4 posts from July 2007

Latido Negro: Perú’s African Beat
Directed by Rafael Santa Cruz
Gala Teatro Hispano
June 7 – July 1, 2007

July 1st, Sandra and I went to the Gala Theatre on 14th Street to see the last performance of this show, which was kind of a capsule history of Afro-Peruvian music and dance. We had excellent seats, right in the front row. The music and dance components were framed by a somewhat clumsy, near vaudevillian narrative, which Sandra hated and I liked. It did take a while for the music to start, and I know that Sandra was expecting a kind of non-stop music and dance performance.  

The dances were distinctive. There was the alcatraz, a kind of erotic pantomime in which the dancers had tissues attached to their lower backs, which their partners tried to ignite with candles; and Son de los Diablos, a street masquerade dating back to the thirteenth century, appropriated by Afro-Peruvians after the abolition of slavery. Most exciting was a sequence of tap dances with origins in the seventeenth century, three hundred years before the Nicholas brothers and Bill Robinson (not to mention Fred and Ginger) showed up, and a couple of hundred years before tap dancing emerged in North America, supposedly in the 1830s.  

Rafael Santa Cruz is a charismatic performer and a member prominent in Afro-Peruvian culture.  (If you view the video, he’s the man with the broom in the first scene.)  In this show, he also plays Pancho Fierro (1809-1879), an artist and archivist of Afro-Peruvian culture.

A Latido Negro video may be found at youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXvQUVPHYWc

About two and a half minutes into this video, there is a spectacular performance involving the cajón (box), which is the national instrument of Perú and came into being in the nineteenth century after the Spanish prohibition of skins and drums among slaves.  It was one of the highlights of the show.

Latido Negro made me think of the relation of Latin American music to the music of North America, and made me wonder about the hidden layers of contingent music under the surfaces with which we are most familiar.

For example, take Carmen Miranda, a performer remembered for her crazy tutti-frutti hats and her caricature of the red hot Latina mamacita in many motion pictures.  One has only to listen to Carmen Miranda (1930-1945) on Harlequin Records to get to the next level in this case.  She was a fabulously gifted musician.  Samba was about a decade old when she started her recording career, and one wonders about what else was going on in Brazil in the teens and twenties and during the fifteen years represented on this recording. I will also recommend the documentary film Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1995), directed by Helena Solberg, for an excellent portrait of Carmen Miranda, and of her times in relation to the Americas.

Jelly Roll Morton said, “Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues", you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”

Obviously, the history of jazz is rich in infusions of Latino music.  In the 1940s, bebop made a huge connection with Afro-Cuban music: Charlie Parker and others played in Machito's orchestra, Chano Pozo played with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton made many forays into Afro-Cuban jazz and featured the Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida in his orchestra.  One could go on and on with this, from beatnik bongos to the samba/bossa nova, Getz/Gilberto phase and beyond.  

One of my all-time favorite recordings is Cubop City by Machito & his Orchestra, with solos by Howard McGhee and Brew Moore, which I first heard as a two-sided 78 rpm record, when my friend David Dooley borrowed it from his Stan Kenton fanatic cousin Brian Williams, in Swansea, long ago.  When it was issued on the Original Mambo Kings compilation in 1993, Cubop City was credited to Howard McGhee & His Afro-Cuboppers, but it was Machito’s band.  However, I digress.

And I am not entirely sure of what it is from which I do so.  I guess the revelations of Latido negro have made me wonder about the musical innovations of Latin America and the Caribbean of which I am ignorant.  There is no really original thought here, more like older thoughts brought home by the power of a live performance.

True Dutterer: The Work of William S. Dutterer
American University Museum
Washington DC
June 30 – July 29, 2007

http://www.american.edu/cas/katzen/museum/

You write, you paint, you die. 

Everybody makes marks and leaves them behind, no matter how apparent they might or might not be.  Writers and painters are fortunate, sometimes, in that their marks are particularly tangible; and painters especially so because their legacies have such physical presence.

Dutterer’s work has immense presence, an immensity of intimacy, a presence informed by passion and obsession.  The series of paintings of wrapped heads Dutterer made after visiting Afghanistan with his wife Jamie Johnson exemplifies the power of his work.

“…these paintings are chamber music, etudes, quartets and duets,… at once intimate but in your face because one can only hear/see them up close.  Like chamber music they can be sensed from a distance, but it’s the intimacy of nuance that really counts… Even the title of the series, “Sotto Voce,” is an act of intimacy.  The irony of an image, a screaming/shouting head, bound in such a way as to reduce the scream/shout to a muffled growl.”

