Zansa Debut Dances but Doesn't Sizzle

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ZANSA

Djansa

Zansa Music

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He lives in North Carolina, but Zansa front man Adama Dembele has deep roots in the Ivory Coast. To put a point on it, he represents the 33^rd generation of musicians from his family! But one also hears American influences on this Afropop album, not all of them good. Djansa means “dance” and this is a party album. Dembele handles lead vocals and, as in most African music, writes songs in which percussion (djembe, shakers, and various other hand drums) is the lead instrumental voice. It indeed makes for great dance music, which is, after all, rooted more in rhythm than in melody. Dembele sings in French, English, Bambara and Baoule. He’s a decent singer, not a great one. The same can be said about the songs. Most find a groove and stay in it, which is fine for dance music, but both the arrangements and the instrumentation from his four white sidemen sounds smooth and safe (though the electric fiddle is a nice touch). In short, this album feels “American” in many ways and lacks the raw and passionate spark that makes West African music sizzle. I liked this record, but I didn’t love it. But check out this promo video–you might feel differently.

Rob Weir

Clannad Can Still Bring the Magic

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CLANNAD

Nádúr

ARC Music 2471

Stick around long enough and the old becomes new. One can debate whether or not the Donegal-based quintet Clannad invented ambient Celtic music, but there’s little disputing that very few have done it better. By now we know the formula: start with a good story, preferably one filled with some tragedy and/or mystery. Add Moya Brennan’s singular voice, one whose inflections at once suggests pathos, joy, timelessness, and now. Soak the instruments in California-style New Age smoothness and add some mist-evoking harmonies. Maybe toss in a soupçon of spirituality. Repeat. But here’s the rub–it always works. There’s no such thing as a bad Clannad album. Friends show up at when one is playing and make jokes about whether you intend to open a fern bar; they leave with a sticky note of the album’s name and when you stop by their home a week later, guess what’s playing in the background? Clannad remains the calm in a world gone crazy. Nádúr is Irish for “nature” and you could label this one musical transcendentalism. From the opening “Vellum” to the closing “Cití na gCummann” we are taken on a meditative journey. Along the way we have a few departures, including “Tura Dhómhsa chon na Galldachd,” an a capella delight with a work song tempo evocative of “Dulaman,” one of Clannad’s most-requested songs. “A Song in Your Heart” is Brennan, her voice, and harp with drums thundering in the background in ways one associates with Loreena McKennitt, one of many musicians Clannad has influenced. What’s new on this album? The fresh sound of what’s old. It’s the band’s first with entirely new material since 1998, and the first to feature the original 1970 lineup since 1989. Any dust settling in? A little, but the gentle breeze they generate quickly makes you forget. -Rob Weir

White Privilege: A License not to Think

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What's wrong with this image? If you're not white, just about everything. 

It began innocently enough—a Facebook remark from someone who said he didn’t understand the hullabaloo over the football team nickname “Redskins.” It’s just a name, he suggested, and those getting excited about it are victims of Political Correctness (PC) run amok. In a sincere effort to educate, not excoriate, I responded that were he a Native American, he might feel quite differently about tags such as the Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, or Cleveland Indians. How would be respond to a team named the Atlanta Honkies, I asked. I should have stayed the course on politeness. When he responded that he’d find it “funny,” I suggested that this was because he had grown up with privilege.

That led to an outburst on how both he and his parents had worked hard and sacrificed, as if the only sort of privilege possible in America is measured in monetary terms. I confess inward chuckling when I hear this from conservatives. It amuses me no end when they unwittingly espouse Marxist ideas, but I wasn’t about to go into the radical materialist assumptions embedded in reducing humankind to homo economicus. Instead, I blithely continued on the educational course and suggested he look up critical race theory and perhaps Google Tim Wise. For this I was denounced as a leftwing intellectual. (Well you got me there! I was under the impression that thinking was a good thing, but apparently it’s passé.)

