Sunday, July 30, 2006
Sorry...
...about the recent dearth of images on this site. I've never been good about remembering to take pictures, generally preferring to live the experience, but I made the effort to document a bit better in the DR. Since I got back I've gotten lazy - but I promise to make the effort again soon!
The levels of musical hell
Regarding 7/20-7/22
...cont. from the last post... I was slated to meet a man who had emailed me several times over the years with questions about Dominican music, only to then act like he already knew all the answers. Needless to say, I had an odd impression of him and was curious to meet him in person, as well as to see the project he was working on with the Musical Instruments Collection. He’d indicated we should meet in the reception area just to the left of the information desk in the Met’s main entrance hall, so I figured I would stand around there looking lost, until he would recognize me from my lostness and rescue me. But after a half an hour of that, my feet were tired and he was late. I went to the desk to see what they could do, and they got me on the phone with musical instruments, and a nice man said he’d come down and get me. He did, recognizing me by my yellow umbrella, and just a few minutes later the man himself showed up, replete in a white seersucker suit, white shirt with cufflinks, and white shoes. Whoa. (Later he told us all that all of his clothes and shoes are custom made by an Ecuadorian tailor.)
The following hours were decidedly odd. First, I stood in one place for about an hour and a half without sitting or moving, feeling my knee stiffen up as I was told over and over, “I’m the only one qualified to do this job. No one else knows anything about salsa. Some of the salsa musicians disagree with me. But I say, screw you! I’m the one who got this job and I get paid a lot of money to do it. Nobody hired those guys. I’m the one who decides. No one else can do my job. Nobody.” I’d never encountered an ego quite this size before, even in all my travels among self-centered musicians or star-complexed academics. A couple times I tried to inject an opinion or a carefully-worded disagreement. But I could never get more than about 4 or 5 words out before he was off again. Not once was I asked about my research, what I’d been doing or what I thought about all this. After a few edgewise attempts, I realized there was no use to speaking anyway: smiling absently and nodding was all that was called for here. Although it became increasingly difficult to comply with this behavior as he traveled into the realm of Dominican music, about which he knew little but thought he knew a lot. My heart sank as he told me about his plans for a Dominican program at the museum, as I realized it would likely take a similar one to a program about Afro-Cuban music he told me he’d put on recently. “Cuban music is great, but you know you can’t work with Cubans. They’re impossible! Anyway, the Puerto Ricans can play everything the Cubans can, and salsa, and merengue, and everything else. Why should I hire 16 guys when 8 Puerto Ricans can do the job? Puerto Ricans can play batá too.” So much for tradition, representation, and insiders’ cultural knowledge.
That said, the instruments he acquired for the museum were undeniably beautiful.
After a while, I was rescued through the intercession of the head curator of musical instruments. He was an ethnomusicologist too, surprisingly enough, and a lovely person. I got the insiders’ tour of the collection, which was closed that day for new carpeting to get put in. The insiders’ tour includes not only the priceless antique instruments but also a pointing-out of the flaws in walls and ceilings and poor display case design. One, I believe, was described as “the bane of my existence” and slated for dismantling as soon as possible. My favorite part, naturally enough, was the new free reed exhibit. I hadn’t even known that this recently went up, and it included a plethora of weird and wacky accordions, along with a tiny metal box on legs that was a sort of Chinese sheng, thought it looked more like a TV cartoon alien.
At that point, another curator came in with a couple of enormous, carved wooden African drums on a cart and asked for assistance in opening doors and steadying instruments as he brought them down to the storage rooms. We decided to all go along for the ride, the more the merrier, descending into the hidden bowels of the Met inhabited only by workers in white coveralls. I didn’t know this was included in the admission price!
The musical insturments storage room was full of wonders. I first noticed a pile of balafons, African marimbas with gourd resonators, on top of a shelving unit. Next to this was a keyboard instrument wrapped in a blanket: Franz Liszt’s piano, I was told. On another set of metal shelves, the curator pulled off a small harp mounted on a humanoid skull sporting antelope horns. This was the infamous, controversial skull lyre. It used to hang in a display case right at the entrance, adding a sensational touch to the otherwise respectable gallery, until this curator came in a few years ago and removed it. (They don’t believe it was ever a “real” instrument, more likely some ridiculous thing made for European tourists in Africa in the 19th century.)
Ascending again through the various levels of musical hell, from skull instruments on upwards, we returned to the galleries and said our goodbyes. As the curator opened the cordoned-off entrance for us to leave, we found two people standing there as if to come in. “Sydney?!” they said. “What are you doing here??” “Lauren and Dan?!” I replied. “What are YOU doing here??” My friend Lauren, a fellow ethnomusicologist, was hoping to check out the collection with the idea of creating a related assignment for her students; unfortunately, it was still closed until tomorrow. Instead, the two of them joined me for a look at the Mayan exhibit (fabulous) and a trip to the roof sculpture garden. While there I realized I’d been on my feet for four hours straight and was feeling rather swollen; I also hadn’t eaten or drank anything all day except for that cup of coffee and half a cheese danish. Water and the other half were clearly in order, and I consumed these in the shadow of two giant crocodile punctured all over by knives, files, scissors and knitting needles confiscated at airport security checkpoints, and an enormous glass panel decorated with dead birds at its base (I THINK this was part of the artwork, though it was hard to be sure.) Meanwhile, Lauren and Dan gave me the exciting news that they got engaged a week ago, and the equally exciting news that they’re probably going to Ireland for two years. If this means I get to visit, I say, Score!!
It was a long day already, but it wasn’t over yet. More excitement was to come. I barely had time to go home, change, and consume some leftover Indian food (my only actual meal of the day) before I was slated to meet up with Arlene, a professor of anthropology and American Studies who is on my dissertation committee. We needed to talk business, but we also wanted to have fun, so we decided to combine the two and have our meeting at a salsa club, after a quick bowl of gelato at her place. We found we were both in little black dresses, how very stylish of us. Anyway, it was a good strategy: business out of the way we could enjoy ourselves and just dance. She slated me to teach her a dance lesson or two before heading back to Tucson, and I ran into two of my former Razz M’Tazz students! They didn’t even recognize me at first with glasses, and were surprised to hear about my new activities. It’s funny to think that four years ago they could know me only as a dancer, and that my life has changed so much in the meantime. But it was also heartening to hear after dancing with each of them once that I “still had it.”
I didn’t actually get any work per se done during the next few days. Preparing to leave for two weeks in Washington, DC on Sunday, I needed to meet with people, pack, do laundry and all that. So on Friday I had a lovely lunch with Vera, my adopted grandmother, at a Colombian/Cuban restaurant near her place on Chambers Street, then coffee during a downpour at Café Reggio with Angelina, who is doing a dissertation on Dominican palos music at CUNY and soon to leave for Santiago again. I hadn’t realized that we had another thing in common besides Dominican music, which was that she too is a classical pianist. So we had plenty to discuss and I urged her to publish something soon, at least on the web, so that there will be _something_ available for those curious about palos as opposed to the next to nothing of the current moment.
That evening I’d planned on a tipico night with a friend, Ben, of Iaso Records. But in the end he couldn’t swing it and I didn’t feel like making the journey on my own, so I prepared for a quiet evening at home. But then Tianna came in looking for her cello: she was about to play a little, informal gig only a few blocks from home. It was too convenient to pass up, so I went along to her friend’s apartment, where down in the basement in a pleasantly empty but rather stuffy room, an array of electronic equipment and musical instruments were laid out on a rug. Tianna played cello, accompanied by a friend on guitar and voice and a guy on the rug pushing buttons and pulling levers. Everyone had different foot pedals and touch pads to play with, as well, manipulating the sounds into eerie echoes and mournful loops that combined into something that sounded to me like the cosmos. Back to the music of the spheres again.
I was slated to go to Fire Island with Lauren, Dan, and friend the next day. But when I woke up, it definitely looked like rain. It was disappointng - in all the time I worked in Long Island, I’d actually never been there, or even to any Long Island beach other than Quogue - but, it also provided me with a much-needed opportunity for laundry. Walking from the laundromat to our local record & coffee shop, I noticed a sign for a dance studio offering ballroom dance as well as “disco lessons.” It must be for the Poles, but I was kind of tempted to sign up and find out what kind of moves they were teaching.
...cont. from the last post... I was slated to meet a man who had emailed me several times over the years with questions about Dominican music, only to then act like he already knew all the answers. Needless to say, I had an odd impression of him and was curious to meet him in person, as well as to see the project he was working on with the Musical Instruments Collection. He’d indicated we should meet in the reception area just to the left of the information desk in the Met’s main entrance hall, so I figured I would stand around there looking lost, until he would recognize me from my lostness and rescue me. But after a half an hour of that, my feet were tired and he was late. I went to the desk to see what they could do, and they got me on the phone with musical instruments, and a nice man said he’d come down and get me. He did, recognizing me by my yellow umbrella, and just a few minutes later the man himself showed up, replete in a white seersucker suit, white shirt with cufflinks, and white shoes. Whoa. (Later he told us all that all of his clothes and shoes are custom made by an Ecuadorian tailor.)
The following hours were decidedly odd. First, I stood in one place for about an hour and a half without sitting or moving, feeling my knee stiffen up as I was told over and over, “I’m the only one qualified to do this job. No one else knows anything about salsa. Some of the salsa musicians disagree with me. But I say, screw you! I’m the one who got this job and I get paid a lot of money to do it. Nobody hired those guys. I’m the one who decides. No one else can do my job. Nobody.” I’d never encountered an ego quite this size before, even in all my travels among self-centered musicians or star-complexed academics. A couple times I tried to inject an opinion or a carefully-worded disagreement. But I could never get more than about 4 or 5 words out before he was off again. Not once was I asked about my research, what I’d been doing or what I thought about all this. After a few edgewise attempts, I realized there was no use to speaking anyway: smiling absently and nodding was all that was called for here. Although it became increasingly difficult to comply with this behavior as he traveled into the realm of Dominican music, about which he knew little but thought he knew a lot. My heart sank as he told me about his plans for a Dominican program at the museum, as I realized it would likely take a similar one to a program about Afro-Cuban music he told me he’d put on recently. “Cuban music is great, but you know you can’t work with Cubans. They’re impossible! Anyway, the Puerto Ricans can play everything the Cubans can, and salsa, and merengue, and everything else. Why should I hire 16 guys when 8 Puerto Ricans can do the job? Puerto Ricans can play batá too.” So much for tradition, representation, and insiders’ cultural knowledge.
That said, the instruments he acquired for the museum were undeniably beautiful.
After a while, I was rescued through the intercession of the head curator of musical instruments. He was an ethnomusicologist too, surprisingly enough, and a lovely person. I got the insiders’ tour of the collection, which was closed that day for new carpeting to get put in. The insiders’ tour includes not only the priceless antique instruments but also a pointing-out of the flaws in walls and ceilings and poor display case design. One, I believe, was described as “the bane of my existence” and slated for dismantling as soon as possible. My favorite part, naturally enough, was the new free reed exhibit. I hadn’t even known that this recently went up, and it included a plethora of weird and wacky accordions, along with a tiny metal box on legs that was a sort of Chinese sheng, thought it looked more like a TV cartoon alien.
At that point, another curator came in with a couple of enormous, carved wooden African drums on a cart and asked for assistance in opening doors and steadying instruments as he brought them down to the storage rooms. We decided to all go along for the ride, the more the merrier, descending into the hidden bowels of the Met inhabited only by workers in white coveralls. I didn’t know this was included in the admission price!
The musical insturments storage room was full of wonders. I first noticed a pile of balafons, African marimbas with gourd resonators, on top of a shelving unit. Next to this was a keyboard instrument wrapped in a blanket: Franz Liszt’s piano, I was told. On another set of metal shelves, the curator pulled off a small harp mounted on a humanoid skull sporting antelope horns. This was the infamous, controversial skull lyre. It used to hang in a display case right at the entrance, adding a sensational touch to the otherwise respectable gallery, until this curator came in a few years ago and removed it. (They don’t believe it was ever a “real” instrument, more likely some ridiculous thing made for European tourists in Africa in the 19th century.)
Ascending again through the various levels of musical hell, from skull instruments on upwards, we returned to the galleries and said our goodbyes. As the curator opened the cordoned-off entrance for us to leave, we found two people standing there as if to come in. “Sydney?!” they said. “What are you doing here??” “Lauren and Dan?!” I replied. “What are YOU doing here??” My friend Lauren, a fellow ethnomusicologist, was hoping to check out the collection with the idea of creating a related assignment for her students; unfortunately, it was still closed until tomorrow. Instead, the two of them joined me for a look at the Mayan exhibit (fabulous) and a trip to the roof sculpture garden. While there I realized I’d been on my feet for four hours straight and was feeling rather swollen; I also hadn’t eaten or drank anything all day except for that cup of coffee and half a cheese danish. Water and the other half were clearly in order, and I consumed these in the shadow of two giant crocodile punctured all over by knives, files, scissors and knitting needles confiscated at airport security checkpoints, and an enormous glass panel decorated with dead birds at its base (I THINK this was part of the artwork, though it was hard to be sure.) Meanwhile, Lauren and Dan gave me the exciting news that they got engaged a week ago, and the equally exciting news that they’re probably going to Ireland for two years. If this means I get to visit, I say, Score!!
It was a long day already, but it wasn’t over yet. More excitement was to come. I barely had time to go home, change, and consume some leftover Indian food (my only actual meal of the day) before I was slated to meet up with Arlene, a professor of anthropology and American Studies who is on my dissertation committee. We needed to talk business, but we also wanted to have fun, so we decided to combine the two and have our meeting at a salsa club, after a quick bowl of gelato at her place. We found we were both in little black dresses, how very stylish of us. Anyway, it was a good strategy: business out of the way we could enjoy ourselves and just dance. She slated me to teach her a dance lesson or two before heading back to Tucson, and I ran into two of my former Razz M’Tazz students! They didn’t even recognize me at first with glasses, and were surprised to hear about my new activities. It’s funny to think that four years ago they could know me only as a dancer, and that my life has changed so much in the meantime. But it was also heartening to hear after dancing with each of them once that I “still had it.”
I didn’t actually get any work per se done during the next few days. Preparing to leave for two weeks in Washington, DC on Sunday, I needed to meet with people, pack, do laundry and all that. So on Friday I had a lovely lunch with Vera, my adopted grandmother, at a Colombian/Cuban restaurant near her place on Chambers Street, then coffee during a downpour at Café Reggio with Angelina, who is doing a dissertation on Dominican palos music at CUNY and soon to leave for Santiago again. I hadn’t realized that we had another thing in common besides Dominican music, which was that she too is a classical pianist. So we had plenty to discuss and I urged her to publish something soon, at least on the web, so that there will be _something_ available for those curious about palos as opposed to the next to nothing of the current moment.
That evening I’d planned on a tipico night with a friend, Ben, of Iaso Records. But in the end he couldn’t swing it and I didn’t feel like making the journey on my own, so I prepared for a quiet evening at home. But then Tianna came in looking for her cello: she was about to play a little, informal gig only a few blocks from home. It was too convenient to pass up, so I went along to her friend’s apartment, where down in the basement in a pleasantly empty but rather stuffy room, an array of electronic equipment and musical instruments were laid out on a rug. Tianna played cello, accompanied by a friend on guitar and voice and a guy on the rug pushing buttons and pulling levers. Everyone had different foot pedals and touch pads to play with, as well, manipulating the sounds into eerie echoes and mournful loops that combined into something that sounded to me like the cosmos. Back to the music of the spheres again.
