Sound Taste

Friday Sovietika

In the middle of my Miti Miti jag, I started going to see La Sovietika (named after a Dominican term for loose women) and came to the conclusion: tigueraje is back. Not that it ever went away.

The band's sound sometimes reminds me of those mid-80s post-punk dips into dance, reggae, soukous. And the lyrics? Well, the lyrics are perfectly earnest satire of Caribbean men's desire for women ("Diablo morena tú si que tá buena"), of the ridiculousness of rock/merengue/reggeatón dreams ("voy a hacerme un tatuaje que diga 'perdóname madre'"), of how being broke is no excuse for not having a good time.

And the stage presence is a cross between CBGB's mid-1980s hardcore matinee and Third World backyard rockero -- stretched-out t-shirts and scuffed-up sneakers. In other words, the Sovietikos are pure medalagananarios. And I mean that as a compliment.

They're playing tonight at 8 pm sharp at Trash Bar in Williamsburg. Check 'em out. It's cheap (open bar 8-9 pm), and I guarantee you will laugh and maybe dance a little.

Two disclaimers: 1) I've been friends with Robert on guitar and Jorge on bass for many years; 2) I am a sucker for tigueraje and experimentation.

NYRemezcla wrote a semi-swoony interview with the band in October (it doesn't hurt that Trash Bar, LS's most regular venue, is near the Remezcla offices). Whether they attract more attention (or want it) remains to be seen.

Is the band a goof? Is it a serious endeavor? To me, it doesn't entirely matter, as I love how it reminds me of the looser, more playful, more curious side of music and arts. Making the most of inadequate spaces, focusing on the vibe rather than the image.

Check the extremely amateur video below of "Yo Quisiera." In another show I saw, for this song lead singer Stallion dropped trou to show boxers with the words "Meet My Little Friend." Juvenile? Totally. Endearing? I thought so.

Yo Quisiera

Friday Miti Miti

Rita Indiana could easily be the Dominican Grace Jones.

In "Encendía" she makes herself seem even taller and more angular skulking around in a cemetery (I hear she's like 6'4"). I'd been waiting for a video to go with the funny weird wild Miti Miti record Altar Espandex, which was released a couple of months ago and I've been meaning to write about. (Coming soon, I promise.)

"Encendía" the song is  electrogagá plus minimalist merengue mambo horns, nonsense cutup lyrics that remind me a little of Josefina Báez and a lot of Las Chicas del Can. The video is all Afro-Catholic hyperbole (Joan of Arc/Anima Sola images plus all the voudou that fits, possession included).

Friday Chowí

God bless obsessive fans. It's the only reason that YouTube has as many Latin musical performances as it does.

Variety shows never went out of style in Latin America, so lots of groups performed on TV, providing a great visual archive of music and performers. That is, if the TV stations kept archives.

When I was trying to work on a doc on a Dominican musician a few years ago, we found out that it was nearly impossible to get archival footage, because tapes had either fallen apart, been re-used or simply damaged by heat and humidity.

But there are lots of VHS tapes taken off the air signal, lovingly dubbed and re-dubbed, and now on YouTube. I've actually become a connoisseur of sorts of the textures produced by various grades of decay.

I would date this video of "Pájaro Chowí" performed by Wilfrido Vargas y sus Beduinos to the late 70s by the width of the shirt collars and the circumference of the afros. This is the band almost at the height of its powers (which I think was 1980-1981), and a great example of all the lessons Vargas learned from salsa bands and dominicanized. Hard on the horns and letting the piano montuno anchor.

Vargas here is a great trumpet, backup voice and arranger (an informant just put Wilfrido's trumpeting in doubt). He didn't feel the need to take the central spotlight (a mistake he made later, just as Willie Colón did). Sandy Reyes' much sweeter voice does justice to the song.

My favorite part comes about 2:35, when "Yo estoy cantando" slows down the song and everything drops out except for a percolating piano, and discreet tambora and güira. And then the horns explode again. (Alas, the song cuts off).

"No one listens to merengue in Irak"

A story that ran last week in Puerto Rico's Primera Hora mentions how a merengue-loving resident of Puerta de Tierra had to be shushed during filming of the George Clooney-Ewan McGregor flick "Men Who Stare at Goats," based on a bizarre (and real) Army unit that claims to use paranormal weapons.

S/he was told the sound was disrupting the scene because "no one listens to merengue in Irak."

Aside from the incredible idea that Old San Juan can stand in for wartime Iraq, the production assistant was factually wrong. There is a lot of merengue and bachata and reggaetón in Iraq, in the mp3 players of Dominican-American soldiers (the DR retired its troops from Irak in 2004). The latest Dominican-American killed there was Sgt. Ricky Ulloa in August. There are dozens of others.

[h/t to Jorge for the story. Pix of Clooney on set from Primera Hora by Ana María Abruña]

Me on the radio tonite w DJ Rupture

A quick interruption of my hiatus to let you know I'll be on DJ Rupture's WFMU show Mudd Up! tonight 7-8 pm, talking about one of my favorite obsessions, accordion music. Expect some squeezebox shredding from different corners of the Americas.