Assuming that you do wish to think, I’d recommend the above course as a starting point for understanding the thorny issues of race and identity. One of Wise’s steady drumbeats is that white privilege operates most perniciously when we don’t think about it—it’s like the oxygen we breathe in that we take it as a given unless we’re choking. We may indeed start to choke on white privilege. Let’s try a more familiar phrase: “The horse has already left the barn.” Whether we wish it, like it, see it, or deny it, the United States of America is a profoundly multicultural nation–perhaps the most multicultural land on the planet since the height of the Roman Empire. We have become the Ku Klux Klan’s worst nightmare: a land that’s white, but also black, brown, yellow, and red. At some point in the very near future, the rainbow is going to outnumber the whites. Rail at leftwing loonies all you want, but it’s not going to change the demographic arc. The refusal to look at the trends is itself a form of white privilege­—if you haven’t looked, it’s because you haven’t had to. You will.

Maybe I should have stuck to the politeness theme. Or maybe not. Here’s another way in which white privilege works: you assume that someone who is telling you something is actually seeking your approval. On the mascot controversy, native peoples are not asking anyone for a favor; they are telling whites that they’re fed up with being disrespected. They’re telling us that they own their identities and that we don’t have the right to market or parody them. They’re telling us they’re not going to buy the “it’s just name” assertion, and they’re telling us that, no, they don’t plan to shut up about it.

Concerning the last point, there’s nothing new about the Redskins controversy; it’s been going on for decades. You’d think, at some point white-owned teams might get the idea that Native Americans are going to continue to press the issue morally and legally.  The University of North Dakota is facing possible NCAA sanctions for stubbornly refusing to change their Fighting Sioux nickname. Florida State University took a more productive course and sought permission to use the Seminoles name. (It was granted.) If local tribes say no, though, they need to find a new mascot. Lots of schools have done so, including Dartmouth University, St. John’s University, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s possible, even likely given that sports have more clout than morality, that some teams will stubbornly refuse to dump insulting monikers. That’s called power, folks, not ethics.

If you still don’t get it, let me go back to civility. Doesn’t someone have a fundamental right to be addressed as they wish? Isn’t that just a basic rule of respect? I used to be called “Bob.” I never liked it (for completely personal reasons) and at some point I became “Rob.” Those who cared made the adjustment. This personal rule extends collectively and it bleeds into the realm of what you can and can’t do if you want to get on it society. We’ve miles to travel as a culture before justice pours down like rain, but in my lifetime, homosexuals went from being called “fags” to being gay. “Niggers” became Negroes, then became Afro Americans and African Americans. These changes did not  occur becasue straight white people woke up and decided to be nice; they happened because those communities told us enough is enough.There are still far too many media portrayals of mincing queens, pimps, and ghetto thugs poisoning our society, but figures such as effeminate swishers, Buckwheat, Steppin’ Fetchit, Little Black Sambo, and Aunt Jemima went away because those images were hurtful (and political dynamite).

In essence, the price of cultural peace is at least a modicum of respect. You simply couldn’t get away with naming a 21^st century team the Atlanta Houseboys. If you think such a name would be “funny” and that all of this is just PC humorlessness, try it on for size. How about the Louisiana State White Trash? The Boston Drunken Irishmen? The Miami Fat-assed Trailer Park Whores? The University of West Virginia Toothless Cretins?  Do these offend? I hope so. Now do you get it? Still having trouble? How about this? I’ve seen reams of stuff written by nervous parents about bullying. You tell me the difference between bullies and stadiums full of people badgering Native Americans every fall weekend.

Cigdem Aslan Explores the Rough Rebitiko World with Grace

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ÇIĞDEM ASLAN

Mortissa

Asphalt Tango Records 4313

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Culture is a funny thing–if something sticks around long enough, a musical style for instance, it acquires an air of respectability that’s far removed from its original stench. Who today remembers that tango, merengue, the blues, and fado were once sung in brothels, gin joints, and dive bars. Add to that list the Greek style known as rebetiko, which older non-Greeks first encountered partially scrubbed in the movie Never On a Sunday (1960). There were some good rebetiko recordings in the 1980s, and then passed from popularity. Guess it’s time for them to cycle again and who better to sing it than Turkish-born, London-based Çiğdem Aslan?