I was slated to go to Fire Island with Lauren, Dan, and friend the next day. But when I woke up, it definitely looked like rain. It was disappointng - in all the time I worked in Long Island, I’d actually never been there, or even to any Long Island beach other than Quogue - but, it also provided me with a much-needed opportunity for laundry. Walking from the laundromat to our local record & coffee shop, I noticed a sign for a dance studio offering ballroom dance as well as “disco lessons.” It must be for the Poles, but I was kind of tempted to sign up and find out what kind of moves they were teaching.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Weird: the new normal
composed 7/22 - 7/26/06
Most of my weeks are odd, but this one does seem odder than most. Perhaps it’s just that I’m feeling a bit sleep-deprived, but the combination of an International Tambora Day, freelance talent scouting, riding around in a town car singing to Tatico songs at 4 AM, descending into the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see skull lyres and Franz Liszt’s piano, and avant-garde noise/music in a Greenpoint basement still seems strange to me. But hey: weird is the new normal. I declare it so, and so it must be.
It started off on Monday with a last-minute invitation from my friend Chinito, the percussionist. He’d been invited, also at the last minute, to play some tambora up at the Alianza Dominicana in Washington Heights in order to help dedicate a new mural honoring Catarey, a great tamborero of the past who’d died on that day sixteen years ago. Thus I found myself, on what was, if possible, even a hotter day than the one on which we’d made the backyard bonfire a couple of days earlier, standing around on a sidewalk under the beating sun. I was sweating from every part of my body and it was running down the backs of my legs. I shaded myself with a magazine and examined a giant tambora, maybe three feet in diameter and painted in Dominican red, white and blue, that had been made specially for the occasion.
A group of Alianza students gathered around as well, along with a few random musicians that had showed up to honor Catarey. Chinito was still nowhere in sight, but a couple of other tamboreros had brought their instruments and started playing in duet, cycling between the various rhythms of maco, merengue, and pambiche, giving each time to solo. Then Catarey’s sister was asked to say a few words, but no one could hear her, so a couple of students just yanked the black cloth from the mural and we all applauded. It showed winged tamboras, big and small, flying up to join the stars in the night sky.
Chino showed up shortly thereafter, just in time to watch a video of the late great tambora player in some of his numerous TV appearances, some of them with his brothers - fabulous guitarists who played bachata and son. Jaded as I am, the guy was impressive and inventive. It turned out he’d even played at the Blue Note with some Latin jazz artists back in the 80s. I couldn’t watch the whole thing, though, as I also needed to chat with folklorist Ivan Dominguez, who I’d met long ago, and the Alianza director, who I never had. They told me about a new collection of field recordings they’d recently acquired. They were looking for a student to help them out with the cataloguing and identification, and I wanted to help, but I won’t be around long enough to make much headway.
The film was followed by more tambora playing on the sweltering sidewalk, this time in trio, now that Chino was there. And then it was over and everyone went back to their business, which in Ivan’s case involves trying to convince President Leonel Fernandez that every July 17 should be the official Day of the Tambora. Even if it never comes to be, this was a nice, unofficial start.
I was glad to have learned about a great percussionist, even though he hadn’t been a tipico guy. But I was about to learn something truly surprising Chino and a new friend, a former Dominican folk musician, walked me to the train. On the way, this friend said something about a certain 17 million dollars he was about to get. Naturally, we wondered how he was going to swing this. “Oh, you know, I was contacted by email by someone in Europe who needed help getting money transfered between banks. The paperwork and all. He needed a partner in the US and I agreed to do it. So he’s going to pay me a cut. It’s for real ” This sounded suspicious, but Chino didn’t want to sound too disapproving. “Really? I get emails that sound like that all the time. I never thought any of them would be for real.” “Oh, I know, but some of them are,” he assured us. “We’ve already done most of the paperwork. We’re only waiting for one more document to come through now.” I didn’t have Chino’s compunctions. “Have you seen the money yet?” I asked. “No, but I will soon.” “If you haven’t seen any money, it’s just a scam like all the others.” “Don’t pass judgment when you don’t know all the details,” he warned me. “OK - I’m just saying, I wouldn’t waste my time or money on it.” “Well, sometimes you have to take risks to get something. I’m taking one and it’s going to pay off.”
So if you ever wondered who fell for those emails, now you know. I just hope he doesn’t have to invest too much before he finds out the real story. I guess one might at least take consolation from the help he’ll be giving to the Nigerian economy.
I spent Tano writing, reading, doing errands, and trying to track down both a hard-to-reach empresario and a certain missing bass player. Guess how successful I was?
Not to worry, I was much more successful the next day. Alejandro came through for me again and set up an interview for me with Peligro, the empresario in charge of his band, Aguakate. He put a time to it and everything- I just had to get there. Little did I know that that would be the hard part.
I left home an hour before the scheduled time, figuring that would give me plenty of leeway. Ha My first thought was to take the G train to the E and then the A up to Washington Heights. When I got to the turnstile, though, I found my Metrocard had expired. Just as I finished purchasing the new one, I heard the train arriving. I ran to meet it and had just reached the first car when the driver, looking me in the face, closed the doors. My supplicating look had no effect on this evil man, who I imagined laughing horribly as he sped away, leaving me swaying on the platform in the subway wind.
The G train tends to come only every 20 minutes or so. I didn’t have that long to wait, so I decided to go for plan B - the bus to the L to the A, a longer route, but my only other option. As I called Alejandro to tell him my woes and perhaps relay a message to Peligro, I saw a B61 arriving across the street, and ran again to meet it, just as the door closed. This time my pathetic expression paid off, though, and the driver opened it again. “What?” he asked me. “I just got nervous for a second.” “NERVOUS? WHY??” he asked me in the fake screechy voice of a madman. “I thought you were going to leave me.” “LEAVE YOU? Does THIS look like the face of a guy who LEAVES people? ?” I looked at his crazed expression and decided, “No; you look like a nice one.” I went to sit down.
Across the aisle from me a girl with a thick Queens accent and long, bright pink nails was talking on her cell phone. “So I said to her, no, forget it I’m just gonna take the bus over to her house.” At this the bus driver picked up his microphone and his voice, now deep and booming, came over the loudspeaker: “You take the bus over there. Yeah.” From then until I got off, he responded to every comment she made with a Barry White-style “Yeah.”
That was entertaining enough, but it didn’t quite make up for the mental anguish I suffered at the hands of the G train driver. I got to Peligro’s late and a bit flustered. Not to worry; he’d been busy anyway so it was just as well to start later. I found him behind the counter of his sports store, but he took me into the basement for the interview, where noone would interrupt us. Down there, we sat on plastic buckets between the tightly packed aisles full of shoeboxes. In a tiny room off this cluttered hallway a man worked alone embroidering jerseys, imprinting my interview recording with the sounds of an industrial sewing machine. We did get interrupted a bit, by workers coming down to ask Peligro’s opinion on various things and a guy bearing pink-tinted silkscreens saying “Brooklyn Girl.” But we also got the interview done. Good thing, too: I decided to award him the Second Most Difficult Interview prize, after Aureliano, since I’d been trying daily to schedule the appointment for the last month, and had even tried briefly some years before. Through Peligro, I learned more about the business of tipico and how it plays out in the US context. I also learned which is the biggest-selling tipico recording in history. No, I’m not going to tell you! Read the dissertation!!
Now it was about 7 PM, but my day was far from over. I picked up a smoothie from a cart on the street before hopping in the train to fortify me. I had to get a couple of things done at NYU, and I had to get to Macoris Restaurant tonight. First because I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks, second because I needed to track down some people, and when you can’t reach a tipico musician or fan or get their phone number, Macoris is the best bet for finding them. Lidia, my new blog friend from the University of Texas, decided to join me for the expedition.
We met in the Grand Street subway station, taking the L to Broadway Junction and changing there for the J. Although we could only get one stop closer to our destination, it was worth it. I knew that if we got off at Broadway Junction we’d have to walk under blocks and blocks of elevated traintracks along dark, unpopulated streets in East New York, which is still reported to be New York’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. (Of course, perceptions of this vary widely among residents, as it’s a large area filled with all differnt kinds of people. When I expressed concern a few weeks ago about walking to Alejandro’s house from the subway station a few blocks away, he told me, “but nothing ever happens around here!”) At any rate, we decided to skip the scene from the slasher movie and get off at the much better-lit Fulton Avenue station, from there walking on busy boulevards to Macoris. This worked out fine.
At Macoris, nothing was happening yet. It was only about 10:45. Far too early for tipico, these days. But guess who was there? Tano! The mysteriously missing bass player. His excuse? He doesn’t get a cell phone signal in the basement where he lives. “Don’t you ever come out of that basement?” I wondered, as I’d tried to reach him at all hours and on every day of the week. “Not that much. I have my computer there, so, you know.” Everyone’s wired these days! Certainly a change from when I started my research 5 years ago. He gave me the number of the land line, so we’ll see if what he says is true. (One of the other musicians suggested an alternative, low-tech explanation: too many women.)
Tano also helped me in the evening’s other mission: locate Geno, a young Dominican-American kid I’d never met but who was reputed to be an excellent accordionist, with Prodigio-like technique. I was intrigued and wondered if he could be the right man for the aforementioned folk rock fusion recording/touring job. Tano had his number so we gave him a call to see if he could come by and regale us with some tunes. He did, but much later, like 1 AM, when we were about ready to leave. In the meantime, we’d already heard two sets from Lioni Parra, whom I hadn’t seen in a number of years but who was sounding very good. Another friend from my now long-ago tipico-club-going days, Freddy Ginebra, showed up as well. At the end of the second, I played two tunes myself, and found I’d made some new fans since the last time I’d played Macoris. “Play El Tiguerito! El Tiguerito!!” they demanded. I hadn’t played that tune since the last time and I didn’t remember it very well, either, but squeezed it out anyway, endearing me to those two merengueros forever - Lidia and I even shared a ride home with them later.
At any rate, Geno eventually did show up and I saw right away it was true, he was the perfect guy for the project, even though he was only 20 years old. He wanted to know more about it. “They said they want someone young and hip,” I told him. “Do you consider yourself young and hip?” “Well, young, but I don’t know about hip. Maybe you can teach me.” He thought I was hip! Isn’t that adorable? I set him straight though. “Me? Nah, I’m just an accordion-player loser.” “Me too,” he concurred. But when he played, he certainly didn’t seem like a loser. His technique was all it was cracked up to me, he was adorable, and could even sing. I gave him a glowing recommendation the next day, and the day after that I called him to make sure he was going to call the band back. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Practicing accordion?” “Yeah, like a loser.”
When I’d played I took advantage of my microphone priveleges to berate the men in the place for not dancing when I was sitting around waiting. So while Geno played they had to re-prove their manhood by dancing with me finally, which helped me stay awake. After all that was over and I made my round of farewells, it was after 3! So we hopped in a town car with my fans and sped away, under the command of the most tipico driver ever. “See if you know these songs!” he shouted, pushing in a cassette of old Tatico tunes. Soon everyone was singing along in drunken tipico bliss. “Do you play this one? You should play this one!”
There could hardly have been greater contrast between my Wednesday night, East New York ambience and the setting of my Thursday activities. After far too little sleep, I had to get up and hit the road in preparation for a meeting I’d set up a few days previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I barely had time to wolf down half a cheese danish and a cup of coffee at a Polish café playing bad pop music before I had to get on the G train, the E train, and finally the 4 train to the Upper East Side.
– to be continued --
Most of my weeks are odd, but this one does seem odder than most. Perhaps it’s just that I’m feeling a bit sleep-deprived, but the combination of an International Tambora Day, freelance talent scouting, riding around in a town car singing to Tatico songs at 4 AM, descending into the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see skull lyres and Franz Liszt’s piano, and avant-garde noise/music in a Greenpoint basement still seems strange to me. But hey: weird is the new normal. I declare it so, and so it must be.
It started off on Monday with a last-minute invitation from my friend Chinito, the percussionist. He’d been invited, also at the last minute, to play some tambora up at the Alianza Dominicana in Washington Heights in order to help dedicate a new mural honoring Catarey, a great tamborero of the past who’d died on that day sixteen years ago. Thus I found myself, on what was, if possible, even a hotter day than the one on which we’d made the backyard bonfire a couple of days earlier, standing around on a sidewalk under the beating sun. I was sweating from every part of my body and it was running down the backs of my legs. I shaded myself with a magazine and examined a giant tambora, maybe three feet in diameter and painted in Dominican red, white and blue, that had been made specially for the occasion.
A group of Alianza students gathered around as well, along with a few random musicians that had showed up to honor Catarey. Chinito was still nowhere in sight, but a couple of other tamboreros had brought their instruments and started playing in duet, cycling between the various rhythms of maco, merengue, and pambiche, giving each time to solo. Then Catarey’s sister was asked to say a few words, but no one could hear her, so a couple of students just yanked the black cloth from the mural and we all applauded. It showed winged tamboras, big and small, flying up to join the stars in the night sky.
Chino showed up shortly thereafter, just in time to watch a video of the late great tambora player in some of his numerous TV appearances, some of them with his brothers - fabulous guitarists who played bachata and son. Jaded as I am, the guy was impressive and inventive. It turned out he’d even played at the Blue Note with some Latin jazz artists back in the 80s. I couldn’t watch the whole thing, though, as I also needed to chat with folklorist Ivan Dominguez, who I’d met long ago, and the Alianza director, who I never had. They told me about a new collection of field recordings they’d recently acquired. They were looking for a student to help them out with the cataloguing and identification, and I wanted to help, but I won’t be around long enough to make much headway.
The film was followed by more tambora playing on the sweltering sidewalk, this time in trio, now that Chino was there. And then it was over and everyone went back to their business, which in Ivan’s case involves trying to convince President Leonel Fernandez that every July 17 should be the official Day of the Tambora. Even if it never comes to be, this was a nice, unofficial start.
I was glad to have learned about a great percussionist, even though he hadn’t been a tipico guy. But I was about to learn something truly surprising Chino and a new friend, a former Dominican folk musician, walked me to the train. On the way, this friend said something about a certain 17 million dollars he was about to get. Naturally, we wondered how he was going to swing this. “Oh, you know, I was contacted by email by someone in Europe who needed help getting money transfered between banks. The paperwork and all. He needed a partner in the US and I agreed to do it. So he’s going to pay me a cut. It’s for real ” This sounded suspicious, but Chino didn’t want to sound too disapproving. “Really? I get emails that sound like that all the time. I never thought any of them would be for real.” “Oh, I know, but some of them are,” he assured us. “We’ve already done most of the paperwork. We’re only waiting for one more document to come through now.” I didn’t have Chino’s compunctions. “Have you seen the money yet?” I asked. “No, but I will soon.” “If you haven’t seen any money, it’s just a scam like all the others.” “Don’t pass judgment when you don’t know all the details,” he warned me. “OK - I’m just saying, I wouldn’t waste my time or money on it.” “Well, sometimes you have to take risks to get something. I’m taking one and it’s going to pay off.”
So if you ever wondered who fell for those emails, now you know. I just hope he doesn’t have to invest too much before he finds out the real story. I guess one might at least take consolation from the help he’ll be giving to the Nigerian economy.
I spent Tano writing, reading, doing errands, and trying to track down both a hard-to-reach empresario and a certain missing bass player. Guess how successful I was?
Not to worry, I was much more successful the next day. Alejandro came through for me again and set up an interview for me with Peligro, the empresario in charge of his band, Aguakate. He put a time to it and everything- I just had to get there. Little did I know that that would be the hard part.
