I also performed a solo piece based on video tracking, but that performance ended in disaster, and I believe the footage is lost, if it ever existed… I certainly never had a copy… I’ll ask around to see if I can dig it up.

Gnaoua isn’t bad, but a bit African for my tastes.

It was only when flying through the Algerian border in my over-rented Land Rover digging deep into the Sahara (and eventually running randomly into old pal Brahim in Rissani) that I was properly introduced between oases by hired hand Abdullah to Cheba Maria, the mistress of Rai.

no tengo lugar
y no tengo paisaje
yo menos tengo patria
con mis dedos hago el fuego
y con mi corazon te canto
las cuerdas de mi corazon lloran
naci en alamo
naci en alamo
no tengo lugar
y no tengo paisaje
yo menos tengo patria

Have you ever known a girl to be so infectiously happy about her dispossessed homeland?   The best part about being in Seville is to hear this type of music on the public buses.  Time to go back and get an infusion of flamenco pop.

Israeli ravers

But actually, Yasmin Levy wasn’t like that.  She had a sharp sense of humor about her own music.  And we all know that Jews love self-deprecation, so the crowd composed of mostly Jewish women and their yarmulked companions was appreciative.  And her music was unique, not attempting to be flamenco, but clearly using the influences in what I opine to be an unaffected way.  Not that the music was great, but that it was an honest attempt at something interesting by people who are not relying on cheap musical or performing tricks, which I couldn’t help but remembering is a rare experience to witness.

My mom and I both agreed that she “overdid it” except on the very last song, the encore she requested we give her, which was understated and very good.   They would do well to unironically reduce the reverb on her microphone so her perfectly fine singing sounds less “world music”-ish.  She also clearly can’t dance, besides a forlorn look she tends to give the audience over her bared right shoulder, which is endearing.  She has a very strong, rich voice that of course is necessary for both the spanish and turkik musics from which ladino draws material.

I don’t think the online videos or recorded music represent the experience well, but here she is singing to my favorite Kurd pop singer, Ibrahim Tatslises, sitting on a couch with a random hot blonde woman.

She is no La Paquera de Jerez, but you can’t hold that against anybody. There will only ever have been one La Paquera de Jerez. And while her guitarist was good, he was no Parrilla. But he wasn’t trying to be, so it’s ok.

She’s also nothing like Ibrahim Tatslises.  But aren’t there enough mustachioed men in Izmir?

And who is Ibrahim Tatslises compared to Ataturk anyway?

Ataturk = big. Other people = little.

John la Barbera

He looked suspiciously like a younger guy at Curtiss’ birthday party I had met a few weeks ago, the night before the Harry Chapin Run Against Hunger (thus explaining my placing 61st in the race as I ran against hunger and a hangover).  This guy had made an impression: he had arrived, after I was well on my way to happiness, with an amped-up entourage of two significantly larger women, all smiling, sweaty, and possibly drunk.  Could this be the same person?  The inimitable Alessandra Belloni introduced him on stage as someone she had begun performing with 30 years ago in Greenwich Village, so it couldn’t be.

Without further ado, Alessandra Belloni began banging her Alessandra Belloni Signature REMO^TM Tambourine, and the ragtag ensemble of musicians began learning the songs.

Alessandra Belloni seems to be quite a character.  Despite her age and girth, she can dance the tarantella with the best of them, and although her demeanor lacks any sensuality as she furrows her brow and manhandles her oversized drum, you get the feeling that she is a three-breasted Awa commanding devotion from her rabble of musicians and dancers.

Three beautiful muscular Italian girls began prancing around on stage, with a tall gangly but graceful Italian guy as their male counterpart.  The movement was a mixture of traditional folk dance interspersed with segments of modern interpretive movement.

Antonio Fini

Caterina Rago

Greta Campo

Francesca Silvano

You see, the tarantella is a dance of trance-like exorcism in a traditional society, so it was only a matter of time until the girls began humping and flailing on the floor while Antonio Fini ran around with glow sticks in only his gold lamé underpants.

But I tell you, even that paled in comparison to the presence of Nando Citarella of Napoli.  As soon as he stepped up to the microphone in his white linen shirt and pants and bare feet, you knew you were in the presence of a master.

The southern Italian Ninna Nanna lullaby rivals even my own personal favorite Georgian Nina Nana lullaby in its sweet sounding nananess.  Nando Citarella does his own rendition in a living room in Napoli.