If you’re wondering how a Turkish woman ends up doing Greek music sung by women in rough fishermen bars (and supplementing their vocalist’s income with causal participation in the world’s oldest trade), history provides an answer. Until independence in 1830, Greece was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Moreover, as a land tied to the sea, it has since antiquity been an economic and cultural crossroads. When you hear Aslan sing rebetiko it will sound like a mash-up of Greek, Turkish, Balkan, North African, and klezmer music.  That’s because it is! Trading outposts are generally cosmopolitan places and Greece was once a land in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims came together (often in the same brothels).

Mortissa translates “strong woman,” and Aslan may be a tad romantic in her view of rebetiko singers, though one certainly had to have chutzpah to survive in some of the places it was originally sung. Then again, she’s not aiming for folklore or fieldwork–she’s trying to show the fire, the sorrow, the laughter, and the pluck within the tradition and enfold it into well-crafted modern arrangements. To that end, she has accumulated superb London-based Greek and Turkish musicians. The songs are also culled from both the public domain and from composers such as Vangelis Papazoglu. There’s also a song famed it Turkey about the outlaw Çakici. Aslan sings each in an easy voice that’s full of ornamentation and emotion, but has hints of pop modernity. Call it the past meets the present.

Rob Weir

Hula Honeys Take Hawaii to the Mainland

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HULA HONEYS

A Hui Hou

Community Music

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If the Andrews Sisters had gone to Hawaii and added a few island tunes to their repertoire, they would have sounded a bit like the Hula Honeys. This frothy collection of jazz standards and Hapa Haole tunes (island tunes sung in English) sports tight harmonies, swingy beats, a sunny disposition, and some songs that are not in English. The Hula Honeys are Robyn Kneubuhl and Ginger Johnson who are that most rare of things–women singing songs from the South Pacific who are actually from Hawaii. Johnson's case is even rarer; she's a Haole (white) who is musically conversant in native languages. These ukulele and guitar-rooted songs sound easy and natural. They also sound vintage and it’s not because the Hula Honeys supplement their island set list with pieces such as Johnny Mercer’s “Too Marvelous for Words” or the Bill Loughborough/David Wheat classic “Better Than Anything.” Take “Girl in the Coconut Hat,” which sounds like it may have come from a 1940s movie soundtrack but is actually a Johnson original. The Hula Honeys do a lot of that. Their cover of Mel Peterson’s “You’re at a Lu’au Now” makes you feel like you’re contemplating Hawaii as it appears on a sepia-tinted pre-World War II postcard. In 2010, Kneubuhl and Johnson won an award for the best Hawaiian jazz album (Girl Talk). A Hui Hou (Until We Meet Again) is slightly folkier, though guest steel guitar, saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet assure that the music always sways and that it remains true to the template of classic Hawaiian female ensembles. Those of us who live thousands of miles to the east, which is most of us, may find the idea of “hula” music a bit odd. I say, give it a try–you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

You can hear two tracks on the Hula Honeys website.

Rob Weir 

Beautiful Ruins a Lovely Novel

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Beautiful Ruins (2013)

Jess Walter

Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780061928178

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No one who has visited Cinque Terre can forget it. Five towns separated by rocky mountain ridges hug the Ligurian coast and spill their bright pastels down the rock cleft toward the sea. One of them, Vernazza, features a peninsula jutting into the ocean that is crowned with the remains of a 15^th century castle. When viewed from the hiking trail high above, it is a beautiful ruin. It is child’s play to imagine romance in such a setting.