I left home an hour before the scheduled time, figuring that would give me plenty of leeway. Ha My first thought was to take the G train to the E and then the A up to Washington Heights. When I got to the turnstile, though, I found my Metrocard had expired. Just as I finished purchasing the new one, I heard the train arriving. I ran to meet it and had just reached the first car when the driver, looking me in the face, closed the doors. My supplicating look had no effect on this evil man, who I imagined laughing horribly as he sped away, leaving me swaying on the platform in the subway wind.
The G train tends to come only every 20 minutes or so. I didn’t have that long to wait, so I decided to go for plan B - the bus to the L to the A, a longer route, but my only other option. As I called Alejandro to tell him my woes and perhaps relay a message to Peligro, I saw a B61 arriving across the street, and ran again to meet it, just as the door closed. This time my pathetic expression paid off, though, and the driver opened it again. “What?” he asked me. “I just got nervous for a second.” “NERVOUS? WHY??” he asked me in the fake screechy voice of a madman. “I thought you were going to leave me.” “LEAVE YOU? Does THIS look like the face of a guy who LEAVES people? ?” I looked at his crazed expression and decided, “No; you look like a nice one.” I went to sit down.
Across the aisle from me a girl with a thick Queens accent and long, bright pink nails was talking on her cell phone. “So I said to her, no, forget it I’m just gonna take the bus over to her house.” At this the bus driver picked up his microphone and his voice, now deep and booming, came over the loudspeaker: “You take the bus over there. Yeah.” From then until I got off, he responded to every comment she made with a Barry White-style “Yeah.”
That was entertaining enough, but it didn’t quite make up for the mental anguish I suffered at the hands of the G train driver. I got to Peligro’s late and a bit flustered. Not to worry; he’d been busy anyway so it was just as well to start later. I found him behind the counter of his sports store, but he took me into the basement for the interview, where noone would interrupt us. Down there, we sat on plastic buckets between the tightly packed aisles full of shoeboxes. In a tiny room off this cluttered hallway a man worked alone embroidering jerseys, imprinting my interview recording with the sounds of an industrial sewing machine. We did get interrupted a bit, by workers coming down to ask Peligro’s opinion on various things and a guy bearing pink-tinted silkscreens saying “Brooklyn Girl.” But we also got the interview done. Good thing, too: I decided to award him the Second Most Difficult Interview prize, after Aureliano, since I’d been trying daily to schedule the appointment for the last month, and had even tried briefly some years before. Through Peligro, I learned more about the business of tipico and how it plays out in the US context. I also learned which is the biggest-selling tipico recording in history. No, I’m not going to tell you! Read the dissertation!!
Now it was about 7 PM, but my day was far from over. I picked up a smoothie from a cart on the street before hopping in the train to fortify me. I had to get a couple of things done at NYU, and I had to get to Macoris Restaurant tonight. First because I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks, second because I needed to track down some people, and when you can’t reach a tipico musician or fan or get their phone number, Macoris is the best bet for finding them. Lidia, my new blog friend from the University of Texas, decided to join me for the expedition.
We met in the Grand Street subway station, taking the L to Broadway Junction and changing there for the J. Although we could only get one stop closer to our destination, it was worth it. I knew that if we got off at Broadway Junction we’d have to walk under blocks and blocks of elevated traintracks along dark, unpopulated streets in East New York, which is still reported to be New York’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. (Of course, perceptions of this vary widely among residents, as it’s a large area filled with all differnt kinds of people. When I expressed concern a few weeks ago about walking to Alejandro’s house from the subway station a few blocks away, he told me, “but nothing ever happens around here!”) At any rate, we decided to skip the scene from the slasher movie and get off at the much better-lit Fulton Avenue station, from there walking on busy boulevards to Macoris. This worked out fine.
At Macoris, nothing was happening yet. It was only about 10:45. Far too early for tipico, these days. But guess who was there? Tano! The mysteriously missing bass player. His excuse? He doesn’t get a cell phone signal in the basement where he lives. “Don’t you ever come out of that basement?” I wondered, as I’d tried to reach him at all hours and on every day of the week. “Not that much. I have my computer there, so, you know.” Everyone’s wired these days! Certainly a change from when I started my research 5 years ago. He gave me the number of the land line, so we’ll see if what he says is true. (One of the other musicians suggested an alternative, low-tech explanation: too many women.)
Tano also helped me in the evening’s other mission: locate Geno, a young Dominican-American kid I’d never met but who was reputed to be an excellent accordionist, with Prodigio-like technique. I was intrigued and wondered if he could be the right man for the aforementioned folk rock fusion recording/touring job. Tano had his number so we gave him a call to see if he could come by and regale us with some tunes. He did, but much later, like 1 AM, when we were about ready to leave. In the meantime, we’d already heard two sets from Lioni Parra, whom I hadn’t seen in a number of years but who was sounding very good. Another friend from my now long-ago tipico-club-going days, Freddy Ginebra, showed up as well. At the end of the second, I played two tunes myself, and found I’d made some new fans since the last time I’d played Macoris. “Play El Tiguerito! El Tiguerito!!” they demanded. I hadn’t played that tune since the last time and I didn’t remember it very well, either, but squeezed it out anyway, endearing me to those two merengueros forever - Lidia and I even shared a ride home with them later.
At any rate, Geno eventually did show up and I saw right away it was true, he was the perfect guy for the project, even though he was only 20 years old. He wanted to know more about it. “They said they want someone young and hip,” I told him. “Do you consider yourself young and hip?” “Well, young, but I don’t know about hip. Maybe you can teach me.” He thought I was hip! Isn’t that adorable? I set him straight though. “Me? Nah, I’m just an accordion-player loser.” “Me too,” he concurred. But when he played, he certainly didn’t seem like a loser. His technique was all it was cracked up to me, he was adorable, and could even sing. I gave him a glowing recommendation the next day, and the day after that I called him to make sure he was going to call the band back. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Practicing accordion?” “Yeah, like a loser.”
When I’d played I took advantage of my microphone priveleges to berate the men in the place for not dancing when I was sitting around waiting. So while Geno played they had to re-prove their manhood by dancing with me finally, which helped me stay awake. After all that was over and I made my round of farewells, it was after 3! So we hopped in a town car with my fans and sped away, under the command of the most tipico driver ever. “See if you know these songs!” he shouted, pushing in a cassette of old Tatico tunes. Soon everyone was singing along in drunken tipico bliss. “Do you play this one? You should play this one!”
There could hardly have been greater contrast between my Wednesday night, East New York ambience and the setting of my Thursday activities. After far too little sleep, I had to get up and hit the road in preparation for a meeting I’d set up a few days previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I barely had time to wolf down half a cheese danish and a cup of coffee at a Polish café playing bad pop music before I had to get on the G train, the E train, and finally the 4 train to the Upper East Side.
– to be continued --
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
The magical, self-referential blog
7/17 - 7/18/06
I figured I’d better get out and hear some more music on Sunday, a good night for tipico in Queens, so I made plans to go out to El Rinconcito de Nagua in Woodhaven. But first, both excercise and brunch were in order. Tianna’s Tucson friend, Danielle, was in town. It felt a bit like a slumber party, and we all woke up groggy and giggling. Tianna suggested we try a Kick & Punch class at the neighborhood Y to get us moving. We did, but didn’t last long. It was pretty intense, and exactly what I’m not supposed to be doing for my knee. Instead, we did about fifteen minutes of bedroom yoga, gossiped about Tucson people, and then, starving for both food and caffeine, headed towards Saint Helens, where we had the slooooooowest brunch I’d yet encountered. It was tasty, but I don’t think anything was tasty enough for that kind of wait.
Later that evening, I had to meet a new friends whose acquaintance I owe to this very blog: Lidia, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Texas who is studying Dominican foodways in Tamboril and New York. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about, and since we both found ourselves temporarily in Brooklyn we made plans to meet up down on Grand Avenue, near my old East Williamsburg haunts. We touched base via cell phone. “Keep walking east on Grand, and I’ll be walking towards you. If we stay on the same sidewalk, we’ll run into each other eventually.” “But how will I know you’re you, and how will you know I’m me?” I wondered. “I think I can recognize you from your blog,” Lidia said. “And I have big hair.”
I did recognize her from her masses of long, curly hair, more than enough to make the hair-deprived (such as myself) jealous. We headed to an old favorite of mine, the Salvadoran restaurant “Bahia.” While living in New York, I found Salvadoran food often provided the best substitute for the Sonoran food I missed from home. They have corn tamales with no meat inside, not quite the green corn tamales with chile and cheese I longed for, but close enough. They also have delicious refried black beans. We ordered a “plato tipico” consisting of fried sweet plantains, homemade cheese, beans, and cream, as well as cheese-filled pupusas topped with tangy cabbage salad. This kept us pleasantly occupied as we discussed research plans and I gave her some contact information for all my favorite people in Santaigo. We even gave Hector, the palero, a call - I wanted to check on my car, anyhow. The connection wasn’t very good, but we managed to touch base, at least.
Unfortunately, Lidia couldn’t go with me to El Rinconcito - her crazy New York existence meant that 10 PM on a Sunday night was the only time she’d been able to find to meet up with an old friend. So we parted ways at the Grand Avenue subway station, but made plans to have a tipico night some other day. Taking the L to the J train out to the 75th Street stop, I made surprisingly good time to my destination. Once there, I claimed a table near the door, feeling a little odd because I didn’t recognize anyone in the small but highly appreciative audience, making me a curiosity in more ways than one. Still, I did know Leopoldo, the accordionist, and Junior, the guirero, and once they finished the set they came over to say hi and buy me a second beer. Before long everyone in the place wanted to dance with me, it seemed. Good thing, as I needed the exercise both for the usual reasons and in order to stay awake
In the second set, I was asked to play so I cranked out some of the usual suspects, “La Cartera Vacia” and “El Puente Seco.”: Junior thought I’d played better than the day before, and this immediately made me a lot of new friends who wanted to know all about me. One who asked me to dance told me he was both a bodega-owner and one of the biggest merengueros or tipico fans around, so I asked his name. He turned out to be Fermin Checo, a name I’d heard often both from the musicians I know and in homenajes, recorded songs of homage. This was a fortuitous meeting and, naturally, I made plans to interview him.
For neighborly reasons, this gig has to end at 1 AM sharp - all the better for me - so at that time we repaired to the sidewalk, where I stood around talking to the New York-born bass player until Papo, one of those ultra-persistent fans who never misses any of the shows, offered me a ride to the Myrtle Avenue L station, much more convenient for me, and we sped away in his delivery van.
On Monday I tried again to reach Tano. Guess how well that went?
On Tuesday I was more successful: not with Tano but with Heidy, one of the only professinal female guira players around, and an old friend from the days when she was playing with Rafaelito Polanco and I was working in the public sector. Turns out she now has three kids and thus is not playing much anymore, especially since Rafaelito went back to the island. We made plans to meet up at her new apartment near Myrtle and Broadway.
When I got off the bus under the elevated M train, I tried to call Heidy for the address but couldn’t get through. Eventually I decided I might as well have some lunch, so wandered into the nearest Dominican restaurant for a lunch plate of rice, beans, and fish. It was enough for three people, but I was glad to have leftovers. When I finished I tried again and found her. Then I found the building, one of those tall apartment blocks built by city services, without trouble. Heidy opened the door to her extremely tidy first-floor, two-bedroom place accompanied by her one-year-old daughter who was rolling about in a pink walker.
A Bushwick native, Heidy had never thought much of tipico until highschool, when she was able to hear some of the local bands playing at restaurants in the neighborhood. One of her sisters had recently come up to New York from the DR and played accordion, sparking Heidy’s interest further. She started out as a dancer with a band, but when one of the percussionists suggested she take up an instrument instead she realized the guira was for her. After practicing a few months along to tapes of Fefita, she was surprising everyone in the tipico world with her self-taught skills. She ended up playing for about seven years straight with Rafaelito Polanco, one of the most demanding accordionists, and greatly enjoyed proving that women can indeed be awesome percussionists.
After an hour or so of interview, Heidy had to go pick up her twin son and daughter at school. I went along for the walk. Her son, Eli, quickly decided I was OK. As soon as we got home, he was showing me all his toys. (His twin sister was more interested in potato chips.) Heidy showed me her new guira and a framed newspaper article on her wall - the one I’d set up with El Diario several years ago, which featured a picture of her with Rafaelito and Pablo, the bass player. I couldn’t stay too long as I had to go into school to pick up some stuff, but we discussed plans to meet up later to go out for more tipico.
Back at the ranch that evening, Tianna arrived home with another houseguest from Tucson, this one a traveling physicist. Apparently, he roams around the country in a vegetable oil bus giving physics demonstrations at schools, while he’s not teaching at community college. I asked if he was like a snake oil salesman, only for science, and he said yes, but without the sales. Tianna tells me that the their biggest challenge came in the South. There, people thought they were psychics. Apparently, they couldn’t read the “Physics Factory” sign. The physicists hadn’t counted on illiteracy.
He didn’t have that problem to contend with at our place, but he did have to contend with our sleeping situation: Tianna has a futon, I have what she terms “the crib” but is actually an armchair and ottoman that fold into a very narrow bed. The rest of the space is taken up by piles of laundry, a drum set, computer equipment, desks, books, a Casio keyboard, a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it that reads “first word best word. She lived in an attic, like the artists of la boheme,” two entirely unnecessary space heaters, a football, some potted plants, cowboy boots and hats, but no other sleeping equipment. The physicist solved the problem by deciding to sleep on the roof after we’d climbed out the window to enjoy the view of Manhattan and a blood-red moon, indicating the city’s current smog level.
The next day, Tianna had to work early so I entertained our new, temporary roommate with brunch at a diner, a visit to the Strand, and lunch at Dojo, my usual place. After he left I had a pretty average afternoon of library visits and all. Guess which musician I was still unable to reach?
Back at home that evening, the evening of one of the hottest days of the year so far, Tianna looked out our kitchen window only to find our downstairs neighbors inexplicably sitting around a campfire. “Come on down! We’ve got beer!” they called to us. Seemed like a good invitation, so we went down and wandered around the basement until we found the exit to the backyard - the rather lovely backyard, with a thick carpet of grass, a pear tree full of young fruit but no partridge, tomatoes, peppers, basil, and marigolds. In the midst of all that bounty, two guys drinking beer and eating Sunchips around a metal firepit shaped like a 1950s UFO. Soon I too had a beer in my hand and they were telling us how they’d been inspired to collect the wood after last Wednesday’s rain and windstorm, the same one that had resulted in the freak tornado in Westchester, and saw all that unclaimed bounty lying about the streets of Brooklyn. They felt like manly men as they ran around collecting firewood and hacking it into manageable pieces with their hatchet. It made quite a change from their day jobs at financial firms on Wall Street.
The fire and beer party was actually being held in honor of our downstairs neighbor’s birthday the next day, which, when we joined the festivities, was only an hour away. We decided to wait for it in order to make a toast. In the meantime, we threw peanuts to the firegod. Then two friends of the birthday boy, punk rock girls with crazy hairdos and a punk rock band. We discussed horror movies and how these days they’ll just make one about any old thing. I imagined the writers at work: “What are people not sufficiently scared of yet?” “I don’t know - rubber duckies?” And thus is a horror movie born. The rubber ducky horror could really go places, too, as his water-dwelling habits open up all sorts of possibilities for new deaths involving drowning, electrocution, etc. One of the financial advisors also suggested the squirting of acid out of the ducky squeaky place. In the movie, whenever one heard SQUEAK-Y! SQUEAK-Y! One would know horror would follow. But tonight, all that followed was a toast, bourbon, and bedtime.
