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talkinganddrumsolos · 8 years ago

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I Went To New Orleans And All You Got Is This Lousy T-Shirt

Among the glib and oversimplified beliefs I find utility in repeating to others is this recommendation: all Americans ought to visit New Orleans. I mean something more specific, of course, something like: all Americans ought to visit New Orleans but only partly for bon-temps decadence and also to see the most eccentric but perfectly logical extension of what your country's economic system and institutional racism and general human ingenuity hath wrought. To see a place where the the problems of Everytown, USA are humidified into a crucible but also where young black men regularly earn social and financial capital from playing the tuba. To see a place that is doomed in the short-to-medium term to repeat its own mistakes and doomed in the long term to Poseidon, yet "still I rise" until the sea level counters again.

This also requires having a particular point of view — some desire to witness regional cultural experience, and some empathic consciousness toward the underprivileged whose communities often are the originators of said cultural experiences. These things manifest in basic questions that should occur to any witness, as in "why is there an elaborate parade today for no particular reason?“ or “who had the idea to immerse seafood in butter?“ or “how does this elegant baroque richesse coexist with such stark inequality and tropical decay?” Apparently even this half-woke perspective is harder to come by in America c. 2017 than it it ought to be, but when presented with such marvels it isn’t really a big ask. It doesn't really matter exactly what type of privilege or cultural experience you're curious about; in New Orleans, chase any thread far enough and the intersections of oppressions and creative pursuits both should get you to some form of the experience I have in mind.

OK wait. That all scans way too grim and medicinal, especially since my personal experiences in New Orleans have been, on the whole, really fucking fun. As a wee lad my immigrant parents convened a family vacation to Louisiana basically as an excuse to escape winter and imbibe seasoned crawdads; I was old enough to remember specific things being entertaining and delicious but not old enough to find any of it particularly enlightening. About six years ago I sent myself to the Jazz and Heritage Festival for work with a colleague who happened to be a New Orleans native, and Josh basically gave me the weeklong crash course in Crescent City Conspicuous Consumption 101. The pump had been primed by jazz music mythologies and some vague inference that the city in the news and other mass-cultural phenomena all the time was indeed exceptional living history, but that was the start of the love affair really.

Throughout this last trip I just completed, well-meaning people kept asking me why I was visiting, which struck me as superfluous. I just assumed they would just assume I was there for the same reason that any other out-of-place-looking dude was suddenly in the area code: tourism. Well, that and the convergence of a few boring personal motivations: trying to make the most of forcible unemployment; trying to be warm during an East Coast winter, trying to ride a bicycle somewhere warm during an East Coast winter, trying to use some frequent flyer miles (I paid $11.20 for the flight), trying to see what attracted some good friends from college to land there and stay there, trying to take a vacation from my own simmering existential crises. But also I went to try to better understand why the music and food I’d developed a taste for existed and perpetuated itself not just by reading about it, but by consuming more of it. Basically, tourism.

If I had to pick a centerpiece event of the week I was there, it was probably the 21-hour period in which I attended the first parade of the Mardi Gras/Carnival season — the profoundly politically-incorrect Krewe du Vieux, followed by the more broadly satirical krewedelusion — and the following day’s second line parade of the CTC Steppers (nothing to do with Mardi Gras), which crossed an industrial canal into the Lower Ninth Ward led by 6-7 floats blaring bounce and modern R&B ahead of the brass band. The mere regular existence of these traditions, where ordinary people build ornate floats to slowly walk around the city in costumes for no discernible purpose other than merriment, is an manmade wonder of the world in itself. They also form a handy contrast: the white-encoded Krewe du Vieux vs. a social aid and pleasure club thoroughly suffused in blackness, skewering others vs. prideful celebration of self, depictions of Donald Trump suffering sex acts vs. a fair amount of twerking, the most economically successful areas of the city vs. a poor area still very much recovering from post-Katrina flood damage, anarchy as aesthetic vs. actual barely reined-in anarchy. In some figurative respects, and a literal one, it was night and day.

(krewedelusion, a younger, more diverse and more female set of sub-krewes, took on some sharper and generally more clever targets. Among the many were anti-AirBnB protests, Guy Fawkes masks, an all-women sub-krewe, the Krewe du Jieux [say it out loud], and a group named after James Brown: the Krewe of King James Super Bad Sex Machine Strollers. Their “security” staff was members of New Orleans Ladies Arm Wrestling. It, like much of New Orleans, doesn’t quite fit as neatly into the duality I’m setting up.)

