The Cuban Cowboys bring together rock ‘n’ roll and Latin beats with a punk sensibility that brings to mind such post-punk genre busters as The Pixies, Manu Chao, Jonathan Richman, and Moroccan cha’abi rockers Hoba Hoba Spirit. Musically promiscuous and lyrically inventive, head Cuban Cowboy, Jorge Navarro, has found the musical voice on their n

Trails Mixed

S.F.’s Cuban Cowboys flavor Latin grooves with punk power.

By Jeffrey Callen

The Cuban Cowboys‘ new album, Diablo Mambo, doesn’t hesitate to let you know what it is all about. Drop the digital needle on the first track and you learn all you need to know within the first 50 seconds: A Jimi Hendrix lick establishes the rock bona fides before the track morphs into a mambo section overlaid with a post-punk, art rock guitar pattern. The Hendrix lick then returns and signals the transition to driving punk guitars, but with a difference — the usual straight up-and-down thrash is blended with the sway of a Cuban son rhythm pattern. Two musical streams — rock and Latin music — are introduced, then blended, before the story of the song begins.

Bandleader/songwriter Jorge Navarro has interesting, engaging stories to tell. The opening track, “Cojones,” relates an early lesson in navigating the contradictions of the code of machismo taught by his knife-wielding grandfather. Navarro’s songs portray his family’s memories of a mythical Cuba born out of the nostalgia of exile and his experiences as a first-generation Cuban American, immersed in American pop culture and drawn to cowboy boots and rock ‘n’ roll. These two themes establish the narrative poles for the songs on Diablo Mambo, and Navarro skillfully navigates this bi-cultural territory, spinning tales of romance, sex, politics, and family. The music plays an essential role in the effectiveness of the stories, weaving together various tributaries from the two main musical streams — classic rock, punk rock, doo-wop, post–punk, rockabilly, and son, mambo, calypso, and salsa. (to read the rest, go to SF Weekly).

Image via Wikipedia

The Cool Ruler, Gregory Isaacs, passed away today in London. Known as the master of  ”lovers rock” — smooth vocals over cool grooves — Isaacs made his mark singing romantic songs. However, he also was an eloquent spokesperson for Jamaica’s poor, addressing social social problems in songs such as “A Riot” and “Village of the Underprivileged.” For me, Isaacs’s most arresting work is in songs in which he carried on the rocksteady sound of master vocalists, such as Alton Ellis and Dobby Dobson (check out his covers of rocksteady classics “Tumblin’ Tears” [Ellis] and “Loving Pauper” [Dobson - below]).

Related Articles

• R.I.P. Gregory Isaacs (jambase.com)
• Gregory Isaacs aka ‘Cool Ruler’ Succumbs to Lung Cancer (rightcelebrity.com)
• Gregory Isaacs Dead At 59 (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
• Reggae Star Gregory Isaacs Dies (sugarslam.com)
• Reggae singer Gregory Isaacs, the ‘Cool Ruler,’ dies at 59 (thestar.com)
• Reggae Legend Gregory Isaacs Dead at 59 (rollingstone.com)

Big Freedia Queen of New Orleans Bounce (Image by Incase. via Flickr)

Unexpectedly, when I was doing research on the history of a former blues nightclub district in North Richmond, California, I stumbled upon a facet  of that history I had not anticipated: the participant of cross-gendered performers and club-goers. And, in mainstream venues. It flew in the face of all my presumptions of the role of drag  performers in the history of American music and African American music in particular. Sensing that the community members I was interviewing would not take kindly to a slew of questions about drag performers and club-goers, I tread lightly on that subject and the only information I gleaned was from the one bandleader who told me about Jean LaRue, his best (not his only) drag queen singer –she was so popular that she did not work for the band but made separate deals with clubowners.

Transgendered performances became rare in the U.S. by the 1950s (McCarthyism‘s persecution of leftists was accompanied by an as serious persecution of homosexuals that accompanied a newly serious policing of gender roles). Most were for straight audiences as safe parody in the ministrel show tradition that is one of — if not the — wellsprings of American popular entertainment. There were also a few performances for the transgendered community, such as the ball tradition (see the excellent film Paris is Burning), but mixed audiences in mainstream venues did not see transgendered performers. And it still is rare. That is why it struck me when I learned about a sub-style of the Bounce style of hip-hop out of New Orleans called “Sissy Bounce” from a N.Y. Times article by Jonathan Dee in July 2010. Here’s a taste of that article, which is worth checking out in its entirety:

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar. (from Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap).