I’ve been getting the most interesting mail from my blog readers. Thanks, readers! Keep it coming! Anyway, last week I got one from the assistant to the frontman of a popular folk rock band which shall remain nameless, but which is beloved to my nephews. They’re apparently looking for recommendations for a latino accordionist to work with them on a recording project and go on tours and all. It could be a great opportunity for someone but I wasn’t sure who, so I started calling around to see what my tipico-playing friends thought. It’s always good to start with the ones who want to marry you, because you know they’re likelyto help. Sure enough, Alejandro came up with a good possibility. But first he asked, “are you SURE they don’t need a bass player?” Then I called another friend for advise. He said he’d ask around, but first he wanted to know, “are you SURE they don’t need a percussionist?” Jeez, maybe I should just get a whole band together and take it on tour myself...
It was an interesting end to the week, and after that, there was only vacation to worry about. Along with my sister, brother-in-law, and nephews, I’d been invited out to visit our cousins at their summer homes in Quogue (near the Hamptons in Long Island). It was an offer too good to refuse, especially with the heat rising in the city. (Why do we need so much *&^%$ cement and asphalt?!?) So we rendezvoused in Flushing and headed east. There we spent a lovely though too short two days and one night playing in the pool and on the beach, enjoying the surprisingly cool breeze in the forest (I even needed a sweater at night!), eating and drinking, bicycling and being amused by the antics of small people. If only I’d had batteries for my camera I would have captured the cutest moment ever. One of our cousin Amy’s children, Owen, wanted to go down to the water and jump waves with his grandfather Lou, and took his hand. Once my smaller nephew Aiden saw this he wanted to go too, and took Lou’s other hand. And then Owen’s twin brother Oliver saw this and decided he’d better not miss the action, taking his brother’s hand. My larger nephew, Aaron, not to be left out, grabbed Aiden’s hand and they all paraded out to the ocean, five men all in a row.
I figured I’d better get out and hear some more music on Sunday, a good night for tipico in Queens, so I made plans to go out to El Rinconcito de Nagua in Woodhaven. But first, both excercise and brunch were in order. Tianna’s Tucson friend, Danielle, was in town. It felt a bit like a slumber party, and we all woke up groggy and giggling. Tianna suggested we try a Kick & Punch class at the neighborhood Y to get us moving. We did, but didn’t last long. It was pretty intense, and exactly what I’m not supposed to be doing for my knee. Instead, we did about fifteen minutes of bedroom yoga, gossiped about Tucson people, and then, starving for both food and caffeine, headed towards Saint Helens, where we had the slooooooowest brunch I’d yet encountered. It was tasty, but I don’t think anything was tasty enough for that kind of wait.
Later that evening, I had to meet a new friends whose acquaintance I owe to this very blog: Lidia, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Texas who is studying Dominican foodways in Tamboril and New York. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about, and since we both found ourselves temporarily in Brooklyn we made plans to meet up down on Grand Avenue, near my old East Williamsburg haunts. We touched base via cell phone. “Keep walking east on Grand, and I’ll be walking towards you. If we stay on the same sidewalk, we’ll run into each other eventually.” “But how will I know you’re you, and how will you know I’m me?” I wondered. “I think I can recognize you from your blog,” Lidia said. “And I have big hair.”
I did recognize her from her masses of long, curly hair, more than enough to make the hair-deprived (such as myself) jealous. We headed to an old favorite of mine, the Salvadoran restaurant “Bahia.” While living in New York, I found Salvadoran food often provided the best substitute for the Sonoran food I missed from home. They have corn tamales with no meat inside, not quite the green corn tamales with chile and cheese I longed for, but close enough. They also have delicious refried black beans. We ordered a “plato tipico” consisting of fried sweet plantains, homemade cheese, beans, and cream, as well as cheese-filled pupusas topped with tangy cabbage salad. This kept us pleasantly occupied as we discussed research plans and I gave her some contact information for all my favorite people in Santaigo. We even gave Hector, the palero, a call - I wanted to check on my car, anyhow. The connection wasn’t very good, but we managed to touch base, at least.
Unfortunately, Lidia couldn’t go with me to El Rinconcito - her crazy New York existence meant that 10 PM on a Sunday night was the only time she’d been able to find to meet up with an old friend. So we parted ways at the Grand Avenue subway station, but made plans to have a tipico night some other day. Taking the L to the J train out to the 75th Street stop, I made surprisingly good time to my destination. Once there, I claimed a table near the door, feeling a little odd because I didn’t recognize anyone in the small but highly appreciative audience, making me a curiosity in more ways than one. Still, I did know Leopoldo, the accordionist, and Junior, the guirero, and once they finished the set they came over to say hi and buy me a second beer. Before long everyone in the place wanted to dance with me, it seemed. Good thing, as I needed the exercise both for the usual reasons and in order to stay awake
In the second set, I was asked to play so I cranked out some of the usual suspects, “La Cartera Vacia” and “El Puente Seco.”: Junior thought I’d played better than the day before, and this immediately made me a lot of new friends who wanted to know all about me. One who asked me to dance told me he was both a bodega-owner and one of the biggest merengueros or tipico fans around, so I asked his name. He turned out to be Fermin Checo, a name I’d heard often both from the musicians I know and in homenajes, recorded songs of homage. This was a fortuitous meeting and, naturally, I made plans to interview him.
For neighborly reasons, this gig has to end at 1 AM sharp - all the better for me - so at that time we repaired to the sidewalk, where I stood around talking to the New York-born bass player until Papo, one of those ultra-persistent fans who never misses any of the shows, offered me a ride to the Myrtle Avenue L station, much more convenient for me, and we sped away in his delivery van.
On Monday I tried again to reach Tano. Guess how well that went?
On Tuesday I was more successful: not with Tano but with Heidy, one of the only professinal female guira players around, and an old friend from the days when she was playing with Rafaelito Polanco and I was working in the public sector. Turns out she now has three kids and thus is not playing much anymore, especially since Rafaelito went back to the island. We made plans to meet up at her new apartment near Myrtle and Broadway.
When I got off the bus under the elevated M train, I tried to call Heidy for the address but couldn’t get through. Eventually I decided I might as well have some lunch, so wandered into the nearest Dominican restaurant for a lunch plate of rice, beans, and fish. It was enough for three people, but I was glad to have leftovers. When I finished I tried again and found her. Then I found the building, one of those tall apartment blocks built by city services, without trouble. Heidy opened the door to her extremely tidy first-floor, two-bedroom place accompanied by her one-year-old daughter who was rolling about in a pink walker.
A Bushwick native, Heidy had never thought much of tipico until highschool, when she was able to hear some of the local bands playing at restaurants in the neighborhood. One of her sisters had recently come up to New York from the DR and played accordion, sparking Heidy’s interest further. She started out as a dancer with a band, but when one of the percussionists suggested she take up an instrument instead she realized the guira was for her. After practicing a few months along to tapes of Fefita, she was surprising everyone in the tipico world with her self-taught skills. She ended up playing for about seven years straight with Rafaelito Polanco, one of the most demanding accordionists, and greatly enjoyed proving that women can indeed be awesome percussionists.
After an hour or so of interview, Heidy had to go pick up her twin son and daughter at school. I went along for the walk. Her son, Eli, quickly decided I was OK. As soon as we got home, he was showing me all his toys. (His twin sister was more interested in potato chips.) Heidy showed me her new guira and a framed newspaper article on her wall - the one I’d set up with El Diario several years ago, which featured a picture of her with Rafaelito and Pablo, the bass player. I couldn’t stay too long as I had to go into school to pick up some stuff, but we discussed plans to meet up later to go out for more tipico.
Back at the ranch that evening, Tianna arrived home with another houseguest from Tucson, this one a traveling physicist. Apparently, he roams around the country in a vegetable oil bus giving physics demonstrations at schools, while he’s not teaching at community college. I asked if he was like a snake oil salesman, only for science, and he said yes, but without the sales. Tianna tells me that the their biggest challenge came in the South. There, people thought they were psychics. Apparently, they couldn’t read the “Physics Factory” sign. The physicists hadn’t counted on illiteracy.
He didn’t have that problem to contend with at our place, but he did have to contend with our sleeping situation: Tianna has a futon, I have what she terms “the crib” but is actually an armchair and ottoman that fold into a very narrow bed. The rest of the space is taken up by piles of laundry, a drum set, computer equipment, desks, books, a Casio keyboard, a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it that reads “first word best word. She lived in an attic, like the artists of la boheme,” two entirely unnecessary space heaters, a football, some potted plants, cowboy boots and hats, but no other sleeping equipment. The physicist solved the problem by deciding to sleep on the roof after we’d climbed out the window to enjoy the view of Manhattan and a blood-red moon, indicating the city’s current smog level.
The next day, Tianna had to work early so I entertained our new, temporary roommate with brunch at a diner, a visit to the Strand, and lunch at Dojo, my usual place. After he left I had a pretty average afternoon of library visits and all. Guess which musician I was still unable to reach?
Back at home that evening, the evening of one of the hottest days of the year so far, Tianna looked out our kitchen window only to find our downstairs neighbors inexplicably sitting around a campfire. “Come on down! We’ve got beer!” they called to us. Seemed like a good invitation, so we went down and wandered around the basement until we found the exit to the backyard - the rather lovely backyard, with a thick carpet of grass, a pear tree full of young fruit but no partridge, tomatoes, peppers, basil, and marigolds. In the midst of all that bounty, two guys drinking beer and eating Sunchips around a metal firepit shaped like a 1950s UFO. Soon I too had a beer in my hand and they were telling us how they’d been inspired to collect the wood after last Wednesday’s rain and windstorm, the same one that had resulted in the freak tornado in Westchester, and saw all that unclaimed bounty lying about the streets of Brooklyn. They felt like manly men as they ran around collecting firewood and hacking it into manageable pieces with their hatchet. It made quite a change from their day jobs at financial firms on Wall Street.
The fire and beer party was actually being held in honor of our downstairs neighbor’s birthday the next day, which, when we joined the festivities, was only an hour away. We decided to wait for it in order to make a toast. In the meantime, we threw peanuts to the firegod. Then two friends of the birthday boy, punk rock girls with crazy hairdos and a punk rock band. We discussed horror movies and how these days they’ll just make one about any old thing. I imagined the writers at work: “What are people not sufficiently scared of yet?” “I don’t know - rubber duckies?” And thus is a horror movie born. The rubber ducky horror could really go places, too, as his water-dwelling habits open up all sorts of possibilities for new deaths involving drowning, electrocution, etc. One of the financial advisors also suggested the squirting of acid out of the ducky squeaky place. In the movie, whenever one heard SQUEAK-Y! SQUEAK-Y! One would know horror would follow. But tonight, all that followed was a toast, bourbon, and bedtime.
I’ve been getting the most interesting mail from my blog readers. Thanks, readers! Keep it coming! Anyway, last week I got one from the assistant to the frontman of a popular folk rock band which shall remain nameless, but which is beloved to my nephews. They’re apparently looking for recommendations for a latino accordionist to work with them on a recording project and go on tours and all. It could be a great opportunity for someone but I wasn’t sure who, so I started calling around to see what my tipico-playing friends thought. It’s always good to start with the ones who want to marry you, because you know they’re likelyto help. Sure enough, Alejandro came up with a good possibility. But first he asked, “are you SURE they don’t need a bass player?” Then I called another friend for advise. He said he’d ask around, but first he wanted to know, “are you SURE they don’t need a percussionist?” Jeez, maybe I should just get a whole band together and take it on tour myself...
It was an interesting end to the week, and after that, there was only vacation to worry about. Along with my sister, brother-in-law, and nephews, I’d been invited out to visit our cousins at their summer homes in Quogue (near the Hamptons in Long Island). It was an offer too good to refuse, especially with the heat rising in the city. (Why do we need so much *&^%$ cement and asphalt?!?) So we rendezvoused in Flushing and headed east. There we spent a lovely though too short two days and one night playing in the pool and on the beach, enjoying the surprisingly cool breeze in the forest (I even needed a sweater at night!), eating and drinking, bicycling and being amused by the antics of small people. If only I’d had batteries for my camera I would have captured the cutest moment ever. One of our cousin Amy’s children, Owen, wanted to go down to the water and jump waves with his grandfather Lou, and took his hand. Once my smaller nephew Aiden saw this he wanted to go too, and took Lou’s other hand. And then Owen’s twin brother Oliver saw this and decided he’d better not miss the action, taking his brother’s hand. My larger nephew, Aaron, not to be left out, grabbed Aiden’s hand and they all paraded out to the ocean, five men all in a row.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Ernestidio plays the Main Squeeze Accordion Festival
Another photo from last week's festival. (Scroll down the page to see me performing at the same event)
Whipped into an accordion-induced frenzy
7/12/06
So, on a very steamy Saturday afternoon, I jumped on the L train to the DeKalb station, where I got off and found Bushwick residents trying to beat the heat by opening up the fire hydrants and letting them run everywhere, and by bringing their TVs and armchairs out onto the sidewalk, running the cords in through a window. (Electrical appliances and gushing water doesn’t seem the safest combination, but they did look comfortable.)
I found Chinito hard at work mixing tracks on his computer - as usual. But he had made time to go out and get a couple of Presidentes so as to make our interview more enjoyable. They helped with the heat, too In the course of this very interesting interview, I found out that Chinito had been a member of a roller-skating crew when he was growing up on the Lower East Side in the late 70s-early 80s. They wore matching suits with their names stiched onto one leg and their zodiac signs on the other and went around skating and working on skate-dancing moves. He was also getting involved with the early New York deejaying scene, spinning records and scratching and all that. And at the same time, he was beginning his típico performance career, playing guira with King de la Rosa. When he had to go to a gig that was a little ways away, he would skate over, so sometimes he just left his skates on as he played. This developed into a whole shtick where during his guira solos he would break out with some roller stylings, rolling down into the splits and then seeming to pull himself back up by the neck of his shirt. Needless to say, the new guira style caused quite a stir when he took it on tour with him to the DR in 1981.
These days Chino keeps busy by producing recordings for merengue, reggaetón, and rock artists. He no longer has the matching jumpsuit seen on the cover of the LP he recorded with King when he was 16 and pulled out to show me, a black-and-tan polyester number that combined well with King’s afro and Pablo the bassist’s cubano-style cap. I asked Chino if he could still skate and he told me he took his skates out the other day just to see. But now, he found, he was mostly just afraid of falling down. I could totally sympathize what with my knee surgeries and subsequent lack of a dancing career. Man, I guess we’re all getting older
I continued reflecting on that theme over the remainder of the Fourth of July weekend. I spent three post-Presidente days at my sister’s house playing with my nephews, or
writing while they were otherwise occupied. At ages 6 and 2 ½, they never seem to tire. Even after a whole morning at the beach on the Croton River (which has the inexplicable name of Silver Lake), Aaron was unable to nap long enough for Heather and I to watch Transamerica. So we were unable to complete our Alternative Lifestyles Independence Weekend, which had begun so promisingly with a showing of Brokeback Mountain. Still, we had a successful Fourth of July BBQ at the neighbors. I brought moro de guandules and Heather tried to poison me with chicken disguised as fish. Then Aaron threw a tantrum when we had to leave, proving that the party had been a success.
I got back into the swing of things pretty quickly upon return to the Greenpoint attic where I hide out these days. It’s fun living with Tianna again - the last time we were roommates was in the year 2000 - although she has a crazy work schedule and social life that has cut into my sleep habits. (That may explain the quality of this blog entry more than anything.) Her room, which I now share, is the whole top floor of a three-story house, from which one can admire the shiny hardwood floors and beamed ceiling on the inside as well as a view of Manhattan, Empire State Building and all, out of the west-facing dormer window. There is also a stairway going up to a skylight that presumably opens onto the roof - though it appears to be stuck down with tar. More on that later. The only drawback is the downstairs area of the apartment, where the kitchen, living room, and bathroom are to be found and which we share with way too many aspiring indie rockers who drink too much. The trash-and-bottle situation gets completely out of control about every two days, while just about every morning the kitchen is a disaster area of crusty dishes and half-used cooking ingredients. So this area plays the cloud to the attic’s silver lining.