April Centrone

Trab ‘Antura, a duet between ordained deacon Naji Youssef and clinical psychologist Salma Marjieh

Salma Marjieh

Saz jam

Saz player statue in Avanos, Turkey

When tonight’s Shakespeare in the Park performance of Bacchae began with heavy drums and repetitive melody, I became entranced by the beating sounds and subtle harmonies, forgetting entirely my previous expectation of boring repetitive irritating obvious music in the boring repetitive irritating obvious modern tradition.  The setting of Shakespeare in the Park is beautiful, with Belvedere Castle lit up on a hill behind the stage.  For a few moments, everything: the lighting, the set design, music, setting, and even the amphitheater seating, came together in as close as one can get to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk without actually getting close at all.  Then the clean-cut curly haired kid walked out on stage in jeans, and my mind drifted away from Gesamtkunstwerk.

We live in a particular period of time with particular changing social values.  You could say we live in interesting times, but isn’t it likely that all times are interesting to those who are interested in them?  Gender is in the middle of bending; woman’s liberation has taken a new turn away from direct competition with men;  single mothers are reworking of the meaning of the term nuclear family;  works involving race are given preference in almost every public performance venue thereby proving a pervasive inequality;  technological progress has made birth unnecessary for life; the American tradition of informality has reached a certain apex with the glorification of underwear as outerwear from which we can only retreat if we are not to go fully nude; the hypocrisy of human rights has all but officially imploded;  and the notions of nation-states and borders are beginning to seem artificial and oppressive.

All these seemingly modern concepts and conflicts lie latent within the original 5th century BC Greek tragedy of Euripedes’ Bacchae, a story involving divine retribution for the lack of fealty from mankind.  A skilled director would have so much high potential raw material to work with if putting it on stage in today’s social context.  But as should have been irritatingly predictable and obvious, Philip Glass’s collaborator in this Shakespeare on the Park production is irritatingly predictable and obvious.

Not even the tragedy’s debauched women in the mountains, cross-dressing kings, broken urban families, surrogate birthing, savage murder, Asian invasions, or old blind black men in sequin-lined pants can make up for unimaginative and heavy-handed directing.  It’s not that the director, Philip Glass’ ex-wife, didn’t try to be meaningful and relevant.  It’s that she tried so hard she didn’t even come close at all.  Doesn’t she know you can’t escape The Fates?

Taking to the stage, Yo Yo Ma discussed the Tanglewood origins of the ensemble, charming the audience with his superior smile and well-tailored suit.  He repeatedly referred to the other members as “friends”, with such redundant obviousness of emphasis on this word that I began to suspect it served him as a euphemism for something far more sinister that lays behind his enlightened demeanor.

Then the ensemble began the first piece of the Silk Road Suite, “Wandering Winds”, a “musical conversation” among Korea’s Dong-won Kim on jang-go , China’s Wu Tong on bawu, Japan’s Kojiro Umezaki on shakuhachi, with Yo Yo’s cello playing backup riffs to a mildly Persian theme reinforced by his friends jamming on their kim chi teriyaki instruments: Kayhan Kalhor on kamancheh, Wu Man on pipa, with even a cursory Indian, Sandeep Das, thrown in on tabla, among others less recognizable.

The rhythm was just noodlingly Persian enough to allow for monotonous nodding of the head while sitting. And so the night went on, with expert musicians masters in their respective genres, performing a lowest-common denominator style of pan-Asian groove music time and again.  A pat on my shoulder from a Chinese girl behind me warned that a trickle of an amber-hued liquid was making its way down the slightly slanted makeshift amphitheater towards my bag.

The rest of the compositions that evening flowed in much the same way, with the understanding among friends clearly visible in the performers’ slow grins and gentle gestures of respect for one another. Conversations with foreigners are always limiting, but the musicians were obviously enjoying themselves, high on the promise of a world of love, the prospect of future endorsements on Wheaties boxes in 13 different languages, and their totally unexpected mutual admiration.  And the audience’s bladders were mostly under control despite the collection of an apt yet abberated puddle under my seat, which continued to pick up new and richer hues as it coalesced.

From the dozens of shades of faces in the ensemble, there were only two stand-out performers:  Wu Man, who performed “White Snow in the Sunny Spring”, a classic pipa solo; and Alim Qasimov, a bona-fide “Living National Treasure” from Azerbaijan, who sang two intensely semi-Azerbaijani pop pieces with his handsome wild-eyed daughter, Fargana Qasimova.

Yo Yo Ma is clearly using his fame to expose artists unknown in the western world.  I suppose serious compositions would just obstruct the flow.