For all of that, Italy’s west coast is also a hard place. Opulent, fat-walleted jet setters frolic on beaches and self-lubricate in pricy bars in one village, while just miles away fishermen mend their nets, their sails, and their clothing–destitution just one bad haul away. It’s also child’s play to imagine broken dreams in such places.

Jess Walter’s brilliant new novel uses these physical and metaphorical settings to probe what we do with the ruins we encounter and make in our lives. Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame) is a ruin of sorts–a town blessed with beautiful coast line and cursed by inaccessibility and poverty, unlike nearby Portovenere, which is dotted with nightclubs, glitzy hotels, and cash-rich tourists. The former is home to Paquale Tursi, a child of poverty with a spattering of English, regret for a love gone wrong, dreams of converting his down-market Hotel Adequate View into a luxury destination, and one semi-regular American visitor, Alvis Bender, a writer who drinks more than he types. Pasquale’s world is about to be transformed in ways he can’t imagine when an American starlet, Dee Moray, inexplicably checks into his hotel, not one in Portovenere. It is 1962, and Dee is fresh from the set of Cleopatra, a big-budget bomb starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that is better known for scandal than fine acting.

I hesitate to say more because this is a book of external and interior discoveries. Suffice it to say that it goes back and forth between 1962 and now, and that Burton is indeed a character, though a relatively minor one. Actually, it’s hard to say who the main character is, though the book’s central mystery centers on Dee, and some heavy-duty soul-searching befalls Pasquale. The book is really about the aforementioned ruins, including a literal one visited by Dee and Pasquale. Just to tantalize, among the other ruins is the botched plastic surgery of Hollywood director Michael Deane; a ruinous relationship maintained for no good reason by his assistant, Claire Silver; the doomed script of Shane Wheeler, whose Italian is little better than Pasquale’s English; and Bender, the writer who doesn’t write. The central question is how we confront ruins–our disappointments, sins, inappropriate desires, personal limitations, and the ensnaring lies we tell. Can anyone find love among those ruins? Or redemption?

This is a beautifully written book that contains passages you feel compelled to read aloud. Walter’s skill is also displayed in the ease with which he moves us between numerous characters without confusing the reader, or breaking the pace appropriate for each scene. I marveled over the transitions, as some of the pacing is as languid as a daydream above Vernazza, and others as frenetic as a speedboat coursing the Ligurian Sea. My second metaphor will likely describe the pace at which you will rip through this novel. For lovers of irony, it’s almost inevitable that this book will be optioned for a movie. But you’ll have to read it to understand why that’s ironic.

Rob Weir     

New CD from Sean Tyrrell One of Many Moods

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SEÁN TYRRELL

Walker of the Snow

The Vital Record 003

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To get a sense of Seán Tyrrell’s latest, think Woody Guthrie rated R. Like Guthrie, Tyrrell’s voice will never invoke adjectives such as “mellifluous,” but it’s choked full of emotional honesty. Unlike Guthrie, Tyrrell is far more direct and dark in discussing the seamier side of life. His musical treatment of the Oscar Wilde poem “Reading Gaol” is so downright creepy that when he sings, “each man slays the thing he loves” you envision Tyrrell hovering in the shadows with a knife. There are lots of sanitized versions of “Ringsend,” but Tyrrell unabashedly opens with the original words: “I will live in Ringsend with a red-headed whore.” Then there are the songs that quake with righteous anger, like his cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” and “Black Hole,” Tyrrell’s take down of phonies. Yet, there are also moments of unexpected tenderness–a delicate instrumental of “The Derry Air” (“Danny Boy”), his clipped brogue rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” and the title track, originally a late Victorian poem from Charles Dawson Shanly and one Tyrrell picked up form his collaborations with Davy Spillane. Walker of the Snow is an album of many moods and much of it–including a rendition of “On Top of Old Smokey”– feels like a throwback to the days of the Folk Revival. One wonders, in fact, if eighteen tracks aren’t too many in an age in which music is often purchased a la carte rather than by the platter, but at least there’s something for everybody.  Rob Weir