I was skeptical when Watcha Clan‘s “world & bass” sound first crossed my path and their first show left me unimpressed (Deciphering Watcha Clan). But there was something there that kept me coming back: the musical goals were ambitious and sometimes sometimes it really worked. Then the second time I saw them it all came together (Watcha Clan, Live in San Francisco). That performance and a conversation with keyboardist left me eagerly awaiting their new album:

…Clement and I talked about the change in the approach Watcha Clan was taking to creating musical fusion on their new album (for release in early 2011). The album will include more North African, Balkan and Jewish songs, including a Yemeni song played in a Balkan way. Clement said it’s in the same format – “traditional plus electric but deeper.” This time, they are spending less time working on the arrangements and putting more attention to finding the emotion. For each song, they start by recording two or three simple vocal tracks by Karine or Nassim. Then when they have a good vocal take, they build a mix around it. The approach seems to be paying early dividends. On Sunday night, the arrangements of the songs fromDiaspora Hi-Fi were more dynamic and felt both more immediate and filled out. They bore little resemblance to the watered-down versions I’d bemoaned last time I’d seen them. Last time, I saw Watcha Clan, I left eagerly awaiting their new album but unsure if I’d see them again live. This time, I’m eagerly awaiting the new album and looking forward to seeing them again when they return for a North American tour next year. And, remember, never judge a band by a single performance.

Jackie Wilson’s Melisma – 20 notes for the word ‘for’

‘The extent to which the music is integrated with the literal meaning in soul is apparent in some of its basic stylistic conventions, the call and response structure, for instance, where a phrase from the lead vocalist – which may not even take a verbal shape – is as often echoed by the band as by other singers. Or the distinctive use of melisma – the concentration of several notes into one syllable – by soul performers. The effect of this technique is often to give the impression that the singer is none too sure that the words exist which could adequately convey the power of what he is feeling. When Jackie Wilson packs more than twenty notes into the word “for” in his version “Danny Boy“, the literal meaning of the song is virtually superseded’ (Ian Hoare, Mighty mights spade and whitey: soul lyrics and black-white crosscurrents, in The Soul Book, edited by Ian Hoare, London: 1975)

Check out the closing bars of this song for the example given – 20 notes for the word ‘for’:

Related Articles

• Jackie Wilson: “To Be Loved” (davidjmarkowitzmusic.wordpress.com)
• Oversouling (schott.blogs.nytimes.com)
• JACKIE WILSON – (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me)”HIGHER AND HIGHER” (joetroiano.wordpress.com)

A history of the Sunbeam label by Robert L. Campbell, Armin Büttner, and Robert Pruter includes this fascinating portrait of Pettite Swanson and the scene at Joe’s Deluxe Clug (thanks Ray):

…soon thereafter, Marl Young recorded with his own trio behind vocalist Petite Swanson. Petite Swanson was a member of Valda Gray’s troupe of female impersonators, who for much of the 1940s were the main attraction at Joe’s Deluxe Club in Chicago; Marl Young had led the band there in 1943. Some of the entertainment at Joe’s Deluxe is preserved on the recordings made by two of the house band leaders: Dallas Bartley’s session for Cosmo and his three soundies from 1945, and Bill Martin’s 1946 sessions for Hy-Tone (although Martin used a studio lineup instead of the musicians he was appearing with nightly). But the Swanson session includes the only surviving performances by a member of the Gray troupe. Referring to him as a “fem impersonator,” Billboard announced in its March 22, 1947 issue that Swanson had just been signed to the label. The way indie labels usually did their business, we infer from this that Swanson had already recorded. In his article on the label in Blues & Rhythm, Bo Sandell gives La Swanson’s real name as Alphonso Horsley. In its March 1948 issue, Ebony magazine ran an article on the female impersonators at Joe’s Deluxe Club. Petite Swanson is mentioned as a regular performer there; Ebony spells Alphonso’s last name as “Hersley” and states that he was 40 years old at the time, a former school teacher who “attends Catholic church quite regularly.” According to the Ebony writer, he was a “topnotch blues singer but favorite song is Schubert’s ‘Serenade’.”
Not everyone appeared to understand Petite Swanson’s act. In 1945, a young Marshall Stearns, in from New York, decided to take in Dallas Bartley’s six-piece group at Joe’s Deluxe Club, and wrote a rave review of Bartley’s band–which then included Bartley on bass, Mac Easton on alto sax, Reese Thomas on tenor, and Bob Hall on trumpet (the other two were unnamed)–hailing their music as “real jazz.” He was also thrilled by Swanson, writing, “Highlight of the floor show is a blues singer named Petite Swanson, whose idols are Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. When Petite backs away from the mike and lets go with ‘Evil Gal Blues,’ put up on what she’s putting down! She has the power and tone of the old-time, great blues singers and she knows the style by instinct.” Nothing in Stearns’ report indicates that he was watching a female impersonator floor show, or that the source of Ms. Swanson’s power and tone included some testosterone! In any case, he knew the jazz was real. See M. W. Stearns, “Dallas Bartley Pleases Those in Search of Jazz,” Down Beat, 15 September 1945, p. 2. (http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/sunbeam.html) [The Ebony article is included full text on the Petite Swanson page of Queer Music Heritage website -- more fascinating stuff].

