Easter Sunday in "Passing Strange," our curvy narrator Stew slips an exultant interjection into the crescendo of the first-act closer, when our hero has been freed from his constricting middle-class LA milieu: "This is how we go to church, to the church of rock'n'roll!"
In the play, church is a point of origin, but not a refuge, except for how it helps Youth connect the musical dots between spirituals, blues, soul, gospel and rock. In the youth choir with its bitter, cowed, reefer-smoking director, whose bohemian dreams of "La Baker walking a panther down the Champs Elysées" always exist elsewhere, away, he finds music as his church, his calling as an artist.
Even as we giggle at callow Youth's rejections of the hipocrisy of his community, as we cheer his passage to loopy Amsterdam and humorless Berlin (which come off as affectionate cartoons), we recognize his Pilgrim's quest, the one that concludes when he realizes that music/art is the ultimate home, but one that must be rooted in history and love -- the real.
Saturday night at Radio City Music Hall, the Queen of Soul complained about her gown. I'd never seen Aretha Franklin before in concert (and I'll never beat the man next to us, who's seen her 527 times), so I don't know if this is part of her intersong routine. She asked for scissors to cut herself out of the sparkly black mermaid gown, a stormcloud of sequins and tulle.
As amazing as it was to see her play American standards like "My Funny Valentine" and "In the Mood for Love," soul classics like "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" and, duh, "Respect," what got me was the gospel. I'll admit it, I've appreciated gospel mostly at a distance, on recordings. It's a whole other thing to see an artist so in control of her instrument -- and with a backing chorus that included Cissy Houston, so we're not playing around here -- sing "Precious Memories," lifting us in the pauses between notes, up and away from our earthbound worries on the loft of the rising bell of her voice.
And in between these two performances, I was thinking about Cachao, who died over the weekend in Miami, the third of recent deaths (Patato, Tata Güines) taking out important bricks from the foundation of Cuban, Afro, universal music.
His innovation was not just inventing mambo -- saying he came up with a new genre belies the sonic revolution of syncopating the danzón -- but summoning the spirits in every descarga, busting out from the metronome, turning the big European symphonic contrabajo into a drum (I saw him bang on his stand-up bass, the wooden box of it, the deep vibrating strings of it), seeding flowers all over the sound lanscapes of the Afro-verse -- jazz, mambo, son, salsa.
As opposed to the mostly superficial obits in much of the mainstream press, check this recent appreciation by master drummer Rebecca Mauleón.
As much as I dislike Andy García, I have to admit that Master Sessions, Vols. 1 & 2 revitalized Cachao's career and are slammin' discs to boot. "Cachao's Güiro" always makes me feel the gates opening up to the other side, the side of the Real, the side of redemption.
["Passing Strange photo by Ari Mintz/Newsday via Passing Strange site; Aretha Franklin photo by Rahav Segev for the NYT; Cachao photo via photo.net]
Oh my...I go out to the country in Western Mass to spend time as the only Latino in miles, and this is what happens???
Ay que pena. QEPD, Cachao.
Posted by: richard | March 24, 2008 at 02:01 PM
yeah, brother, let's play some descargas, it's all we gots.
Posted by: Caro | March 24, 2008 at 02:08 PM