As lovers of a good hamburger must, and as a negligent blogger should, we arrived several hours before the performance in order to allow ample time for analysis of the impending hamburger consumption along two axes: immediate flavor impact, and gustation variation over time.  Music-lovers will clearly see the relation between hamburger analysis and earlier notes on the harmony/melody duality of music.

For a hamburger, like a piece of western music, is a multi-faceted thing, ill-treated if considered only in terms of its immediate impact upon one’s sensory receptors.  Variation over time is critical to a modern conception of beauty, as evidenced no more clearly than in the Baptist church, where even gays are beautiful, so long as they’re trying, over time, to change their aberrant ways.  I guess this means that a Baptist homosexual, at any given moment, is like a single dissonant chord.  Put a bunch of dissonant chords together, and you get jazz.

Brussel Sprouts with Bacon at PJ Clarke's

Now I have no idea where that analogy was going, but it definitely was not the reason why I ordered brussel sprouts and fries with the hamburger.  I think that was more a result of the searching eyes of the tall, fresh, young waiter, clearly a by-product of the Mid-West’s dairy industry.  His name was James or Brad or something, and there was no possibility of not ordering a draught beer, brussel sprouts, and fries with the hamburger so long as this blonde Übermensch was asking piercing questions, like, “What will you be ordering today?” and calling me “buddy” as I sat, at least ten years his elder, in my navy blue suit at a picnic tablecloth covered table with my exotic-looking date in full opera getup.

I remembered what I had liked about PJ Clarke’s.  It’s the sort of place where you feel democratized but not compromised.  When Brad brought over the romantic candle to place on our picnic tablecloth, I thanked him, gesturing in Nina’s direction with the words, “Oh, thanks, that’ll do the trick.”  Beautiful Brad, exotic Nina, and I had a good chuckle, and I started to get buzzed.

The hamburgers, draught beer, and brussel sprouts arrived and were of high quality and good.  God, there’s nothing like a brussel sprout to get the beer down.

The hamburger and all the condiments were very good.  If it weren’t for the slightly flavorless beef, I would easily call it a better burger than the Corner Bistro burger.  But flavorless beef being flavorless beef, this hamburger was not better.  I consider that to be a shame because I far prefer the pretentiously casual ambience at PJ Clarke’s to the grimy honest informality of the Corner Bistro.

PJ Clarke's Hamburger with Bacon, Mushrooms, and Swiss Cheese

The fries were as can be expected, and that was exactly what I’d expected.  The pickle on the side was fully sour, which perfectly accompanied the task at hand, despite my usual outspoken preference for its half sour brethren.  Did I mention that the brussel sprouts were cooked to perfection as was the bacon?  The bun, while nondescript, had been lightly toasted on the inside and proved to be a useful force multiplier for handling the entire deliciously oversized package into my mouth.

By the time the mid-level porcelain plates were barren, it was time for the pre-concert lecture by the appreciably dry humoured composer, Richard Wilson.  The lecture proved to be much more engaging than the actual mid-20th century compositions by Luigi Dallapiccola which was thankfully only tangentially its topic.

Across the street, in Alice Tully Hall, Wilson explained the basic concept behind the 12-tone composition technique, something which is so simple, yet so oft misunderstood.  While western classical music has traditionally been “in key”, or tonal, 12-tone compositions are generally not.

Twelve-tone composers pick a theme of 12 non-repeating notes, called a tone row, and use variations upon that theme as a replacement for the affordances that tonality usually offers.  In other words, 12-tone compositions find other ways to make the music interesting over time than the simple techniques of leading notes and cirlcle-of-fifths standard harmonies.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t find atonal music interesting at all.  And Wilson wryly remarked that it may have been better for posterity if Arnold Shoenberg had kept the details of this 12-tone music composition technique in the closet, thus leaving the audience’s focus on the music, not the technique.  How does the music make you feel?

By this point, the hamburger and brussel sprouts had established a solid foundation in my stomach, and judging by my feelings of agility, both mental and physical, the level of quality in the overarching 12-tone hamburger experience was feeling pretty high.  For music, like hamburgers, as I think I’ve mentioned, should be judged along both axes: immediate impact, and variation over time.

It is my firm belief that Luigi Dallapiccola’s operas are not especially interesting in either story or music, but that Richard Wilson is an engaging didact.  The hamburger was great, but the meat could use more flavor.

By the end of the hour, Nina, a girl with no prior musical or culinary instruction, understood perfectly the use of the 12-tone atonal system in contemporary composition and the importance of high quality ingredients.