The 10 Rock Commandments Of DavÃd Garza, or, The Book Of Dah-veed:
Category: Music Reviews
For Minnesota-Mexicana Lila Downs, the “standing o” at the Old Town School stands for resounding cries of “OTRA!” — as in, “Sing another song!” — echoing from the audience which is at its feet applauding for more from the spellbinding chanteuse. Her five-piece band weaves new-age-textured splices of pre-Columbian-flavored world music with lite jazz as backdrop for the female lead’s invocations of native spirituality and Latino social conscience to interpret Mexican/American folk music. As performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña would say, Downs goes from Aztec to hi-tech without skipping a beat.
“What is the influence of Latin rhythms on my music?” David Sánchez says during an interview between sets. “That’s a hard question — I think in lines and melodies when I’m playing, but I’m feeling rhythm even when I’m doing bar lines.” After playing two shows at Jazz Showcase during a five-night stint, he’s charged up as he taps out a typical Puerto Rican plena rhythm with his hands to demonstrate how he absorbs the folk music of his native island while interpreting straight-ahead jazz from Wayne Shorter, opening up a Caribbean-folk/urban-American jazz dialogue with free influences from Ornette Coleman. “Plena and straight-ahead jazz have been done,” he explains, “so I want to give a new vibe to plena and a new vibe to jazz.”
War-torn, bombed-out urban landscapes give root to plants and trees that sprout from the rubble, according to San Diego artists Helen and Newton Harrison. The Trummerflora Collective take the Harrison’s name for this foliage as nom-de-guerre, though their improvisational excursions are equal parts explosive-plow and seed. Coagulating around common interests in free jazz and world music, seven post-national musicians found their niche together as Trummerflora while fomenting interest in experimental, non-commercial sound-artistry in late-’90s San Diego.
A return to the solo acoustic peregrinations of 1998’s Don’t Blame Me, Marc Ribot’s recent Saints (Atlantic) likewise takes standards and contemporary compositions as conceptual springboards for wending, warped sound-art that realizes the potential sonic surprise hidden in the corners of every melodic digression, missed note, and false start. What Ribot does with his arrangements of such traditional pieces as “Go Down Moses” parallels his instrumental attack, actualizing peripheral parts of the guitar that others might only hit on accidentally — for example, using the body as a treasure trove of percussive possibility, plinking and plunking out harmonic netherscapes from sections of the strings not (necessarily) meant for strumming, setting pickups along the fingerboard to catch incidental scratches and hangnail-sustain shakes, and extending the use of plastic or fingernail pick to tools and toys.
“Just walk in like you own the place,” Ozomatli guitarist and singer Raul Pacheco tells me. His advice seems like the perfect all-purpose approach to the music biz, because that’s exactly what Ozo have done, with their seamless pan-Latino sound and political stance that courageously kick the door wide open to increasing popularity, regardless of whether potential fans appreciate the intricacies of traditional Latin music or leftist activism.
Madonna will earn those spurs of hers someday by going to Nashville to record neo-country-swing versions of all her greatest hits. She’ll twang out “Like A Virgin” on banjo, pedal steel, and washboard, playing hillbilly chanteuse to match all her shitkicker-chic fashion.
The city of Monterrey in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León sits at the crossroads of culture and capital — close enough to Texas for North American radio/TV reception but not too far from South America for the rhythmic influence of Colombian cumbia. Though strongly identified with its own specific regional history of international trade and rural Mexicanidad as a major border presence, it’s no wonder that this rugged, industrial oasis produced at least three groups in the last decade — synth-styling sophisticates Plastilina Mosh, attitudinous rappers Control Machete, and conjunto-cred barrio combo El Gran Silencio — whose cultural savvy and idiomatic adeptness have garnered attention from U.S. recording labels while confounding any tidy labeling of their music, whether by measure of generic “world music,” outdated “rock-en-español,” or the misleading “Latin pop” moniker.
“…–CHINGA TU MADRE!–…Viva México, cabrones!…” Echoes of crunching chords and cymbals crash on top of backed-up, slogging slogans belted from the microphone and whiplashed throughout the entire auditorium, creating the sloppy aural pit that is the Aragon acoustic experience, which at the moment parallels perfectly the over-saturated floor of the ballroom booming with bodies and banners.
SHOW ME LA BAMBA . . .
The demand to see the headliner seems politely etched onto the subdued yet puzzled faces of those NorthShorreños sparsely seated in the pavilion, though enough Latinos are present to sing along with opener Julieta Venegas, to respond generously to her unassuming presence and charming bilingual embrace of the audience, even if she sometimes breaks a word or two, but apologizes: “Tengo que pensar doble … I have to think double, in English and Spanish.” This admission seems as honest as her voice — at turns fragile and then growling, but with cariño — and the mewling, cabaret-siren of her piano-accordion instrumentation, that sounds more European than Latin American.
