. . . . Cut & Pasted From Da List And el V:
Coming this week . . .
==> Thursday, Feb. 23rd, 8 pm Eastern. Postmambo Sessions presents on Zoom:Pablo Herrera + Alexis El D'Boys: Afro-Cuban Rare Groove Sessions #1.We listen to and talk about selected cuts of digitized vinyl referencing Afro-Cuban and African American popular music connections by Los Zafiros, Orq. de Música Moderna de Las Villas, Wilson & His Combo and more, drawing on Alexis's vast collection of Cuban 33s and especially 45s.No charge to participate (though we solicit donations), no registration necessary. You just need the Zoom link. The Zoom link goes to the other mailing list, [seminar]. If you've been to our previous Zoom sessions, you're probably on [seminar] already. If you're not on [seminar], write me at ned@qbadisc.com, and put [seminar] in the subject line. Piece o' cake. See you Thursday.* * *Today is Mardi Gras. They've been going since before sunrise, since last night, since Kings' Day.Mardi Gras has often been a chilly damp affair, but not this year, with a predicted high of 77 degrees in New Orleans today. It's the first full Mardi Gras since the pandemic. "It's been emotional and intense and cathartic," texts a friend. Me, I'm back home in NYC, more or less decompressed from For the Funk of It, a/k/a the Postmambo New Orleans Music Seminar.I think it was in early 2018, in Cuba, that Randy Fertel said, Postmambo should go to New Orleans. I'd been thinking about it, but I think about a lot of stuff that I don't do, so thank you, Randy. I started working on it seriously in 2019 for March 2020. But then COVID took hold of the world, and we had to cancel For the Funk of It, fully booked, 10 days before blastoff. Ow.Many of the travelers who had signed up for 2020 waited patiently until we could "fulfill the promise," as one traveler put it, this year. I can't tell you how good it feels to have finally gotten to do it. Everybody, including me, seemed starved for live music and face-to-face contact, albeit with masks on a lot of the time.At last we did it. From February 1-5, we rolled through the city (and out to Acadiana) with 40 travelers and a ground team of 6, on our usual immersive Postmambo schedule. The precise dates were chosen by our producer Ariana Hall because they're midway through the Mardi Gras season, the one time of year when all three of the modalities are in effect: carnival parades, second lines, Black Masking Indian practice, but before the full carnival erupts. Perfect for studying the dynamics of festivity.There isn't anyone I'd rather have gone through this four-year process with than Ariana Hall, with whom I first had the privilege of working 20 years ago in Cuba, and who's been a big influence on how I see New Orleans over the years (long story). Over the course of five site visits I made to New Orleans between 2019 and 2023, she always showed me what's new in that city where there's always more to hear. I admit I had a ball checking out as many different music venues as possible.In the face of lockdown in 2020, Ariana said, "I can do it virtual," with the result that in '20 and '21 we did two three-weekend Zoom intensives under the title NOLA Reconnect. Those revelatory sessions allowed us to enter the headspaces of dozens of New Orleans + NOLA-diaspora musicians and other culture makers held hostage by the pandemic. The hours upon hours of interview and performance video we generated constitute a primary document of the city's creative forces at that historic moment, and they served to prepare our 2023 travelers to get the most out of their time on the ground. Our Sunday night closing party on February 5 was played by 79rs Gang, who Ariana turned me on to in the high days of the pandemic. I've had their album Expect the Unexpected (2020) on repeat, and I also like the 2015 Fire on the Bayou album, which is less produced and heavy on trance-like chanting (I'm listening to it right now), but the group's sound has developed since the pandemic and I want to hear what the next album sounds like. Fronted by Big Chief Romeo Bougere (Ninth Ward Hunters) and Big Chief Jermaine Bossier (Seventh Ward Creole Hunters), whose contrasting vocal personalities keep it moving, with album producer Eric Heigle on drums, 79rs come with slamming percussion and a vocal flow that connects New Orleans rap with Indian chants.
