Tuesday as DJ and performer. The Latino Film Fest continues in Hollywood until Friday. Soon the weather will turn cool and the rains will come. What next? Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This Sunday will be the latest installment of KCRW's 'world fest' in which reigning world music diva Lila Downs will play third fiddle to fusionista crowd-pleasers Ozomatli and Michael Franti's Spearhead, barely edging out TJ techno-rancheristas Nortec Collective featuring Bostich and Fussible, whoever/whatever that refers to. It sounds like a sewing machine that's a real bitch or semi-automatic or both. Es la frontera, hombre. Welcome to World Music 401.