This from an excellent website dedicated to his work: 

http://www.williamdutterer.com/

Looking at Dutterer’s wrapped heads reminded me of something I had thought a long time ago, that painters, like novelists, approach the canvas/page with everything they have known to that point, an endless swirl of data in a process of constant reconfiguration.  Dutterer was a formalist and an image-maker, hooked into the world at large and the world within. 

Bill and I were colleagues at the Corcoran for ten years (1976-1986).  We never spent time together socially, although we liked each other well enough.  My good friends (and longtime Corcoran colleagues) Tom Green and Lee Haner were much closer to him, and they have much in common with him as artists.  The wit, the smarts, the political edge, the passion, the ardor, and great inventiveness and dexterity are there in all three.

This is an exceptionally good exhibition.

 

Bill Dutterer died on January 5, 2007.

Marcus Haydock Photographs at Fotonet

“Seeing implies distance.” 
Maurice Blanchot

Art may change the nature of that distance, as does the work of the young British photographer Marcus Haydock.  See this sequence at Fotonet: 

http://www.fotonet-south.org.uk/haydock/index.html

The immediacy of these combined images confronts the viewer in two significant ways.  First, with combinations of images which defy comfortable explanation, or even the more complex kind of explanation that reigns in academia.  Second, any viewer with serious interest is going to be obliged to consider their own expectations and to recognize what (meaning) they are inclined to project, as well as where they have learned to project it.
I believe that the source of the power of this sequence is in the largely non-literal quality
of the juxtapositions.  Their impact is in emotional value rather than in literal or symbolic connection, even though there are plenty of connections to be made.  Any attempt to explain the impact of this work will automatically revert to the distance which Haydock has reduced via the apparent passion of his vision, which is informed by social and political anger (and a good deal of lurking disgust). 

There is a level of severity in these pictures, which transcends their potential categories, such as “portrait” and “landscape” and so on.  It has been said many times that the world of images in which we live has made Surrealism redundant.  Just as Man Ray claimed that Dada could not function in New York City in the early days of the 20th Century because New York City was Dada, so may we now claim that the world is Surrealism.  We have become accustomed to pictures of starving babies juxtaposed with advertisements for Virginia Slims cigarettes.  What we have lost is the shock of Surrealism.  Haydock’s photographs are shocking in the best way, not as the product of an intention to shock, but of an unflinching vision that does not let the viewer off the hook. 

Ultimately, our humanity is about connection.  The impulse in these works compels the viewer to unfamiliarity, to an index of emotional complexity involving fear, compassion, horror, desire, damage, disgust, wonder, pleasure, humor, serenity and more (unnamable) responses, including an aesthetic gratification that does not dilute its impact.  The connections are indicated, rather than dictated.  I am grateful for this change in distance, for these connections, for the authenticity of this work.

June 30 2007

The Legendary Enrico Caruso: 21 Favorite Arias (RCA) 1987

Caruso smoked two packages of Egyptian cigarettes a day, always in a holder.
Caruso never learned to drive a car.
Caruso took two baths a day.
Caruso loved children and dogs.
Caruso's hands were large and strong, with square fingers.
Caruso bathed his face with witch hazel.
Caruso's favorite vegetable was raw fennel, which he ate like fruit.
Caruso loved ice cream and custard.
Caruso would have no pets in the city.
Caruso would have no caged birds at the Villa in Signa.
Caruso used Caron perfumes; he walked around his apartment with a large atomizer, spraying the rooms with scent.
Caruso took no medicines of any kind except, the night before he sang, half a bottle of "Henri's Powdered Magnesia" in water.

I am listening to Caruso’s rendering of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci, the famously celebrated tears of a clown, recorded 99 years, 3 months, 2 weeks and 2 days ago, and never better.  The voice is amazing, soaring across the decades, heartbreaking, inspiring, and truly awesome.  I have never taken for granted the magic of recorded music.  A voice is a living entity.  And here is Caruso, the first megastar of the recording industry, riding streams of electricity out of my humble G4.  I don't know enough about Caruso to decide if this anthology deserves its reputation as the best available collection of his recordings, but I do know that I have listened to it countless times with undiminished pleasure.  The selections include arias from Rigoletto, Aida, Il Trovatore, Tosca, and La Bohème, rendered with extraordinary precision and feeling.  My own favorites are "Le fleur que tu m'avais jetée" from Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles, and "Je crois entendre encore" from Carmen.

Here, also, we have the legendary "Recondita armonia" and "E lucevan le stelle," both recorded on November 6, 1909,
Puccini for an eternity, Tosca for anyone with ears, opera lovers, dog lovers, football lovers, Sunday lovers, blues lovers, Jesus lovers, New York City lovers, hope I don't fall in love with you lovers, blue sky lovers, shiver my timbers lovers, shoe lovers, hearts on fire lovers, you and me.

June 29 2007