I didn’t quite eat as much shellfish or see as much live music as I had intended, though it was still quite a bit. I did do my fair share of “chill,” as did apparently most of the city. On aimless strolls or bike rides through neighborhoods, an awful lot of folks seemed to be porch-sitting or biding their time in coffee shops or otherwise not really up to much in the middle of the day. Obviously there are plenty of people invisibly doing the building and harvesting and oil drilling and construction and shrimp-boating and cooking, and plenty of tourists to skew the visible numbers, but it seems like an awful lot of folks are marginally employed, or self-employed, or underemployed, or employed in weird service-industry hours, or just not employed. Coming from DC, a place where work-life balance is both bad and boujee, a place where people have more time than money was welcomed if a bit confusing.

Maybe this, and many of my experiences this time around, were filtered through the truly fine folks I stayed with. My friend lives with her girlfriend and another gay couple and most of that household is students and freelancers. One dude also plays in a moderately well-known rock band. Counting their central social circles, the whole thing was a bit like the Dykes To Watch Out For anthology like the one on their bathroom shelf. Basically my whole experience of this Mardi Gras parade in the presence of queer folks and at a gay bar, which, it turns out, was a pretty awesome vantage point for the freak flags of Carnival time anyhow. New Orleans has always struck me as a sort of place where people can build their scenes with relative ease, and as a general statement I’m glad all my peoples down there have found their peoples.

You see things from one subaltern position and you begin to see them all, and not coincidentally my gracious hosts are involved with several social justice communities. One night we went to a panel discussion called “Black Liberation in the Time of Trump” (it was hosted by a white anti-racism group called European Dissent) which seemed apropos. Chalk it up to my artistic interests maybe, but I’ve always observed the predominant power dynamic around New Orleans to be why black communities define so much of its cultural life yet hold so little of its wealth, and are many times legally restricted unduly in the development of that culture.

(Sometimes this discussion too easily excludes underprivileged populations that don’t fit on it. A friend of a friend, an black EMT, is often asked to list the “race” of patients, and reports that there are only two categories on the form — white and black — which is curious given the large Vietnamese and growing Hispanic communities in the city. Again, shades of grey here.)

I guess some well-meaning white folk see New Orleans as defined by its European cultural history, as in French Quarter architecture or Cajun or Italian food or erstwhile Catholicism, and there’s certainly a lot of that to go around. Here and elsewhere though, the United States of America’s popular cultural history has generally been defined by black people repurposing things for themselves, which is how you get to the neighborhoods where people actually live, and black Creole cooking, and Mardi Gras Indians, and Congo Square and jazz and R&B and traditional brass bands and modern brass bands and bounce and Cash Money Records, and a black majority population after white flight and Robert Moses freeway projects, and gentrification and/or tourism co-opting these things to sell back to moneyed mostly-white people. You can’t really enjoy yourself down there without noticing this.

One wonders whether many of the other relative post-Katrina newcomer folks participate in this cultural life of the city in any meaningful way — if it’s just another dangerous city with economic opportunity and terrible infrastructure (my God the roads), or whether the city’s exceptionalism is worthy of their deeper understanding and time investment as well. The city’s longer-term residents, I suspect, alternately welcome and revile these newcomers, depending in part on these newcomers’ engagement with local concerns. Turfing and perceived ownership in the cultural arena is a tricky topic; having “covered” transplanted white jazzmen based there and elsewhere, there are few clear rules. Yet sometimes even the best intentions for allyship or even active complicity needn’t qualify you for a hood pass, and it’s best to shut up and listen.

As is my unfortunate wont, I’ve made this whole reflection overlong and not particularly coherent. Maybe an incident from my last night in town would illuminate my general point insofar as I was trying to make one. I found myself at a wine and cheese and tapas joint with a huge outdoor patio and a monochromatically pale audience, whatevs, to see a cellist named Helen Gillet. She does a looping and improv thing across idiom, singing French chanson and American rock songs and original compositions and generally getting rad, somewhere between Andrew Bird and Tune-Yards and Yo-Yo Ma. Her last tune, fittingly, severed the hair on her bow. It was all a reminder that the New Orleans music tradition isn’t necessarily about tresillo patterns and trombones, but more generally about good and creative music.

Anyway, throughout the performance, we were frequently interrupted by two blacked-out military helicopters conducting drills above an adjacent abandoned Naval building. They would hover alarmingly low, as if to pick up a nonexistent passenger from a rooftop, then elevate away, occasionally leaving an enormous and unidentified explosion in their wakes. To put it lightly, it was very disruptive. But Helen kept at it despite the deafening roar of rotors, occasionally joking that they were listening. What else was she to do, right?