79rs Gang. Timbal on the left behind Hollywood (Romeo) and Jigga (Jermaine). Photo: NS I said percussion: after all the different ways Black Masking / Mardi Gras Indian songs have been arranged over the years in pretty much every genre, I'd never heard them locked with a Cuban timbalero until 79rs started working with New Orleanian Santa Claran César Bacaró. What a sound.* * *My book The World That Made New Orleans began as a study of the musical confluences of Cuba and St. Domingue / Haiti in New Orleans, and that was a subtheme in our programming of For the Funk of It. Because it's happening right now! recapitulating in the present day processes that New Orleans music has previously undergone.As our collaborator Dr. Jean Montès said to me in rehearsal, "This is just a taste of what's brewing here." There's been a small but significant flow of musicians from both Haiti and Cuba into New Orleans in the last years, and they've been stimulated by the music of the city even as they stimulate it. But wherever the players in our events were from -- and the largest number were New Orleanians, born and raised -- I repeatedly had the feeling that we were hearing musicians in the process of discovery. During the depths of the pandemic, it seemed to me that the music we were presenting virtually in NOLA Reconnect was urgent. Now that we can get together again, that sense has carried over into the live music. We presented 12 carefully chosen bands / soloists in five days, in spaces around town, in addition to non-musical cultural events. For me personally, the strongest experience centered around two encounters with RAM, the vodou-based band from Port-au-Prince, who appeared in NOLA Reconnect on Feb. 27, 2021. Simply put, RAM couldn't gig in the anarchy of present-day Haiti, and if a band doesn't work it ceases to exist. They've relocated to New Orleans -- eleven people, living in the Lower Ninth Ward -- and in its fourth decade of existence, the band is alive and growing.It's not the first time musical knowledge has arrived in New Orleans from Haiti. RAM's arrival in town is an exciting development. As far as I know, the musicians of RAM collectively represent the strongest corpus of Haitian musical practice to be dropped on New Orleans in one piece in my lifetime. If I'm wrong, tell me when an established Haitian band, known in Haiti for the quality of its drummers, has moved to New Orleans lock, stock, and barrel. They have something to offer, and New Orleans's musical heritage has a lot to offer them. As seasoned a carnival group as you could ask for, RAM's been playing every day during carnival season. One thing about New Orleans -- you may not get paid much, but you play a lot of gigs and you keep your chops and your ensemble communication up. They're warmed up and slamming. Rocking the rara on a four-mile parade? No problem.* * *The first of our encounters with RAM was in an acoustic context, the second electric.The acoustic performance was a site-specific work we created for a little-known historic soundspace in the French Quarter designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the most important architect of the early republic.In New Orleans, Latrobe is less remembered as an architect and engineer than as the accomplished sketch artist who drew the well-known images that document what instruments at Congo Square looked like in 1819 (albeit without using that place name). He despised the music he heard at Congo Square -- a lost-to-posterity music that lives in the minds of New Orleanian musicians, one of the great unrecorded soundscapes of American music, universally spoken of today with the highest reverence -- writing that "I have never seen any thing more brutally savage, and at the same time dull and stupid than this whole exhibition." But he was interested enough to draw the instruments. Though designed to be a bank (it's also known as the Louisiana State Bank Building), the landmark building at Royal and Conti more recently housed an antique store. It was at one time The Royal Turkish Bath Company for Ladies. It operates today as a event space -- they'll do you a lovely wedding reception -- with the name Latrobe's. Many New Orleans musicians have played in it for one function or another, including, I'm told, Lil Wayne. I didn't know it existed until Dr. Bryan Wagner called my attention to it last fall.This was the last building Latrobe designed, completed after his death in New Orleans in 1820 from yellow fever. It was his only bank, at a time when banks in the South were capitalized with the value of enslaved human beings. It's a rotunda, featuring a domed whispering gallery cognate to the one in the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol -- which Latrobe also designed. Like all historical buildings in the South, it's a charged space.When I first clapped my hands in there and heard the slaps, my first thought was, the muertos are present. We called the piece A Most Extraordinary Noise, after Latrobe's phrase describing the sound of Congo Square.
