Music, Ho Ho

So . . . Saturday night I was at the Globalquerque festival, on my way to hear Yungchen Lhamo again, and I passed by the open air pavilion, and there was Puerto Plata and his band. And the music was so good that I couldn’t pull myself away.

Puerto Plata’s real name is Jose. He renamed himself after his home town in the Dominican Republic. He’s 84 years old, and he’s just released his first CD after performing for sixty years. He’s pretty much got the entire history of Dominican hardwired into his brain and his fingers, and he was happy to recapitulate it for us. Son, merengue, musica jibara, guaracha . . . and his band absolutely rocks.

I bought his CD, and he signed it “Jose” in a hand that was clearly not accustomed to forming words. Perhaps he has come late to literacy.

The CD is a lot more acoustic than the dance band he brought to the festival, but it makes pleasant listening nonetheless.

Eventually I did drag myself away, to see Dragon Art Studio, a family of Chinese puppeteers. (So there you have my priorities. I rank good Caribbean music over Buddhist chanting, but behind Chinese puppets. Go figure.)

The puppet show was funny, charming, and ingenious. We saw a peddler beset by rioutous monkeys. We saw a throwdown between a haughty crane and an ingenious tortoise. We saw a dancer recreating the postures shown on 1500-year-old Dunghuang cave paintings. And we saw a ferocious ping pong match between two supernaturally gifted opponents.

Alas, we didn’t get to see the Monkey King at the Flaming Mountains. We only had an hour.

From the puppet stage we headed off to the Roy Disney Theater to check out Ilgi, a band from Latvia that I wanted to see out of a sense of Baltic solidarity. These folks were the subject of much attention from the Authorities during the Soviet occupation, when Latvian folk music was more or less forbidden, but are now at the top of the Latvian charts.

First off I saw an accordion, a dulcimer/harp/lap thingie, and an instrument that looked as if it were made of a couple strings stretched over a pine box. There was also a bagpipe of a non-Celtic type.

The music was excellently-performed “post-folk.” We also learned that the way to say “thank you” in Latvian is to say “Paul Diaz.”

Next up was the Italian band Fianna Fumana on the main stage at the Plaza Mayor. Despite having a long-legged young woman in a miniskirt and tights who was carrying a bagpipe, the music was a lot more “post-folk” than we’d heard from the Latvians. It was pretty much indistinguishable from rock ‘n’ roll, except that we were assured that the melodies and lyrics were traditional. Good rockin’ sounds tho, and the bagpipe made me wonder why more rock bands don’t have bagpipes.

(This one was a regional bagpipe called a piva Emiliana, but it looked identical to the Latvian one.)

Afterwards I caught a bit of Lankandia Cissoko’s set. He’s a Senegalese griot who plays the kora, which is basically a harp made from a honkin’ big calabash with a stick rammed through it. He was playing with a much younger man who was playing a kind of balafon, the African instrument from which the marimba was developed.

Expertly done, I’m sure, but I lacked the context for full appreciation.

The evening’s big finale was Mickey Hart’s Global Drum Project. I’d been looking forward to this, but the results were not quite what I expected. I’d figured with so many drummers on stage, you’d have a hard time not dancing, but nothing danceable occurred. The huge crowd jamming the dance floor swayed back and forth for a while, then gave up swaying and just watched.

Mickey Hart was center stage, in a polo shirt and glasses, very busy and bustling around behind an enormous wall of equipment. He produced a lot of electronic sounds and lyrics along the lines of, “Rhythm moves throughout the Universe, and Beyond the Universe.” I noticed that the other drummers seemed to be trading licks around him, as if he weren’t there.

Perhaps in another mood I would have listened to this, but I wasn’t in that sort of mood. I still had virii infecting my lungs, and it was getting late and cold.

So we drove home, playing Puerto Playa all the way.