Greenpoint is a heavily Polish section of Brooklyn, now being invaded by hipsters. There seem to be few culture clashes between the two groups, although of course the hipsters haven’t yet invaded the Europa nightclub. I don’t think the syrupy Polish pop and Polish electronica suit their tastes. I shop at a Polish grocery sometimes but I can’t buy any of the Polish canned food products because I don’t know what they are. I do buy the Polish juice though, as it very conveniently has a picture on the box of the type of fruit you’ll find inside. All told, life is pretty good for me in Greenpoint.
Anyway, Tianna and I got out to enjoy some music provided by her friend Hannah one night during the week. She is a singer-songwriter who performs on her guitar and sometimes harmonium. Her voice is lovely and works well for her mellow tunes and picturesque lyrics, one of which says “I’d like to rip out your throat and plant a tree in it.” And it was sung in a place called Capone’s Bar, an interesting setting with an upper level where people sitting up above on a patio can look down upon cleavage, and a sunken lower seating area where those sitting below can look up people’s skirts. An interesting arrangement, to be sure. We did get free pizza.
Then it was back to business - I’d set up an interview with Arsenio de la Rosa, King’s brother whom I’d met the week before. This time around I had a much easier time finding the apartment and gaining admittance. One of Arsenio’s American-born, hip-hop-playing sons came down to let me in. Up in the apartment, we found King hanging out playing guitar, accompanied by the chirping of the dozen tiny, colorful birds kept in cages in the hallway. The History Channel was on the big-screen TV, sound off, and so grainy footage of battleships accompanied us throughout the interview. As Aresnio started playing during the Trujillo era, and actually met Petan (the dictator’s brother who ran the state radio and TV stations), I was able to learn a lot more about life and music during that time. I also learned a lot about how tipico got going in New York, since he’d moved here in 1963 - just after Trujillo died and some time before other tipico musicians got up here.
On Friday, I did not get the interview with Tano. Good thing something else happened on Saturday to distract me for a while: the first annual Main Squeeze Accordion Festival. A week ago, I’d called up my old friend Ernestidio, an accordionist and accordion tuner in Cypress Hills. He was happy to have heard from me. “Hey, you know, I’m playing at some kind of festival up in Manhattan, in Riverside Park, next Saturday. You should come down! Play a couple of tunes with us!” That same day but a few hours later, I checked my emails and found I’d received a couple inviting me to the same event - to introduce Ernestidio and his group. It turned out that while I was away, Bob Godfried, a fellow New York accordion nut, had been helping the organizers to get some Latino groups onto the program, and had remembered my old friend Ernestidio from a library program I’d organized several years back. He’d called him up and contracted him for the event, and then when I got back he and organizer Robin had invited me to come on over as well. So that worked out nicely.
The festival took place all afternoon and into the evening on the pier at 70th Street. At that point, Riverside Park is just a little strip of green located on a very steep hill in between and sort of underneath the West Side Highway. But the pier, which has been made over rather nicely with paving stones, railings, and streetlamps, was a very pleasant and breezy location for a music event. As I came out from under the highway and crossed the bike path, I encountered Ernestidio just walking back up the path to get the bass amp, and Cesar the tambora player drinking a beer with Junior the singer (usually a guira player, but promoted to lead singer for the occasion) at a table near the food booth. On the stage at the moment was a rock band fronted by a woman playing accordion while wearing flourescent pink fingerless gloves and copious amounts of eye makeup. I was sorry we’d missed some of the earlier act, which included an all-female accordion orchestra, an Irish group, and a norteño group with, oddly enough, a Chilean frontman. But we did get to hear a Balkan duo as we waited. Bob gave me some background: the accordionist was raised on Staten Island by Albanian parents, while the percussionist was part of the Bronx Macedonian gypsy community. The two got tired of being threatened with guns in classic Balkan fashion whenever they missed someone’s favorite tune, and thus stopped playing Macedonian weddings and started on the folk festivals instead.
They kept us entertained until it was time for Ernestidio and the boys (which included New York-born “El Escorpion” on guira and Monchy on bass) to take the stage, and me to translate for their sound check. But this task was finished before I knew it - literally. I was still waiting for an affirmative from the sound man when they just started in with Los Algodones. Ah well. I made my introductions later, and then took the opportunity to dance a few numbers - including a mangulina - with the two Dominicans present (both friends of the musicians). Many others were motivated to join in with their own moves, some of which resembled merengue and some of which did not. The latter were mostly performed by a guy in a Mark Twain mustache and puff of grey hair dressed in bright red trousers, yellow shirt, and herringbone jacket. Apparently, he goes to all the accordion events.
The festival crowd was really easy to please, they were already whipped up into an accordion-induced frenzy. Their reacion when I introduced the band was “WOO-HOO!!!” And then when Junior asked me to come up and ask the crowd if they were enjoying the music, they said “WOO-HOO!!!” I translated this for Junior: “They said they were! They said they were!!” And when Ernestidio asked me to come up to play, I told the audience they could be the judge as to whether I’d learned anything in all the time I spent in the Dominican Republic. When I finished my first tune, I asked their verdict. It was: “WOO-HOO!!!” All in all, a successful afternoon. We stayed long enough to hear a few tunes from the Cajun band that followed us and closed the show. Bob was on guitar and the accordionist was playing a beautiful instrument handmade in the bayou. He had the appropriate accent, as well. We liked the music, and the accent, but Ernestidio was pleased that more people had danced to his tunes.
Ernestidio’s driver kindly gave me a ride home, all the way to Greenpoint. I’d planned on going out again to hear Ernestidio play in Bushwick later that evening, but got distracted with other things and then it really seemed too late to have to catch a bus, then a train, then call the musicians to come look for me and walk me to the club from the creepy subway station, so I called it a night. Tomorrow would be another tipico day, after all.
So, on a very steamy Saturday afternoon, I jumped on the L train to the DeKalb station, where I got off and found Bushwick residents trying to beat the heat by opening up the fire hydrants and letting them run everywhere, and by bringing their TVs and armchairs out onto the sidewalk, running the cords in through a window. (Electrical appliances and gushing water doesn’t seem the safest combination, but they did look comfortable.)
I found Chinito hard at work mixing tracks on his computer - as usual. But he had made time to go out and get a couple of Presidentes so as to make our interview more enjoyable. They helped with the heat, too In the course of this very interesting interview, I found out that Chinito had been a member of a roller-skating crew when he was growing up on the Lower East Side in the late 70s-early 80s. They wore matching suits with their names stiched onto one leg and their zodiac signs on the other and went around skating and working on skate-dancing moves. He was also getting involved with the early New York deejaying scene, spinning records and scratching and all that. And at the same time, he was beginning his típico performance career, playing guira with King de la Rosa. When he had to go to a gig that was a little ways away, he would skate over, so sometimes he just left his skates on as he played. This developed into a whole shtick where during his guira solos he would break out with some roller stylings, rolling down into the splits and then seeming to pull himself back up by the neck of his shirt. Needless to say, the new guira style caused quite a stir when he took it on tour with him to the DR in 1981.
These days Chino keeps busy by producing recordings for merengue, reggaetón, and rock artists. He no longer has the matching jumpsuit seen on the cover of the LP he recorded with King when he was 16 and pulled out to show me, a black-and-tan polyester number that combined well with King’s afro and Pablo the bassist’s cubano-style cap. I asked Chino if he could still skate and he told me he took his skates out the other day just to see. But now, he found, he was mostly just afraid of falling down. I could totally sympathize what with my knee surgeries and subsequent lack of a dancing career. Man, I guess we’re all getting older
I continued reflecting on that theme over the remainder of the Fourth of July weekend. I spent three post-Presidente days at my sister’s house playing with my nephews, or
writing while they were otherwise occupied. At ages 6 and 2 ½, they never seem to tire. Even after a whole morning at the beach on the Croton River (which has the inexplicable name of Silver Lake), Aaron was unable to nap long enough for Heather and I to watch Transamerica. So we were unable to complete our Alternative Lifestyles Independence Weekend, which had begun so promisingly with a showing of Brokeback Mountain. Still, we had a successful Fourth of July BBQ at the neighbors. I brought moro de guandules and Heather tried to poison me with chicken disguised as fish. Then Aaron threw a tantrum when we had to leave, proving that the party had been a success.
I got back into the swing of things pretty quickly upon return to the Greenpoint attic where I hide out these days. It’s fun living with Tianna again - the last time we were roommates was in the year 2000 - although she has a crazy work schedule and social life that has cut into my sleep habits. (That may explain the quality of this blog entry more than anything.) Her room, which I now share, is the whole top floor of a three-story house, from which one can admire the shiny hardwood floors and beamed ceiling on the inside as well as a view of Manhattan, Empire State Building and all, out of the west-facing dormer window. There is also a stairway going up to a skylight that presumably opens onto the roof - though it appears to be stuck down with tar. More on that later. The only drawback is the downstairs area of the apartment, where the kitchen, living room, and bathroom are to be found and which we share with way too many aspiring indie rockers who drink too much. The trash-and-bottle situation gets completely out of control about every two days, while just about every morning the kitchen is a disaster area of crusty dishes and half-used cooking ingredients. So this area plays the cloud to the attic’s silver lining.
Greenpoint is a heavily Polish section of Brooklyn, now being invaded by hipsters. There seem to be few culture clashes between the two groups, although of course the hipsters haven’t yet invaded the Europa nightclub. I don’t think the syrupy Polish pop and Polish electronica suit their tastes. I shop at a Polish grocery sometimes but I can’t buy any of the Polish canned food products because I don’t know what they are. I do buy the Polish juice though, as it very conveniently has a picture on the box of the type of fruit you’ll find inside. All told, life is pretty good for me in Greenpoint.
Anyway, Tianna and I got out to enjoy some music provided by her friend Hannah one night during the week. She is a singer-songwriter who performs on her guitar and sometimes harmonium. Her voice is lovely and works well for her mellow tunes and picturesque lyrics, one of which says “I’d like to rip out your throat and plant a tree in it.” And it was sung in a place called Capone’s Bar, an interesting setting with an upper level where people sitting up above on a patio can look down upon cleavage, and a sunken lower seating area where those sitting below can look up people’s skirts. An interesting arrangement, to be sure. We did get free pizza.
Then it was back to business - I’d set up an interview with Arsenio de la Rosa, King’s brother whom I’d met the week before. This time around I had a much easier time finding the apartment and gaining admittance. One of Arsenio’s American-born, hip-hop-playing sons came down to let me in. Up in the apartment, we found King hanging out playing guitar, accompanied by the chirping of the dozen tiny, colorful birds kept in cages in the hallway. The History Channel was on the big-screen TV, sound off, and so grainy footage of battleships accompanied us throughout the interview. As Aresnio started playing during the Trujillo era, and actually met Petan (the dictator’s brother who ran the state radio and TV stations), I was able to learn a lot more about life and music during that time. I also learned a lot about how tipico got going in New York, since he’d moved here in 1963 - just after Trujillo died and some time before other tipico musicians got up here.
On Friday, I did not get the interview with Tano. Good thing something else happened on Saturday to distract me for a while: the first annual Main Squeeze Accordion Festival. A week ago, I’d called up my old friend Ernestidio, an accordionist and accordion tuner in Cypress Hills. He was happy to have heard from me. “Hey, you know, I’m playing at some kind of festival up in Manhattan, in Riverside Park, next Saturday. You should come down! Play a couple of tunes with us!” That same day but a few hours later, I checked my emails and found I’d received a couple inviting me to the same event - to introduce Ernestidio and his group. It turned out that while I was away, Bob Godfried, a fellow New York accordion nut, had been helping the organizers to get some Latino groups onto the program, and had remembered my old friend Ernestidio from a library program I’d organized several years back. He’d called him up and contracted him for the event, and then when I got back he and organizer Robin had invited me to come on over as well. So that worked out nicely.
The festival took place all afternoon and into the evening on the pier at 70th Street. At that point, Riverside Park is just a little strip of green located on a very steep hill in between and sort of underneath the West Side Highway. But the pier, which has been made over rather nicely with paving stones, railings, and streetlamps, was a very pleasant and breezy location for a music event. As I came out from under the highway and crossed the bike path, I encountered Ernestidio just walking back up the path to get the bass amp, and Cesar the tambora player drinking a beer with Junior the singer (usually a guira player, but promoted to lead singer for the occasion) at a table near the food booth. On the stage at the moment was a rock band fronted by a woman playing accordion while wearing flourescent pink fingerless gloves and copious amounts of eye makeup. I was sorry we’d missed some of the earlier act, which included an all-female accordion orchestra, an Irish group, and a norteño group with, oddly enough, a Chilean frontman. But we did get to hear a Balkan duo as we waited. Bob gave me some background: the accordionist was raised on Staten Island by Albanian parents, while the percussionist was part of the Bronx Macedonian gypsy community. The two got tired of being threatened with guns in classic Balkan fashion whenever they missed someone’s favorite tune, and thus stopped playing Macedonian weddings and started on the folk festivals instead.
They kept us entertained until it was time for Ernestidio and the boys (which included New York-born “El Escorpion” on guira and Monchy on bass) to take the stage, and me to translate for their sound check. But this task was finished before I knew it - literally. I was still waiting for an affirmative from the sound man when they just started in with Los Algodones. Ah well. I made my introductions later, and then took the opportunity to dance a few numbers - including a mangulina - with the two Dominicans present (both friends of the musicians). Many others were motivated to join in with their own moves, some of which resembled merengue and some of which did not. The latter were mostly performed by a guy in a Mark Twain mustache and puff of grey hair dressed in bright red trousers, yellow shirt, and herringbone jacket. Apparently, he goes to all the accordion events.
The festival crowd was really easy to please, they were already whipped up into an accordion-induced frenzy. Their reacion when I introduced the band was “WOO-HOO!!!” And then when Junior asked me to come up and ask the crowd if they were enjoying the music, they said “WOO-HOO!!!” I translated this for Junior: “They said they were! They said they were!!” And when Ernestidio asked me to come up to play, I told the audience they could be the judge as to whether I’d learned anything in all the time I spent in the Dominican Republic. When I finished my first tune, I asked their verdict. It was: “WOO-HOO!!!” All in all, a successful afternoon. We stayed long enough to hear a few tunes from the Cajun band that followed us and closed the show. Bob was on guitar and the accordionist was playing a beautiful instrument handmade in the bayou. He had the appropriate accent, as well. We liked the music, and the accent, but Ernestidio was pleased that more people had danced to his tunes.
Ernestidio’s driver kindly gave me a ride home, all the way to Greenpoint. I’d planned on going out again to hear Ernestidio play in Bushwick later that evening, but got distracted with other things and then it really seemed too late to have to catch a bus, then a train, then call the musicians to come look for me and walk me to the club from the creepy subway station, so I called it a night. Tomorrow would be another tipico day, after all.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Palos video
Palos music - Grupo Mello
I shot this video one very dark night at the Casa de Arte in Santiago, Dominican Republic. It is of my friends the Turbí brothers, heads of the group Mello de San Juan, performing palos music. They are originally from San Juan de la Maguana, in the Southwest, but now live in Santiago. The second part of the clip focuses on people dancing to the music.
Ah, fieldwork! The ups! The downs! The standing around looking at one's watch...