A Most Extraordinary Noise at Latrobe's. Photo: Jim HannahWhat an honor it was to collaborate on it with Dr. Jean Montès, the conductor of the Loyola Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Director of the Greater New Orleans Youth Orchestras, who knows Richard Morse and RAM from Port-au-Prince back in the day.Dr. Montès couldn't be present to direct at Latrobe's because -- the cloning-yourself problem -- he had to be in Charleston that night to conduct the music of my favorite 18th-century composer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de St.-Georges, at the 10th Colour of Music Black Classical Musicians Festival. (That's a performance I would like to have heard.) But what a skilled conductor can do: in one hour of rehearsal two days before the event, directing the musicians in Kreyòl, he put together a half-hour of hushed, soul-stirring music from scratch. Based on Haitian traditional melodies with chorus, tanbou (vodou drums) and vaksins (one-note valveless trumpets that play melodies by hocketing), it was led in performance by his wife and collaborator, cellist Sarah Montès.As the musicians called the spirits, the sound traveled around the space in a way that can't be recorded. When the composed part ended, we channeled our applause up into the dome. It came back as a slapped-back, multi-echo spatialized pulse that flipped the band into rara mode -- it reminded me of the change from dirge to second line -- and suddenly there was an upbeat part two that had not been previously contemplated but seemed inevitable . . . We'd like to do it again, in that room, with the addition of a chamber orchestra.The second RAM manifestation was a post-Krewe du Vieux Saturday night vodou blowout / sacred party like I'd never seen at Snug Harbor, usually a sitdown room for jazz listening, but transformed on this occasion with no tables and an open dance floor, and the partition that separates the back from the front of the building removed. For their performances with us, RAM was joined by the charismatic Haitian-American singer Sabine McCalla, also a Lower-Ninth resident. At Snug, she was in the front line next to RAM's iconic lead singer Lunise Morse. When the full band played, with bass, drumset, and William Morse's super-precise electric guitar in addition to the tanbou and vaksins, it was throw-away-your-crutches music.* * *Everything was a highlight. Our first night closed with an inspired performance from Herlin Riley with his quartet (Max Moran, bass, Oscar Rossignoli, piano, Derek Douget, sax) at Snug Harbor. Our opening event, just prior to going to Latrobe's, was in Preservation Hall -- also a musical-architectural-timewarp experience -- with the Preservation Hall All-Stars, under the direction of trumpeter / vocalist Branden Lewis, with Craig Klein (trombone), Mari Watanabe (piano), Richard Moten (bass), and Joe Lastie (drums). A laid-back rendition of Fats Waller's "Louisiana Fairytale" was a standout, as sung by Mr. Lewis.On an otherwise ordinary Saturday afternoon, we stepped into another dimension with a live-in-the-studio set of high-level musical communication by the Stanton Moore Trio (w/David Torkanowsky, James Singleton) and very special guest Big Chief Donald Harrison. 
Shamarr Allen. Photo: NSAt Snug Harbor, we heard drummer Gerald French + the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band. At The Rabbit Hole, a new place on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard with good sound, nice people, and a great patio, Omari Neville + The Fuel brought the funk, followed by a stellar set from a testifying Shamarr Allen (including of course his version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), and then the Cuban multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter-bandleader Yusa -- now a New Orleanian -- with a quintet. In the course of all this, we encountered one fabulous pianist after another, including, besides David Torkanowsky, Oscar Rossignoli (from Honduras, with Herlin Riley), Victor Campbell (from Camagüey, with Yusa), and Larry Sieberth (my former neighbor in the Irish Channel, with Gerald French).We rode the bus a couple of hours out of town to spend a day with Lafayette-based choreographer / dancer / educator / producer Millicent Johnnie, who produced us up a well-fed afternoon of music and dance at the Bayou Teche brewery in Arnaudville. There we heard Louis Michot's Melody Makers playing a set that Postmamboistically included Louis Moreau Gottschalk's "Souvenir de Porto Rico," Op. 31, in addition to zydeco from Corey Ledet, Cajun fiddle from David Greely, and a dance lesson from Millicent and friends. (Millicent's uncle, Patrick Johnnie, who astounded us all during NOLA Reconnect with his impassioned, extended disquisition on boudin, supervised the cooking.)
Corey Ledet and his accordion. Photo: Heather HodgesOn Saturday night we scooped up swag from the Krewe du Vieux parade, with the most X-rated floats you ever saw (unless you've previously been to Krewe du Vieux), and on Sunday morning we were welcomed at Mt. Hermon Baptist Church, known for its music ministry. Sunday afternoon we went on the Treme Sidewalk Steppers second line, then hit Sunday night Indian practice with Spyboy Honey from Creole Wild West at Zony Mash.
At the second line. Photo: Jill Stanton.Besides the music, there was Richard Campanella's magisterial Cultural Geographies of New Orleans bus tour that functioned as our keynote address, Milton Carr and Dr. Ina J. Fandrich walked us from the river to Congo Square, and we paid studio visits to two of New Orleans's most important artists, Big Chief Victor Harris, Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi, and Big Chief Demond Melancon. All in five days. Like the man said, it's just a taste of what's brewing.When's the next Postmambo Music Seminar? you ask.Soon. We've got some doozies in the works. Watch this spot.
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