That creativity and revelry and uniquely resourceful art is valued in such quantity in New Orleans that it can support many musicians with a significant supplementary or working-to-middle-class income is, I think, no small wonder. But those military helicopters were a stark symbolic reminder that cellos are not actually ordnance; that these cultural pursuits are circumscribed by colonial and police-statist and capitalist and white supremacist systems that are more powerful, more insidious, more invisibly baked into the fabric of everyday life than we can at once describe. (This, too, was on the day we woke up and learned that Beyonce’s Southern-, Louisiana- and black-centric critically-lauded album had “lost” a Grammy award to a contrite Adele, which as many commentators pointed out, is a prime example of what systemic racism looks like in the music biz itself.) This oppression both gives rise to and then limns many of the things I love about New Orleans, and yet those things still happen, at least so far.

To a privileged observer it’s all beautiful and all damned and rarely quite so simple as one or the other. To a local, it must be hard to get on with your day unless you somewhat accept that it just is.

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ananalog · 6 years ago

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Minnesota Private Radio, Two, 9.6.18

https://www.mixcloud.com/Ananalog/minnesota-private-radio-two-9618/

1. MF Doom (Mediavuelta remix), "Go With the Flow (12" version)", Operation: Doomsday, Foldle 'Em / Metal Face, 1999 / 2008 / 2018, USA

June haze remix of the original version of Doom's "Go With The Flow." I have the recording as collected on the 2008 Metal Face reissue of the oft reissued Operation: Doomsday. The 12" version is sparse and easier to remix than the album version. I ambiened verse, almost reducing it to rap soundz, but no disrespect is intended. Hopefully, you have a well worn issue of the album on your shelf.

2. Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, "Rapela", Genes and Spirits, M.E.L.T., 2000, South Africa

"Rapela" means pray in Zulu. Genes and Spirits is full of genius moments in which Molelekwa and company fused S.A. jazz, hip-hop, kwaito and electronica. All innovation duly credited, the two barely syncopated notes introducing the deceptively simple first theme of "Rapela" are my favorite part of the album. The joyful canon that follows, like one of Chick Corea's children's songs, is buoyed by the rest of the band and eases into a supercrisp, 21st century jazz take on the same melody, before snapping into a breathtaking, unified turnaround. All fusion aside, "Rapela" is beautiful because of very clever writing that the listener hears as organic.

3. Sons of Kemet, "My Queen is Ada Eastman", Your Queen Is A Reptile, Impulse!, 2018, U.K.

On Your Queen Is A Reptile, Shabaka Hutchings and Sons of Kemet raise up a fist to acknowledge the power of black women and lower a withering gaze at conventional British history - embodied by the queen - that declines to recognize the impact of black women on that history. Ada Eastman was Hutchings great-grandmother, his family's matriarch from Barbados.

Hutchings, Theon Cross (tuba) and Seb Rochford (drums) cook at a FAMU drumline temperature beneath Joshua Idehen's lines. "I'm born strong, the song of an immigrant / [...] I'll be here when your cities are sediment / and only your borders and fences are left / I'll be here when your banks stop selling debt / and all your leaders stop selling death / And you've lost all relevance."

This is the most Impulse!-y music Impulse! has released since Black Unity and Magic of Ju-ju, fifty or so years ago.

4. Donald Byrd, "Places and Spaces", Places and Spaces, Blue Note, 1975, USA

I'll admit that while I have about a dozen or so Byrd, Blackbyrd and Mizell brothers recordings from this era, and "Lansana's Priestess" played a key role in ramping my wedding reception song list from stun to kill, I had never heard Places and Spaces before a few months ago. I heard a clubby remix of the title track at a pizza place, recognized the sample from Pete Rock's "All The Places" (P.R. has sampled Mizell and Byrd more than a few times), recognized the trumpet as obviously Donald Byrd and the arrangements as so perfect they must be Mizell brothers, and tracked down the album that afternoon. I'm resisting the urge to gush too much about this record.

5. Blackrock, "Yeah Yeah", 7" single, Select-O-Hits, 1969, USA

This lone release from a group of Stax and Hi session musicians in Memphis is thunder that predates the first Funkadelic album by a few months. It's an odd and effective bit of song arranging, with the first, minor key section not serving an obvious role except to amplify the overjoyed, major key guitar solo you didn't realize was going to microwave your face a few seconds later.

6. MonoNeon, "Shooting For the Stars With My Laser Beam", I Don't Care Today (Angels and Demons in Lo-Fi), self release, 2018, USA

MonoNeon is the freek funkateer handle of Memphis bass virtuoso Dwayne Thomas Jr. I Don't Care Today is some clever shit, couching MonoNeon & friends' intimidating virtuosity and avante-garde experimentation on a futon of immediately approachable pyjama funk. Like the bedroom stoner, Sonic The Hedgehog funk that Thundercat rips but doesn't pull off quite as well because his music is too high fidelity. I just really like the guitar riff after the chorus.