7/5/06
You know, trying to get interviews done in New York is really no different than trying to get interviews done in the DR. You think you’ve scheduled something, but it falls through, so you reschedule, and reschedule, and reschedule… and you can’t have any semblance of a social life because you’re planning around the interviews you thought you scheduled and rescheduled, and you even base your sleep schedule around these elusive musician-types, and they have no idea what kind of hell they are putting you through. Aaaaaghh!!!
In spite of all that, I actually did manage to get two done last week. First up was King de la Rosa, who I’d run into at Macoris Restaurant the week before. We’d agreed on a time (5 PM Monday) and a place (his apartment in the Bronx) but I figured it would be wise to give him a reminder call in the morning. So I dialed the number – and got a friendly message from Verizon telling me the number wasn’t in service. Great Well, I could always just go there and hope he remembered – I did have his address, and he had said he would be teaching accordion lessons all afternoon. If I came a bit early I should be able to catch him.
I did that, and found his place, in a big block of four apartment buildings near Yankee Stadium, without too much trouble. I even found his bizarre apartment number (E3X? who ever heard of such a thing??) amidst the hundreds of buttons on the intercom next to the gate. But I received no answer. I pondered my next move, and thought of calling some people who’d be likely to have King’s correct phone number. I tried Tano, who plays bass with him. No go, but he gave me the number of the guy who plays guira with him. He didn’t have it either. Then I tried Juan Almonte, the restauranteur. He didn’t have it but suggested Bolivar, the new owner of Macoris, would. But when I called over there, they informed me he wouldn’t be in for another three hours. Not too helpful for me waiting on a sidewalk in the Bronx. I decided to get a milkshake at a diner I’d passed and rethink the situation.
The only flavor of ice cream at the diner, the Argentine waitress told me, was walnut. This seemed odd, but what the heck, I decided to try the walnut milkshake. Not bad. A soccer game was on - my Dominican York neighbor at the counter and I discussed how we knew nothing about this game, and then I opened up my book on Paraguay, a country I then discussed with the waitress (soup=good, economy=bad, was her evaluation). Afterwards, I figured I’d give the apartment building one last try before calling it a day.
Back at the ranch, someone opened the outer gate for me. Go on in, they told me. Well, it wouldn’t do much good if King still weren’t at home, but I went in and wandered around the very, shall we say, “urban” ambience of the courtyard until a kid carrying a drycleaning bag over his shoulder walked past me, opening the door to King’s building. “Do you live here?” I asked him. He did. “Do you know King de la Rosa? E3X?” “Umm... hold on a second... wait right here...” he mumbled as he ran up the stairs, leaving me to admire a lobby that might have once been grand, with its mosaic floor, high ceilings, and big 1930s copper light fixture, but was now just dingy and littered. Soon a chubby girl in an oversize t-shirt came down and confirmed that King lived on the third floor and that I should go up and knock.
I did that - well, actually, I rang the push-button bell below the peephole instead, and an elderly woman came to the door to let me in. There was no living room to speak of, so she showed me to a bedroom where King had just finished giving the last accordion lesson of the day. He was glad to see me. “But why didn’t you call?”
Explanations out of the way, we went on to a very satisfactory interview, complete with demonstrations of various accordion techniques. All the walking around, waiting, calling, milkshake-drinking, and interviewing had made it late - it was already nine, and I’d thought I would have been home by then. Still, I couldn’t very well turn down King’s offer to introduce me to his brother Arsenio, who I’d also been wanting to interview. “Does he live near here?” “Yes, he does,” King said as we exited into the courtyard. He’d barely finished saying so before we entered the building directly across and walked up one flight, arriving at Arsenio’s place - conveniently located, indeed.
Arsenio has gone evangelical and no longer plays gigs, but the sense of showmanship hasn’t left him. He was happy to have an audience, and pulled out a full-size piano accordion, enormous compared with the button accordions I’m now used to from merengue tipico. He proceeded to work through an incredibly varied repertoire for the next forty-five minutes, playing everything from Italian music to paso dobles and tangos, finally a little vallenato and a merengue for good measure.
Clearly, when we finished it was even later, but now I was hungry, so I couldn’t turn down King’s offer of dinner. “There’s a place near hear with good American food. Let’s go there,” he suggested, and brought me to the same diner as before. It was an all-diner day. At least it was a successful one - both in terms of the interview and the tuna melt.
Next up was Tano, a bass player and one of the first tipico musicians to move to Brooklyn. He’s also the bass player on the famous album Juan Luis Guerra recorded with accordionist Francisco Ulloa (Fogaraté). He’d agreed to a Tuesday interview, but when I called him on Tuesday, he was still working on laying down some tracks in the recording studio, so we put it off til Wednesday. He even offered to pick me up at the train station in East New York Wednesday evening, so I wouldn’t have to walk around alone, and then we could head over to Macoris together as he’d be playing there with King at 11. But when Wednesday evening rolled around, he was nowhere to be found. Alejandro picked me up instead.
Back when we were an item he was just scraping by, but now he’s in this big popular band and raking in the dough, relatively speaking. His best friend Diogenes “El Original” is saxophonist for the same group. Alejandro took me by his place to say hi to Diogenes and hear some stuff they were working on recording at home. I found out that with his newfound wealth Diogenes has bought a house in Boston, where he lives with his wife and kids when he’s not performing in New York or abroad. Alejandro, on the other hand, has stayed in the same old apartment in East New York. However, he’s made some changes too: no more roommates (there used to be a whole bunch of them there in order to make the rent) and a whole ton of new recordings and computer equipment taking up the space where sofas and chairs used to be. It’s interesting how when North Americans become upwardly mobile, one of the first things they do is move to a “better neighborhood.” Dominicans, on the other hand, stay in the same place in order to keep the same neighbors and maintain social ties, instead working on fixing up their house in situ. This holds true both for New York Dominicans and those on the island, so that even in the crummiest areas one can see a few houses that have sporuted second floors, columns and balconies, and fresh paint jobs.
Anyways, among Alejandro’s new toys was a nice keyboard, so of course they wanted me to play something, and of course I couldn’t really play anything as I hadn’t even touched a piano in a year (traveling the world and piano-playing don’t go together too well, I’ve found). But they dug my salsa riffs even though they were sloppy. Diogenes then just had to learn the opening to Fruko’s “El Preso”before I could leave for Macoris. Back at Macoris, I caught up with King and scolded Tano, who apologized that the recording session was taking much longer than expected (figures). We postponed once again, this time to Friday. But I wasn’t in the proper humor to stay out jamming all night so I left after one set.
Guess what happened on Friday? That’s right- no Tano. Time to rethink this situation. On Saturday, I set up something new. First, brunch with Tianna. A very delicious one at Bonita in South Williamsburg, which included the rather bizarre combination of a guacamole appetizer, an apple pancake main course, and loads of both coffee and sangría (depressant in your right hand, stimulant in the left -prepared for any occasion!). Next, an interview with Ray “Chino” Diaz, percussionist and producer, at his apartment-studio in Bushwick.
–soon to be continued---
You know, trying to get interviews done in New York is really no different than trying to get interviews done in the DR. You think you’ve scheduled something, but it falls through, so you reschedule, and reschedule, and reschedule… and you can’t have any semblance of a social life because you’re planning around the interviews you thought you scheduled and rescheduled, and you even base your sleep schedule around these elusive musician-types, and they have no idea what kind of hell they are putting you through. Aaaaaghh!!!
In spite of all that, I actually did manage to get two done last week. First up was King de la Rosa, who I’d run into at Macoris Restaurant the week before. We’d agreed on a time (5 PM Monday) and a place (his apartment in the Bronx) but I figured it would be wise to give him a reminder call in the morning. So I dialed the number – and got a friendly message from Verizon telling me the number wasn’t in service. Great Well, I could always just go there and hope he remembered – I did have his address, and he had said he would be teaching accordion lessons all afternoon. If I came a bit early I should be able to catch him.
I did that, and found his place, in a big block of four apartment buildings near Yankee Stadium, without too much trouble. I even found his bizarre apartment number (E3X? who ever heard of such a thing??) amidst the hundreds of buttons on the intercom next to the gate. But I received no answer. I pondered my next move, and thought of calling some people who’d be likely to have King’s correct phone number. I tried Tano, who plays bass with him. No go, but he gave me the number of the guy who plays guira with him. He didn’t have it either. Then I tried Juan Almonte, the restauranteur. He didn’t have it but suggested Bolivar, the new owner of Macoris, would. But when I called over there, they informed me he wouldn’t be in for another three hours. Not too helpful for me waiting on a sidewalk in the Bronx. I decided to get a milkshake at a diner I’d passed and rethink the situation.
The only flavor of ice cream at the diner, the Argentine waitress told me, was walnut. This seemed odd, but what the heck, I decided to try the walnut milkshake. Not bad. A soccer game was on - my Dominican York neighbor at the counter and I discussed how we knew nothing about this game, and then I opened up my book on Paraguay, a country I then discussed with the waitress (soup=good, economy=bad, was her evaluation). Afterwards, I figured I’d give the apartment building one last try before calling it a day.
Back at the ranch, someone opened the outer gate for me. Go on in, they told me. Well, it wouldn’t do much good if King still weren’t at home, but I went in and wandered around the very, shall we say, “urban” ambience of the courtyard until a kid carrying a drycleaning bag over his shoulder walked past me, opening the door to King’s building. “Do you live here?” I asked him. He did. “Do you know King de la Rosa? E3X?” “Umm... hold on a second... wait right here...” he mumbled as he ran up the stairs, leaving me to admire a lobby that might have once been grand, with its mosaic floor, high ceilings, and big 1930s copper light fixture, but was now just dingy and littered. Soon a chubby girl in an oversize t-shirt came down and confirmed that King lived on the third floor and that I should go up and knock.
I did that - well, actually, I rang the push-button bell below the peephole instead, and an elderly woman came to the door to let me in. There was no living room to speak of, so she showed me to a bedroom where King had just finished giving the last accordion lesson of the day. He was glad to see me. “But why didn’t you call?”
Explanations out of the way, we went on to a very satisfactory interview, complete with demonstrations of various accordion techniques. All the walking around, waiting, calling, milkshake-drinking, and interviewing had made it late - it was already nine, and I’d thought I would have been home by then. Still, I couldn’t very well turn down King’s offer to introduce me to his brother Arsenio, who I’d also been wanting to interview. “Does he live near here?” “Yes, he does,” King said as we exited into the courtyard. He’d barely finished saying so before we entered the building directly across and walked up one flight, arriving at Arsenio’s place - conveniently located, indeed.
Arsenio has gone evangelical and no longer plays gigs, but the sense of showmanship hasn’t left him. He was happy to have an audience, and pulled out a full-size piano accordion, enormous compared with the button accordions I’m now used to from merengue tipico. He proceeded to work through an incredibly varied repertoire for the next forty-five minutes, playing everything from Italian music to paso dobles and tangos, finally a little vallenato and a merengue for good measure.
Clearly, when we finished it was even later, but now I was hungry, so I couldn’t turn down King’s offer of dinner. “There’s a place near hear with good American food. Let’s go there,” he suggested, and brought me to the same diner as before. It was an all-diner day. At least it was a successful one - both in terms of the interview and the tuna melt.
Next up was Tano, a bass player and one of the first tipico musicians to move to Brooklyn. He’s also the bass player on the famous album Juan Luis Guerra recorded with accordionist Francisco Ulloa (Fogaraté). He’d agreed to a Tuesday interview, but when I called him on Tuesday, he was still working on laying down some tracks in the recording studio, so we put it off til Wednesday. He even offered to pick me up at the train station in East New York Wednesday evening, so I wouldn’t have to walk around alone, and then we could head over to Macoris together as he’d be playing there with King at 11. But when Wednesday evening rolled around, he was nowhere to be found. Alejandro picked me up instead.
Back when we were an item he was just scraping by, but now he’s in this big popular band and raking in the dough, relatively speaking. His best friend Diogenes “El Original” is saxophonist for the same group. Alejandro took me by his place to say hi to Diogenes and hear some stuff they were working on recording at home. I found out that with his newfound wealth Diogenes has bought a house in Boston, where he lives with his wife and kids when he’s not performing in New York or abroad. Alejandro, on the other hand, has stayed in the same old apartment in East New York. However, he’s made some changes too: no more roommates (there used to be a whole bunch of them there in order to make the rent) and a whole ton of new recordings and computer equipment taking up the space where sofas and chairs used to be. It’s interesting how when North Americans become upwardly mobile, one of the first things they do is move to a “better neighborhood.” Dominicans, on the other hand, stay in the same place in order to keep the same neighbors and maintain social ties, instead working on fixing up their house in situ. This holds true both for New York Dominicans and those on the island, so that even in the crummiest areas one can see a few houses that have sporuted second floors, columns and balconies, and fresh paint jobs.
Anyways, among Alejandro’s new toys was a nice keyboard, so of course they wanted me to play something, and of course I couldn’t really play anything as I hadn’t even touched a piano in a year (traveling the world and piano-playing don’t go together too well, I’ve found). But they dug my salsa riffs even though they were sloppy. Diogenes then just had to learn the opening to Fruko’s “El Preso”before I could leave for Macoris. Back at Macoris, I caught up with King and scolded Tano, who apologized that the recording session was taking much longer than expected (figures). We postponed once again, this time to Friday. But I wasn’t in the proper humor to stay out jamming all night so I left after one set.
Guess what happened on Friday? That’s right- no Tano. Time to rethink this situation. On Saturday, I set up something new. First, brunch with Tianna. A very delicious one at Bonita in South Williamsburg, which included the rather bizarre combination of a guacamole appetizer, an apple pancake main course, and loads of both coffee and sangría (depressant in your right hand, stimulant in the left -prepared for any occasion!). Next, an interview with Ray “Chino” Diaz, percussionist and producer, at his apartment-studio in Bushwick.
–soon to be continued---
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Syd as accordiongirl at Main Squeeze Accordion Festival
A friend, Bob Godfried, snapped a picture of me playing a couple merengues with friends at the Main Squeeze Accordion Festival yesterday. It took place on the pier at W. 70th St. in Manhattan. Besides merengue tipico, there was also Cajun, Balkan, Irish, Norteno, and rock music!
Friday, July 07, 2006
El Prodigio and Rafaelito Mirabal
At the closing ceremony for the Feria Regional del Libro in Santiago, Dominican Republic in September 2005, accordionist El Prodigio gave this surprise performance. He joined jazz pianist Rafaelito Mirabal to play Periblues (a tune Miarbal composed and El Prodigio recorded on his 2005 album, Pambiche Meets Jazz) - the first time anyone's tried to combine jazz with merengue tipico. I've excerpted some exciting moments here: President Leonel Fernandez and his wife arriving, El Prodigio's solo, Frandy Sax's solo, and the final run through the tune.
Ga-ga video
Ga-ga
A ga-g music and dance group dedicated to San Miguel plays in a batey (sugar cane settlement) near Barahona in the Southwestern DR. This clip shows a few moments when the dancers were performing with machetes. Filmed by Sydney Hutchinson in April 2006, d
This video was originally shared on blip.tv by salsasydney with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Shantologists meet ethnomusicologist
6/23/06
OK, ok, I know I advertised this blog as my adventures in the Dominican Republic, and now I’m in New York, but I’m just going to keep writing anyway and YOU CAN’T STOP ME. At any rate, New York is just another Caribbean island, isn’t it?
It certainly felt that way on Wednesday night, when I went to search out my old New York típico friends, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year. Wednesday night is the big night for hard core típico fans and musicians, who all head over to Macoris restaurant in East New York for a beer, to see who’s playing, and trade off instruments as the night wears on. In the old days when I used to go faithfully, things got started early – nine at the latest. I didn’t really want to be wandering around East New York by myself after dark, and I wanted to talk to the owner, Juan Almonte, anyway, so I hopped on the L train and arrived about 8 o’clock.