The question I’m left with is if there are other transgendered performance traditions that have established a “respectable” position in particular locales or is New Orleans a special case (yet once again)? I look forward to learning more.

Related Articles

• Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap (nytimes.com)
• Big Freedia – “Azz Everywhere” Video (NSFW) (Stereogum Premiere) (stereogum.com)
• Big Freedia, Tayisha Busay, MillionYoung, Dinosaur Feathers, Iran & more (Crush Fest) in pics (brooklynvegan.com)
• Your perfect Saturday: Vamps, vagabonds and outdoor opera (timeoutny.com)
• Queering pop  music studies (decipheringculture.com)
• Writings on Transgendered Musical Entertainers

Excellent article by Ted Swedenburg on Khaled and rai — debunks prevalent misconceptions about both.  Brilliant!  Check out Ted’s HawgBlawg — well worth the time.

Khaled and the myth of rai | The Middle East Channel.

An excerpt:

Cheb Khaled, the Algerian rai singer who is probably the best-known Arabic singer on the planet, was selected this summer as one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices. Banning Eyre, a regular commentator on World Music on NPR and producer for Afropop Worldwide who has worked tirelessly to promote music from Africa, including the Maghreb, introduced Khaled to the NPR audience. Unfortunately, his introduction of Khaled repeated several unfortunate and misleading myths about rai music. Eyre presents a picture of an exceptional artist who favors tolerance and peace, and whose courageous positions have angered many Muslims and forced him to take refuge in the West. Eyre depicts Khaled as well as a kind of “bad boy,” in the image of a U.S. rock’n'roller. Khaled, from “a land [Algeria] torn apart by intolerance and violence,” says Eyre, “stood out as an artist who embraced openness and peace.” The real story of Khaled is more interesting, one rooted in Algerian politics and in its large and vibrant musical scene.

via Khaled and the myth of rai (Ted Swedenburg @ The Middle East Channel)

Related Articles

• Khaled: The King Of Rai (npr.org)

Is the future of jazz in its past?

There’s a lot of talk lately about why jazz has been losing its audience despite decades of efforts to build infrastructure. There is hardly a university music program that does not include a jazz studies program and jazz festivals (and affiliated community programs) abound. The place of jazz in musical histories is secure and the tension between the “classical” and “revolutionary” approaches to jazz historiography  seems no longer relevant with the revolutionary voices having left the field (or at least become as absent from the media landscape as jazz itself seems to be — who’s carrying on Frank Kofsky‘s work now that he’s gone). The deep rooting of jazz in the African American experience has been subverted by its widespread acceptance as America’s classical music, its one true art form. I think this has implications for the survival of jazz as a vibrant part of America’s soundscape. The classicizing of jazz has been going on for a while.

The publication of Grover Sales’ Jazz: America’s Classical Music in 1984 sparked an intellectual and cultural frenzy. Sales not only transformed jazz from a cultural product rooted in the African American experience to a cultural product rooted in the American experience, but he also reclassified jazz (an urban folk music) as a national classical music. Whether or not Sales was the first to meAntion jazz as America’s classical music is not as important as the amount of publicity the idea received from the first printing of his text…. Today, jazz is more highly regarded as America’s classical music rather than America’s “rare and valuable national treasure.” In my opinion, these are two diametrically opposed concepts. (The Non-Classical Nature of America’s Classical Music by Emmet G. Price III in All About Jazz, 2003).

In my opinion, there has been a big downside to the success of the classicizing of jazz. Like European classical music, there is a general perception that the best jazz has to offer is firmly entrenched in the past, and not in the sense of a tradition and roots to draw upon but dead masters to venerate. This approach stultifies symphony programs and pushes innovative music to the margins. It seems to be doing the same to jazz.