7. Belair, "Samba For A Cold Warrior", Relax, You're Soaking It In, Belby Wetterman, 1980, USA

I have this recording from a Kev Beadle, Private Collection compilation. (Where does he find all of this not Brazilian, jazz samba?) The original seems to be small or private press on a microscopic label. I don't know much about this group. I presume guitarist Michael Belair is the leader. Broadly, "Samba For A Cold Warrior" fits a Kev Beadle presents comp well - small combo, small press, medium edge, mild Chick Corea-esque exotica. The big surprise is the vocal chorus that emerges from seven minutes of traded solos. "With the darkness dispelled by the radiance of day, the wiles of the wicked are driven away."

8. The Grodeck Whipperjenny, "Put Your Thing On Me", The Groedeck Whipperjenny, People, 1970, USA

You read that label correctly. James Brown's People label put this megaton psych rock shit out. Keyboardist Dave Matthews arranged for Brown and Brown released Matthew's project. The star of this album is guitarist Kenny Poole. Poole is a Cincinnati legend who went on to be better known for intricate finger picked sambas than for renal liquefying fuzz devastation. Great album.

9. M.C. Mell'o', "All Terrain M.C.s", Thoughts Released, Republic Records, 1990, U.K.

Rufff bounce from the godfather U.K. rapper isn't exactly as mell'o as jell'o. I won't pretend to analyze Mell'o' rhymes, because my London accent detection is not that sharp. You can tell it is ruff albeit smooth, though. Republic was house and disco master, Joey Negro's first label.

I love this era of beatmaking. Slamming rolands atop a funk break, every bass drum sample ever on the one, monosyllabic guitar and organ stabs interjected to fake a harmonic accompaniment, unintelligible vocal scratches, a chord change to keep it fresh, the strange piano interlude whose purpose isn't clear twenty five years later. Like Mell'o' would say, there is something "dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk, no fuss" about the beat. It would have lit a fire under my five year old self when it was released just as it does today.

10. La Mecanica Popular, "Part 4 (Visiones)", Roza Cruz, Names You Can Trust, 2018, USA

La Mecanica Popular, NYC psych salseros, push their newest release into the crawling, sinister realms of live/evil bitches Miles or Eddie Palmieri with his oxygen burning Rhodes turned to t h i c k. "Visiones" churns when the the synth bass, keys and electric guitar unite for the final head. I like that, at least for Roza Cruz, La Mecanica have shunned going somewhere for digging in and being somewhere.

11. Piero Umiliani, "Danza del fuoco", La ragazza dalla pelle di luna, Schema, 1972, Italy

Umiliani is a minor hero of mine. There is a perfect Umiliani track for every life experience. "Danza del fuoco" is a bonus recording not on the original Omicron soundtrack for La ragazza dalla pelle di luni, a 70s exploitation flick about a white European supermodel making out with a Seychellois supermodel or something similarly highbrow.

"Sdoganare" means to sanction or clear through customs. I just discovered the Schema has a Bandcamp page.

12. Leon Ware (ft. Minnie Riperton), "Instant Love", Musical Massage, Gordy, 1976, USA

The second syllable of Riperton's performance, the rising guitar note in between the verses (from either David Walker or Ray Parker), the Mizell-perfect orchestration, this song is so good. I don't know how Ware and company put together such a carefully controlled experience that is dripping with truth and soul. Maybe it is what happens when you task a room full of master craftsmen each with a small task. Parker and Walker's guitar tones on this album have haunted me. I'll accept advice on ringing that bell.

13. Sinn Sisamouth, unknown recording, Cambodian Soul Sounds, Vol. II, Cambodian Soul

Sounds, early 1970s, Cambodia

Sisamouth was a hugely popular and influential figure in Cambodian popular music for decades before his disappearance and death at the hand of the Khmer Rouge. He songs are still re-recorded today. Intellectual property debates regarding the music of Sisamouth and his contemporaries continue to the present, as while the music remains beloved, the Khmer Rouge sought to erase the careers, legacies and lives of many of the musicians who made it. The first Cambodian intellectual copyright law was passed in 2003, but bootlegs are commonly traded and the Cambodian state lays claim to Sisamouth's compositions as property of the Ministry of Culture. Richard Rossa, the Swedish DJ behind the compilations donates sales from both volumes of Cambodian Soul Sounds to charities that support Cambodian youth and the preservation of Cambodian cultural history in an effort to square the fact that the recordings were unlicensed, or possibly un-licensable in the traditional sense.

- RS, 9/6/18

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