Here is Rupture's hyperbolic and blush-inducing description:

Accordion lovers of the world unite! Or at least tune in this evening to DJ Rupture's show from 7-8pm, as special guest, writer Carolina Gomez Gonzalez, will give us a tour of the accordion styles across Latin America. Gomez Gonzalez co-authored the first guidebook on Latino culture in NYC, Nueva York: the Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs, and will be breaking out rare vinyl and wonderful stories of the squeezebox as it travels around Latin America.

Listen here. You can stream or DL at your leisure.

Dog days of summer

Posting has been on the light side of late over here at Sound Taste. I'm not off lying in a hammock listening to the surf (though I wish badly that I were). I'm actually engaged in some serious hustling, which is taking most of my brain power.

I expect to return all refreshed and giving you dear readers lots of bloggy love après Labor Day.

In the meantime, enjoy a couple of videos, with props to some of my fave sites:

Chocó hip hop "San Antonio" from the Colombian Festival Petronio Alvarez site via la guayabita.

Merengue típico grrl power with La India Canela following up on Jace's post.

And this "I done seen about everything" phase in the evolution of bhangra-hip hop relations (with a soupçon of kuffiya-ism), from the Bollywood flick Singh is Kinng, via Ted Swedenburg's hawgblag. (Why does the narrator have a faux-Mexican accent?)

Friday Mambo Gagá

Ever since I heard it coming out of a tinny car stereo in Santo Domingo, I've been wanting to track down what some friends identified as "electro gagá," a techno variant of the traditional voudou-related music played in processions in Holy Week in rural areas of the DR (in Haiti, it's called rara).

Have yet to find a record, but in one of Wayne's posts last week, on the heels of a post about avant duo Miti Miti, he posted a video of a kid dancing "gagá." Just what I'd been looking for. Super-stripped sound, an electric guitar playing the fututo part, a clave the only percussion, modern yet hypnotic. There's several videos of kids and other folks "bailando gagá," all to the same song.

And then I found the Pachemán y Griselito video below, which seamlessly mixes hip hop, "mambo" and gagá visually as well as musically. The men in the carnival costumes look to me like guloyas from San Pedro de Macorís. Some of the people dancing in back of the singers are marching in a procession, as gagá is traditionally performed. And all the folks dressed in white (albeit short and skin-tight) reference the religious nature of the original music/dance. Although, what is up with the one singer's Gilligan outfit?

Friday Prodigio

Here's another bonbon for accordion month, this time my favorite representative of new-school perico ripiao.

Perico ripiao, a fast version of merengue played with button accordion, tambora & metal güira, was a regional form from the Cibao region that was popularized nationally during the Trujillo era (see material in this excellent Paul Austerlitz book for the historical background. Dominican scholar Dagoberto Tejeda has also written some great stuff, which alas is not readily available here in los países).

Perico ripiao was displaced from the center of Dominican popular music in the 50s and 60s by so-called orchestral merengue (really big-band, analogous to mambo bands in NY) and later by the nimble, funk- and rock-influenced merengues of the likes of Johnny Ventura and Wilfrido Vargas.

But perico ripiao never really went away, and it's remained a viable genre. In the early 90s, I found a couple of amazing compilations of perico ripiao, which had been rebranded as merengue típico. There were older stars, like El Cieguito de Nagua, and younger players, like La India Canela (one of the few women accordionists around).

There's a thriving perico ripiao scene in NYC, which Sidney Hutchinson has documented and is writing about. And in that scene, El Prodigio, né Krency García, is an undisputed star.

I've been dying to see this guy live, but he only seems to play Monday nights in the middle of the Bronx or at 3 am in Bushwick.

The video below is shaky, but not the worst of the bunch on YouTube. The song below is "El Refrán (Rebeca)," which he performs often. Watch first the sax-accordion combo, then about a minute and a half into the song, Prodigio tears it up. Sound quality varies wildly, but enjoy anyway.

Jailhouse merengue

While in the clink last week, merengue de calle star Omega made good use of his time, writing a new song, "Dueño," which you can preview below in a bare-bones video filmed in the Najayo jail. (Thx to remolacha for highlighting the video.)

The song is a basic boast:

Dueño, el talento que no tiene nombre ni tiene horizonte
Sueño, mi música no tiene cola ni ruido de pistola
Aparecerán los que hablen mal de mí, pero yo soy pa tí
Ellos jugarán con lo más sagrado que yo tenga, te lo querrán quitar...

Basically: my talent has no limit, my music doesn't need gun sounds (gangsta posturing), people gossip about me, want to take away what most matters (but they won't succeed).

Love the minimal but clearly merengue de calle beats against the bench, the lazy but on-time choruses. Guess his success is not all due to production, after all. Also love how savvy it is about using the on-the-fly, lo-tech uses of YouTube (he starts out, "Let's fix this video, which is turning into a piece of crap, and do something to send to YouTube."

While serving a sentence for allegedly beating his wife, Omega also played a concert. Not quite Johnny Cash in San Quentin, but still in the tradition of jail time serving as a boost to an outlaw image. This fueled rumors that the jail time was a publicity stunt. Who knows.

Omega served only a week of his three-month prison sentence and was released on RD$1M (about US $29,000) bail yesterday after his wife dropped the charges.

[Najayo concert pix via diario libre]