As I was walking up to the restaurant I noticed it had a new awning – blue instead of the old red – and that it said “El Nuevo Macoris.” I was expecting the old Macoris, so I was surprised when I walked in and saw new tables and chairs and a new flat-screen TV in place of the old acrylic painting of Tatico and Siano. Juan was nowhere in sight, so I asked one of the girls behind the counter when he’d be arriving. “Juan doesn’t own this place anymore,” she told me. I was in shock. Juan had been the owner of Macoris for over 15 years, and it was because of him that it was such a típico kind of place. I leave for a year and this is what happens? How could everything change so fast, after so many years of stability?
She told me he now owned a restaurant called El Triangulo on Rockaway Blvd, just over the Queens border, and gave me his number. She also told me that my friend King de la Rosa was playing tonight, but not until after 11! Not relishing the idea of sitting around waiting for three hours, I gave Juan a call. He was surprised to hear from me and told me to hop on the bus down Jamaica Avenue. When I got to 75th street I was to give him a call. I did this, although I went on to 77th street so I could enquire when music would be happening at the Rinconcito de Nagua, another típico joint. Juan then picked me up as planned and took me to El Triangulo.
The new restaurant was very nice and a pleasant place to hang out. Juan, always a good host, gave me a huge dinner of fish, rice, and beans, and a beer for good measure. He had a plan: he’d sent friends to dig up a tambora, a güira, and an accordion so I could play a few merengues a trio with them. As soon as I finished we did this, a full set of eight merengues with Juan on tambora and various friends on güira and vocals. They were surprised and happy to see how much I’d learned with Rafaelito over the last nine months. But soon the accordion’s owner had to leave, Juan had to get back to work, and I had to get to Macoris. Promising to call me the next time music was planned, Juan drove me back in time to hear King in the middle of his first set.
I walked in to find many surprised faces of friends I hadn’t seen in ages. There was King, of course, who made me promise to stay long enough to play a few tunes here; Tano on bass; Cesar on tambora; Ray “Chino” Diaz, the percussionist and music producer, on a stool in the corner; and guitarist Edilio Paredes at a table in front of the band. And wait a second – what was that whole table of white guys doing here? It had to be the doing of my friend Greg, the only other gringo típico fan besides myself, and indeed it was. I had stumbled into his bachelor’s party, as he was getting married in ten days and wanted to use this as an excuse to fulfill his dream of a gringo típico night at Macoris. That was a surprise. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever attended a bacherlor’s party before.
All this was very lucky for me. I found three people I’d wanted to interview (King, Tano, and Ray) all in one place and was able to set up the interviews right then and there. I got in touch with Greg, who I’d also wanted to see. Cesar offered me more tambora lessons, King offered me accordion lessons, and Tano offered to rehearse with me. And of course, I got more free beer. So it was a profitable night, if a long one – I didn’t even get to play my tunes (three of them) until about 2 AM. And after me, Edilio took the stage for a couple of tunes (although he’s principally a guitarist, he learned to play accordion from King and now does both with his group Super Uba).
Also lucky was that I could get a ride home with Greg and the boys instead of paying a car service. About 3 AM or so, I stumbled into my friend Tianna’s place in Greenpoint, where I’m staying for about a month, and promptly sliced off the edge of my fingertip, I think on the razor in my cosmetics bag. Dripping blood, I searched for something to wrap around it. I went in the bathroom and found there was no toilet paper. I went in the kitchen and found no paper towels. I went back in the bathroom to look for band aids – there weren’t any. Finally I realized a tampon was my only option. Hey, they’re absorbent, aren’t they? And then I laughed and laughed as I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on my pajamas, all with a tampon stuck to my finger.
Postscript to that story: I thought I’d stopped the bleeding enough to go to sleep, so I found a Kleenex in my purse to wrap around it and did so. I woke up at 8 AM needing to go to the bathroom, and as I went downstairs I noticed my finger was STILL bleeding – five hours later. I felt a bit lightheaded, and there were still no bandaids. I fell back into bed feeling I would pass out. What does one do to stop bleeding, I wondered, trying to remember my ancient Red Cross training. A tourniquet! Of course! But what would I use? The elastic hairband sitting on the living room table should do the job, I thought, and so I wrapped it around my finger and hoped for the best as I drifted off to sleep again. When I again awoke a couple hours later I saw the trick had worked, although the finger was throbbing a bit. I was pretty proud of my inventive first aid, though I wondered how my accordion playing might be affected.
Luckily, on Friday, when my accordion skills were next called on I found I could play just fine even with my newly-purchased band aid. For a change from my usual Dominican fare, my friend and now roommate Tianna had invited me to play sea shanties with her and some friends on a boat on Saturday. She promised it would be one of the wackier gigs I’d likely ever play, and really, who can resist sea shanties, so I agreed to join the impromptu band formed of Tianna and her friends Hannah, Zeke, and Nathan. Nathan works at the Lomax archives and had done a fine job of digging up old shanties for us to sing.
The accordion would definitely add the right piratey touch to the ensemble, but I worried I wouldn’t find anything I could play with them because my accordion is in B-flat/E-flat, keys that combine well with the sax for típico musicians but which I didn’t think would be much used in the shanty repertoire. As it turned out, Hannah happened to have an ancient Hohner acquired at a flea market and never played, in the much more useful keys (shantily-speaking) of G and C. The only problem was that it had no shoulder straps, nor even a place to attach them, and the thumb strap was broken. The only way to play it was over the knee, fixed in place with one’s chin. This posture couldn’t be comfortable for very long. Thank goodness I hit on the answer: duct tape. This addition much improved the thumb strap and enabled me to muddle through the whole rehearsal without much incident, making it up as I went along and thoroughly enjoying singing harmony in hearty sailor style.
That was the only rehearsal we all got together, though, and the only time I was able to hear the songs before our big debut on Saturday. In Hannah’s van we - five musicians, two friends, a dog, and ten instruments – journeyed to the Gowanus canal, where we found the boat tied up at the very dead end of First Street. This very nonseaworthy ship (it must be moved each day by the dozen-volunteers-hauling-on-a-rope method) had been donated to Tianna and friends, and they thus created the Empty Vessel Project to fix it up and make it useful for musical events of all types. It’s come a long way but still sports a garbage bag ceiling, random holes and pits of varying danger levels, and a toilet made of a bucket that must be manually emptied after each event (a task all EV members fear).
The Gowanus, a stagnant morass of toxic chemicals, isn’t the most scenic spot on earth, but it was definitely novel to be on a boat in the middle of Brooklyn. There was a gangplank to walk up, citronella candles aplenty, and a generator powering the strings of fairy lights that lit the place. A bar was being set up in one corner and on the other end a DJ with a broken leg was setting up his equipment on an ironing board and an old bathtub with a plank on top. With his clomping cast he sounded much more pirate-like than the rest of us, although we had at least made an attempt at a sailor look in navy blue and white. The other workers were dressed in lace, corsets, fishnet tights, polka-dotted hairnets, fishtails, and all other manner of outlandish attire. I figured they were a bunch of Goths, and they might be, but I later found out from one of them that they’d all been in Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade that afternoon. That would also explain it.
I quickly realized the boat setting offered all kinds of opportunities for me to make puns: I hoped we wouldn’t “rock the boat” with our rockin’ sea shanties; I didn’t want to “go overboard” with them, etc. I could have gone all night but luckily for my co-conversants I had to get ready to play by first having a beer and then setting up the instruments and lyric sheets. We had been afraid someone or some instrument might pitch overboard, or that we might sink altogether, but in fact something far worse than this happened: as Zeke helped the crew extract speakers from crates and set them up, he stepped backwards right into Nathan’s guitar with a sickening crack. Nathan, who was out searching for food with Hannah at the moment, was very gracious about the accident but it did put a bit of a damper on our moods.
The gig itself went fairly well considering the amount of rehearsal time we’d had. There was only one song that I’d completely forgotton, and the rest came back easily enough, as they had very catchy tunes and fun-to-sing choruses: Heave away! HEY! Haul away! HEY! At any rate, this crowd didn’t much care that we botched some of them up. It was the spirit of the thing that counted, and we injected the needed saltiness into the festivities.
OK, ok, I know I advertised this blog as my adventures in the Dominican Republic, and now I’m in New York, but I’m just going to keep writing anyway and YOU CAN’T STOP ME. At any rate, New York is just another Caribbean island, isn’t it?
It certainly felt that way on Wednesday night, when I went to search out my old New York típico friends, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year. Wednesday night is the big night for hard core típico fans and musicians, who all head over to Macoris restaurant in East New York for a beer, to see who’s playing, and trade off instruments as the night wears on. In the old days when I used to go faithfully, things got started early – nine at the latest. I didn’t really want to be wandering around East New York by myself after dark, and I wanted to talk to the owner, Juan Almonte, anyway, so I hopped on the L train and arrived about 8 o’clock.
As I was walking up to the restaurant I noticed it had a new awning – blue instead of the old red – and that it said “El Nuevo Macoris.” I was expecting the old Macoris, so I was surprised when I walked in and saw new tables and chairs and a new flat-screen TV in place of the old acrylic painting of Tatico and Siano. Juan was nowhere in sight, so I asked one of the girls behind the counter when he’d be arriving. “Juan doesn’t own this place anymore,” she told me. I was in shock. Juan had been the owner of Macoris for over 15 years, and it was because of him that it was such a típico kind of place. I leave for a year and this is what happens? How could everything change so fast, after so many years of stability?
She told me he now owned a restaurant called El Triangulo on Rockaway Blvd, just over the Queens border, and gave me his number. She also told me that my friend King de la Rosa was playing tonight, but not until after 11! Not relishing the idea of sitting around waiting for three hours, I gave Juan a call. He was surprised to hear from me and told me to hop on the bus down Jamaica Avenue. When I got to 75th street I was to give him a call. I did this, although I went on to 77th street so I could enquire when music would be happening at the Rinconcito de Nagua, another típico joint. Juan then picked me up as planned and took me to El Triangulo.
The new restaurant was very nice and a pleasant place to hang out. Juan, always a good host, gave me a huge dinner of fish, rice, and beans, and a beer for good measure. He had a plan: he’d sent friends to dig up a tambora, a güira, and an accordion so I could play a few merengues a trio with them. As soon as I finished we did this, a full set of eight merengues with Juan on tambora and various friends on güira and vocals. They were surprised and happy to see how much I’d learned with Rafaelito over the last nine months. But soon the accordion’s owner had to leave, Juan had to get back to work, and I had to get to Macoris. Promising to call me the next time music was planned, Juan drove me back in time to hear King in the middle of his first set.
I walked in to find many surprised faces of friends I hadn’t seen in ages. There was King, of course, who made me promise to stay long enough to play a few tunes here; Tano on bass; Cesar on tambora; Ray “Chino” Diaz, the percussionist and music producer, on a stool in the corner; and guitarist Edilio Paredes at a table in front of the band. And wait a second – what was that whole table of white guys doing here? It had to be the doing of my friend Greg, the only other gringo típico fan besides myself, and indeed it was. I had stumbled into his bachelor’s party, as he was getting married in ten days and wanted to use this as an excuse to fulfill his dream of a gringo típico night at Macoris. That was a surprise. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever attended a bacherlor’s party before.
All this was very lucky for me. I found three people I’d wanted to interview (King, Tano, and Ray) all in one place and was able to set up the interviews right then and there. I got in touch with Greg, who I’d also wanted to see. Cesar offered me more tambora lessons, King offered me accordion lessons, and Tano offered to rehearse with me. And of course, I got more free beer. So it was a profitable night, if a long one – I didn’t even get to play my tunes (three of them) until about 2 AM. And after me, Edilio took the stage for a couple of tunes (although he’s principally a guitarist, he learned to play accordion from King and now does both with his group Super Uba).
Also lucky was that I could get a ride home with Greg and the boys instead of paying a car service. About 3 AM or so, I stumbled into my friend Tianna’s place in Greenpoint, where I’m staying for about a month, and promptly sliced off the edge of my fingertip, I think on the razor in my cosmetics bag. Dripping blood, I searched for something to wrap around it. I went in the bathroom and found there was no toilet paper. I went in the kitchen and found no paper towels. I went back in the bathroom to look for band aids – there weren’t any. Finally I realized a tampon was my only option. Hey, they’re absorbent, aren’t they? And then I laughed and laughed as I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on my pajamas, all with a tampon stuck to my finger.
Postscript to that story: I thought I’d stopped the bleeding enough to go to sleep, so I found a Kleenex in my purse to wrap around it and did so. I woke up at 8 AM needing to go to the bathroom, and as I went downstairs I noticed my finger was STILL bleeding – five hours later. I felt a bit lightheaded, and there were still no bandaids. I fell back into bed feeling I would pass out. What does one do to stop bleeding, I wondered, trying to remember my ancient Red Cross training. A tourniquet! Of course! But what would I use? The elastic hairband sitting on the living room table should do the job, I thought, and so I wrapped it around my finger and hoped for the best as I drifted off to sleep again. When I again awoke a couple hours later I saw the trick had worked, although the finger was throbbing a bit. I was pretty proud of my inventive first aid, though I wondered how my accordion playing might be affected.
Luckily, on Friday, when my accordion skills were next called on I found I could play just fine even with my newly-purchased band aid. For a change from my usual Dominican fare, my friend and now roommate Tianna had invited me to play sea shanties with her and some friends on a boat on Saturday. She promised it would be one of the wackier gigs I’d likely ever play, and really, who can resist sea shanties, so I agreed to join the impromptu band formed of Tianna and her friends Hannah, Zeke, and Nathan. Nathan works at the Lomax archives and had done a fine job of digging up old shanties for us to sing.
The accordion would definitely add the right piratey touch to the ensemble, but I worried I wouldn’t find anything I could play with them because my accordion is in B-flat/E-flat, keys that combine well with the sax for típico musicians but which I didn’t think would be much used in the shanty repertoire. As it turned out, Hannah happened to have an ancient Hohner acquired at a flea market and never played, in the much more useful keys (shantily-speaking) of G and C. The only problem was that it had no shoulder straps, nor even a place to attach them, and the thumb strap was broken. The only way to play it was over the knee, fixed in place with one’s chin. This posture couldn’t be comfortable for very long. Thank goodness I hit on the answer: duct tape. This addition much improved the thumb strap and enabled me to muddle through the whole rehearsal without much incident, making it up as I went along and thoroughly enjoying singing harmony in hearty sailor style.
That was the only rehearsal we all got together, though, and the only time I was able to hear the songs before our big debut on Saturday. In Hannah’s van we - five musicians, two friends, a dog, and ten instruments – journeyed to the Gowanus canal, where we found the boat tied up at the very dead end of First Street. This very nonseaworthy ship (it must be moved each day by the dozen-volunteers-hauling-on-a-rope method) had been donated to Tianna and friends, and they thus created the Empty Vessel Project to fix it up and make it useful for musical events of all types. It’s come a long way but still sports a garbage bag ceiling, random holes and pits of varying danger levels, and a toilet made of a bucket that must be manually emptied after each event (a task all EV members fear).