For more interesting history, check out Queering Pop Music Studies.

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

“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.

…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”

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…)

15 July 2010

The Kominas In Preston

After being brought over to the UK to perform at a special night at London’s prestigiousMeltdown Festival, taqwacore bands from the USA The Kominas and Al Thawra undertook a short tour that took in half a dozen dates in England and Scotland. I travelled over toPreston to meet them, take pictures and hear them play live.

The Kominas are one of the main bands featured in the documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth Of Punk Islam. Hailing from Boston, three of the members are of Pakistani origin and the fourth from India. On this tour they were joined by Elester Richard, a black American trumpet player who adds a different dimension to their sound.

The bands that make up this taqwacore scene are regularly described as Islamic punk. On their latest CD “Escape To Blackout Beach”, The Kominas sound more power pop than punk (although their first effort “Wild Nights In Guantanamo Bay” is quite a bit heavier). Live, they play much faster and with more energy and watching them reminds me of my misspent youth where I was seeing punk bands every week. (click here to read the rest)

Taqwacore

Taqwa - (Arabic: التقوى‎ at-taqwá) is the Islamic concept of “God-consciousness”

Core - (from Hardcore) is a subgenre of punk rock that’s generally faster, thicker, and heavier than earlier punk rock.

As humans, we need labels in order to describe things and have some kind of order in the world we live in. However, when it comes to music, labelling can become patently absurd. It seems like every genre of music has multiple off-shoots and for the outsider it can often be totally confusing to try and work your way through a maze of descriptive names. The metal and punk scenes in particular have a bewildering number of labels – how abouthardcore, hardline, street punk, grunge, metalcore, D-Beat, post-hardcore, emo, screamo,thrashcore, grindcore, sludge metal, crust punk or even anarcho-punk?

If that’s not enough then how about desi-punk, bollywood punk, raicore or punk islam? All of these terms are real and the ones in the last sentence all fall under the taqwacore genre that is attracting a lot of attention, in particular in the USA. If I wasn’t short of time and trying to get this blog entry together then I would probably think up a few terms of my own although I’m certain that someone like the satirists Chris Morris or Armando Iannuccicould do a lot better than my efforts.

While it starts to get quite laughable with all of these often quite ridiculous labels, the taqwacore genre is definitely worthy of attention as there are some quite interesting things happening in this scene. (to read the rest, click here).

THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2010

Al Thawra – Miskeen

I’m still putting together my blog entry on the taqwacore punk bands Al Thawra and The Kominas and hope to publish it shortly. Until then, following on from last week’s taster “Sharia Law In The USA” by The Kominas, here is a crisp biscuit from Chicago punks Al Thawra. “Miskeen” which is arabic for a poor or unlucky person is taken from their 2008 CD “Who Benefits From War”. This is about as abrasive arab music ever gets and is not for the faint-hearted.