THIS IS AN ADDENDUM TO AN EARLIER POST ON DECIPHERINGCULTURE.COM: Regenerating Jazz

“Reimagining” the works of classic artists is nothing new to Turtle Island String Quartet. Their previous interpretations of John Coltrane also hit the mark (on A Love Supreme). Here’s a sample, their rendition of “My Favorite Things” informed by Coltrane’s inspired 1961 recording of the Rodgers & Hammerstein composition.

More on Taqwacore from جون بلوتن (Tales from Bradistan)

(1) A short excerpt from AMERICAN ARAB, an in-progress Kartemquin Films documentary by Usama Alshaibi, featuring Marwan Kamel of the Taqwacore band Al-Thawra.

(2) Another repost from Tales from Bradistan with some great photos of the Kominas

The Kominas Live In Bradistan

Following the ending of the taqwacore tour in the UK, Boston band The Kominas stayed on in order to play more shows. A hastily arranged session was put together in Bradistan and held at the Bradistan Playhouse. There was barely over twenty-four hours time to promote the gig plus it coincided with the world cup final so it was no surprise that it was very sparsely attended.

The gig was about as punk as it gets – no stage, half a drum kit with no microphones, no monitors and buzzing guitar leads – but the sound wasn’t that bad. The Kominas put in a typically energetic performance that lasted for around an hour. In the end they were taking requests from the audience and everyone who attended left satisfied.

Here is a selection of photographs that I took at the concert.

For more photographs click here

…one cannot revolutionize a (artistic) field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field, and the great heretics inscribe themselves explicitly in the history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than contemporaries so that revolutions take the form of a return to sources (1996, pg. 238).

Previous writings on:

Tim Eriksen:

• • Postmodern Traditional Music How Tim Eriksen became perhaps the only musician to play with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson.
  • Finding a Voice (Interview of Tim Eriksen)
  • “Northern Roots,” “Americana,” “Traditional Music” — The Strategic Nature of Genre Definition

Carolina Chocolate Drops:

• • CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS DROP NEW ALBUM: “GENUINE NEGRO JIG”

Expanding the Boundaries of a West African Instrument

By JON PARELES

Published: July 26, 2010

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times: Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba Mr. Kouyate with the ngoni, a traditional lute from Mali that dates back hundreds of years, performed with his band at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday.

There were no Western instruments onstage when the Malian griot Bassekou Kouyate and his band, Ngoni Ba, performed at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday afternoon. Ngoni Ba is a string band — four sizes of ngoni, a four-stringed African lute that’s an ancestor of the banjo — with Mr. Kouyate’s wife, Amy Sacko, as lead singer, along with two percussionists playing calabashes and tama, a West African pressure drum. The band wore African clothes, and the songs were in Bambara, Mali’s main language. One, a meditative 17th-century praise song that Ms. Sacko sang in expanding arabesques, delved into 2,000-year-old Malian history.

But this was no traditional African concert. Through technique, technology and open ears, Mr. Kouyate hurls the ngoni into the 21st century. After performing in groups with notable Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, Mr. Kouyate has taken an instrument traditionally used to accompany a singer, pushed it into the foreground and multiplied it into an ensemble.

The bass and tenor-register ngonis in Ngoni Ba, founded in 2005, were invented by Mr. Kouyate, and they bring extra layers of counterpoint to what was already intricate, quick-fingered music. Traditional musicians play the ngoni in their laps while seated; (to read more…)

MONDAY, 26 JULY 2010

Al Thawra

I am the revolution and you are the revolution
In your spirit you have the power
In your heart lies the secret
From your lips spills the truth
That the wine of power is in our blood
Together we can make a revolution
Tell your comrades
I am the revolution
We are the revolution

Recently I drove over to Preston to meet two of the bands that are at the forefront of thetaqwacore scene in the USA. I already wrote about The Kominas with some thoughts about the documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth Of Punk Islam. The other band on the tour were Al Thawra (“The Revolution” in arabic) from Chicago, a group that were not given much airtime in that film but certainly deserve greater recognition.

Al Thawra are a trio but on this trip they had expanded to four members. Syrian-Polish-American Marwan Kamel sings and plays guitar; Matt Scott stood in for the absent bassist Mario Salazar; Micah Bezold was on drums; and Adam Jennings from Winters In Osakaguested by playing the sampler. (to read on…)