The Gowanus, a stagnant morass of toxic chemicals, isn’t the most scenic spot on earth, but it was definitely novel to be on a boat in the middle of Brooklyn. There was a gangplank to walk up, citronella candles aplenty, and a generator powering the strings of fairy lights that lit the place. A bar was being set up in one corner and on the other end a DJ with a broken leg was setting up his equipment on an ironing board and an old bathtub with a plank on top. With his clomping cast he sounded much more pirate-like than the rest of us, although we had at least made an attempt at a sailor look in navy blue and white. The other workers were dressed in lace, corsets, fishnet tights, polka-dotted hairnets, fishtails, and all other manner of outlandish attire. I figured they were a bunch of Goths, and they might be, but I later found out from one of them that they’d all been in Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade that afternoon. That would also explain it.
I quickly realized the boat setting offered all kinds of opportunities for me to make puns: I hoped we wouldn’t “rock the boat” with our rockin’ sea shanties; I didn’t want to “go overboard” with them, etc. I could have gone all night but luckily for my co-conversants I had to get ready to play by first having a beer and then setting up the instruments and lyric sheets. We had been afraid someone or some instrument might pitch overboard, or that we might sink altogether, but in fact something far worse than this happened: as Zeke helped the crew extract speakers from crates and set them up, he stepped backwards right into Nathan’s guitar with a sickening crack. Nathan, who was out searching for food with Hannah at the moment, was very gracious about the accident but it did put a bit of a damper on our moods.
The gig itself went fairly well considering the amount of rehearsal time we’d had. There was only one song that I’d completely forgotton, and the rest came back easily enough, as they had very catchy tunes and fun-to-sing choruses: Heave away! HEY! Haul away! HEY! At any rate, this crowd didn’t much care that we botched some of them up. It was the spirit of the thing that counted, and we injected the needed saltiness into the festivities.
King de la Rosa and Edilio Paredes
King, one of the great accordionists, is joined by Edilio, a great guitarist and singer, on a Wednesday night at Macoris Restaurant in East New York. Tano is on bass (he was the bass player on the acclaimed Juan Luis Guerra CD, Fogarate). But who's that on the TV?
Bachelor party
I accidentally ran into my friend Greg's bachelor party and we snapped this picture, very appropriately next to posters of Aguakate, who will play at Greg's wedding.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Gaspar and Tatico
Gaspar Rodriguez, host of Arriba el Merengue TV show, poses with a portrait of his friend Tatico at home in Gurabo.
Santiago to New York
6/11 - 6/15/06
Last Friday, the tables were turned on me. My friend Juan Miguel wanted to write a newspaper article about me and my research, so instead of me doing the interview I had to be interviewed myself. He’d give it a bit more glamour by including not only my teacher Rafaelito but also the big star El Prodigio in the story and photos. So at 10 AM, I was all ready for the photo session at the Centro Leon with a new outfit and manicure. A bit later, El Prodigio and his manager Yordy showed up, but unfortunately Rafaelito was sick and unable to come. Nonetheless, we all had a good time catching up as I hadn’t spoken with El Prodigio in a number of months. He invited me to play at his show on Sunday and we also agreed to meet up during his tour of New York in August to discuss some ideas for projects we had. He’s very interested in jazz and jazz-merengue fusions, so I thought I could introduce him to some people that might give him some new ideas.
Afterwards, I’d arranged with soundman Ricoche to go with him to meet businessman/típico patron Arnulfo Gutierrez, but when I arrived at La Super Regional, he’d already left. So that was off, but I was able to finally schedule an interview with Che, my favorite bass player, for 11 PM that night. He currently plays with Geovanny Polanco and I had to go to his show at the Tipico Monte Bar anyway, having promised Geovanny the day before. I did my best to get in a nap before the show, since at the TMB they always start so late, but it wasn’t good enough – I still felt exhausted and a bit grumpy when I finally met with Che that night. Still, it was an interesting interview, though we had to conduct it somewhat uncomfortably in the parking lot in one of the singer’s cars. Afterwards, I went in and took a table stage right with Che’s wife. The place was completely packed with young people. I thoroughly enjoyed the first set, as I hadn’t seen Geovanny play since his new CD had come out and thus was able to hear some tunes that were new to me. In the middle, he sent a saludo or greeting to me, “la musicologa.” The rest of the audience looked around curiously, doubtlessly thinking he was referring to some new típico star. The first set ended at 1:30 AM. When Geovanny came off the stage, he told me to prepare myself to play with them during the next set. But there was little chance I would still be awake and mobile enough to play at 3 AM so I gave it a miss. I had loads to do the next day, and a 5 AM bedtime wouldn’t help things any!
I’d mostly planned the next day to be a day of farewells and visiting people I hadn’t seen in sometime. First I got together with my carnival friends, stopping by Tonito’s house, then moving on to Betania’s where Jose Reyes came to meet us. We discussed our costume plans for next year, and Jose made some suggestions. We could save money by reusing the same mask, just repainting it and decorating differently. He liked the design and though we should keep using it so it would become a recognizable mark of Los Confraternos. Our mask combines the two main traditional types, joyero and pepinero, by having both smooth and spiky sections on the horns, and combining the wide beak of one with the upturned snout of the other. And I was assigned the task of investigating fabric selections. They hoped I would be able to find fabrics in the US that no other group would have, and that might turn out to be cheaper as well due to a monopoly in fabric sales in Santiago.
After that I realized it was already 5:30 and I’d been due to make an appearance at Denio’s house for a farewell-to-palos dinner “after five,” so I’d better hurry on over there. As I parked on the curb under the tree at the head of the walkway leading to his house, Denio and a few others were there to meet me, anxiously awaiting my arrival (as an American, I’d been expected to arrive closer to “on time”). Rum and beer were also awaiting me, and soon the party was going strong with palos and son in rotation on the stereo as the rest of the group arrived, including even Monchy and Papo, who hadn’t been to rehearsals since I’d started. Denio and the woman who helps with his kids were preparing yuca and stewed meat, along with some cooked vegetables and cheese for me, the lone vegetarian. They had just gotten food on the table when the power went out. Boy, was it dark! Soon candles appeared for us to eat by, and I chatted with Papo about music, universities, and New York: he’d spent most of his life there, but was now teaching languages at UTESA, a technical university in Santiago. He explained that to teach at one of the bigger, better-known schools like UASD, one had to have political connections, which he didn’t. As we talked it started raining, which sort of ruined our plans for a backyard palos rehearsal, so the guys brought the drums in instead. We played and drank, drank and played until after 11 – my last chance to practice until 2007! - when we figured we should both let the neighbors sleep and get some sleep ourselves. I had a record three performances scheduled for the next day, so I needed the rest.
I started the day by practicing. I needed at least six good songs for the gigs I was to play, and I had to choose them carefully, as I didn’t know who was likely to know the arrangements I would play. I also wanted to try out some merengues I’d never performed before, but wasn’t sure I trusted anyone but Rafaelito’s musicians to accompany me in those uncertain moments. I had planned to go over and rehearse the new tunes with Chiqui, but when I called he was already leaving for his own gig. Then I tried Rafaelito, but he was also unavailable. This was because El Ciego’s father had died just that morning and he had to attend the burial, unusually scheduled for that same day. For me, this meant not only that I would be unable to rehearse my new tunes but that I was now down to only two gigs, as one of the three had been an invitation by El Ciego to play with him at Rancho Merengue.
I prepared as best I could for performing with El Prodigio and then headed out to Champion’s Palace, a place out past Rancho Merengue and La Tinaja on the highway to Navarrete, which was where El Prodigio had told me he’d be playing at 5. But as I neared the Palace, I realized that was wrong, as the sign stated Nicol Pena was playing there today. Luckily, another sign appeared to point the way – El Prodigio was actually at Andy Ranch.
As I arrived there it began to rain: not a good sign for a gig at this outdoor, swimming- pool-oriented Rancho. I thought the place would empty out, but luckily it was only a drizzle and was over fairly quickly. The flip side was that the sweltering, humid heat returned just as quickly, making me regret my elbow-length sleeves. I sat with some people I didn’t know back behind the stage, the tamborero’s wife and friends, and ordered a Coke that it took 40 minutes for me to receive. Then I had to wait another half hour to get my change. At least El Prodigio was happy to see me, even though I scolded him for telling me the wrong place. Between sets, he introduced me to some friends who bought us a beer, but we didn’t have time to drink it before it was time for the second set. Halfway through this one, I took the stage to the surprise of all (or at least those who hadn’t seen me play before). I played La Cartera Vacia while El Prodigio sang, and then he asked me to call a second song. I selected El Puente Seco, but he said his saxophonist didn’t know it, being really a jazz musician rather than típico, so I went with El Cuento Comparon instead. Although the saxophonist didn’t know the mambos I played, he picked them up quickly. One man in the audience was so incredulous that I was playing, he came up on stage and put his ear right against the accordion. After listening for a minute, he stood up and nodded, indicating to the audience that it was no trick.
After we finished the place cleared out pretty quick, and I headed down the street to La Tinaja. I thought I would be late, arriving at 8, but they’d only just started. I greeted the emcee who has sung with me on several occasions but whose name I can never remember and entered the club, where I found Raul, Rafaelito’s son, seated in front of the stage. I took a seat beside him and listened to the first set, during which my hunger grew, so afterwards I went out to the roadhouse in front to see what they had to offer. The emcee accompanied me as I ordered rice, white beans, green salad, and a piece of fried cheese. After a while Rafaelito and the other musicians came in too, and we all ate enormous purple grapes together, dicussing (for some reason) asteroids and mass extinctions until it was time to begin the second set. When we came back, I found that two girls –friends of the Roman family- who had been at Andy Ranch had showed up here, too, following me from show to show. When my turn came I decided to risk it and try out one of my new numbers, El Tiguerito, even though I hadn’t ever played it with anyone else. With my friend the emcee singing, it came out quite well, and I followed it up with El Puente Seco, since I hadn’t been able to do that one at the previous gig. These went off so well that the sound man Cigua, so called because he is tiny like the Cigua bird, told me someone had said to him, “she plays like a man!” High praise indeed in tipico world.
I was pretty tired after all that excitement, but I still had one more stop to make. Otherwise, I didn’t know if I’d have time to say my goodbyes to John Taveras and my other friends among the staff at Rancho Merengue. So I hurried across the street, where I said goodbye to William, the emcee, Chimon güira, and several others. I made plans with Vilo to pick up the tambora I’d ordered, now nearly completed, on Tuesday. And finally John showed up as I waited in the drizzle outside, sad to hear I was leaving so soon. Like everyone else I’ve told I’m leaving he said, “but you’re coming right back, right?” “Well – next year,” I explained. “What?!? How can you leave for so long??” “Well, I am from there, not here,” I reminded him.” “No, you belong to us now,” he said, echoing the same sentiment I’d now heard dozens of times.
Monday was a day mostly for running errands. But I did work in one last dominoes game at Chiqui’s, and then Chiqui accompanied me to say my farewells to El Buty, the güira maker. But neither of them was satisfied with this goodbye, so they both agreed to come to my place to help me with my final packing on Thursday. I played with Buty’s cotorra, a smallish green parrot, friendly but not yet able to talk at only 6 months of age, until I realized I was about to be late for my last accordion lesson. There, I learned Las Indias de Bani at Manuary’s request. I’ll play it for him when I come back next year.
On Tuesday I’d scheduled a meeting with a different Chiqui, this one a cultural specialist at the Centro Leon, who had agreed to help me with my socioeconomic map of Santiago. While there, I planned to say my goodbyes to my friends there. After Chiqui gave me the data I needed, and Camilo presented me with a book of his poetry, I had a meeting with director Rafael Emilio where I gave him a give of a piece of Indian pottery from Arizona and filled him in on my accomplishments in the DR, and he in exchange presented me with a nice coffee-table book of photography by a Dominican artist of whom I’m a fan. Oddly enough, he also photographs Arizona scenery. Then I went back to see the friendly faces in the tabacalera (tobacco-rolling house) and purchase a doll of a tobacco worker in the middle of rolling a cigar. I picked mine mostly for his outfit: orange shirt, floral tie, and blue plaid pants. Stylish. But after lunch, where I had a final chat with my friends in the cafeteria, I had to make a quick split in order to get the rest of my scheduled activites done.
First, the tambora. Vilo had given me vague directions to his house in an unmapped development just behind La Tinaja: “Turn right at the road before the bridge. Then ask someone where I live.” This actually worked just fine, although I missed the turn the first time around and had to double back. On the predictable horrible road, I stopped at a group of dominoes-players to ask directions, and it turned out I new one of the women there, a friend of the Roman’s. They pointed me further down the road, and indicated I should turn right before the school. When I saw the school I asked again and easily found the house. Vilo was on the phone, so I waited on the porch, where a light breeze helped me shed some of the pounds of sweat I was wearing as a consequence of the long drive in the hot sun. When he got off, he showed me my lovely tambora, a Syd-sized black one at a special Syd price, as well as some other models he was working on. We discussed how to get a goat skin (from a goat butcher down the street), how much to pay (300 pesos), how many tamboras one can get from a single goat (not even one, since each side requires two coverings), and how to tell the right-hand side from the left-hand side (the right hand side should play the male goat, and you can tell because the male goat has a black stripe down its back, which will then be down the middle of the tambora head).
I couldn’t dally too long, though, as at 5 I had arranged to interview Francisco Ulloa at long last. I’d been told he wasn’t playing much anymore because he had gone evangelical. I found that he is still playing, not only at his Sunday gig at Rancho Merengue but in other towns as well, but that he is also an evangelical Christian. Nonetheless, I enjoyed talking with him about his status as “the ambassador of merengue típico,” and his collaborations with Juan Luis Guerra and Felle Vega. But again, I couldn’t stay long as I had yet another appointment afterwards: this time with Arriba el Merengue host Gaspar Rodriguez and friend Bismar, who had offered to help me make copies of some historic típico footage Gaspar had on video. But as it turned out Bismar was called upon to work that evening, thereby foiling our plans. I decided to stop by Gaspar’s anyway, just to say goodbye.
He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I waited on the balcony with their maid/nanny drinking a glass of pear juice. When Gaspar and his wife finally showed up I was nearly falling asleep, but roused myself enough to snap some photos of the portrait of Tatico that hangs on Gaspar’s wall. Then they invited me to stay for dinner. To pass the time, the maid brought me beer and Gaspar brought me piles of photos and videos to watch. He had some amazing 1960s pictures of El Ciego and of Tatico. When I turned them over I found they were shot by Lalan, the merenguero and newspaperman that figures in the famous merengue “La Balacera” that Tatico composed about a memorable night the two of them spent in jail together. On video, we watched Nico Lora, Guandulito, El Negrito Figueroa (accompanied by a drunken dancer I found hysterically funny, and whom they told me was named Joel, a fanatical follower of the late accordionist), and Siano Arias (during this one, shot in a New York [?] apartment, the other late accordionist Diogenes Jimenez could be observed asleep on a chair). It was amazing to be able to watch these ghosts from the past I’d heard about but never seen, and I’m hoping to obtain copies soon. Anyway, it was all so entertaining I ended up staying past 11 PM without realizing it!
Wednesday morning being mostly free, I decided to take care of a few things with my car and thereby say goodbye to my mechanic, El Negro, who had taken such good care of me and El Cacharrito. At 2 I was scheduled to interview businessman Juan De Leon (Papote’s brother): Ricoche had set this up as an apology for botching our meeting time the other day. But when we arrived, Juan hadn’t yet returned from a business trip to Puerto Plata, so that was put off yet again. I did comply with my obligation to be reinterviewed on La Super Regional that afternoon, which was entertaining, although when asked to name my favorite performers, I missed a couple I probably should have acknowledged due to the stress of being on the spot. At least I got Fefita in there, and she called in after I was done to express her gratitude. After that, I went back to Tonito’s to pick up some bootleg DVDs he wanted to give me. He’d heard the interview and was tickled I’d mentioned my carnival activities with Los Confraternos.
I woke up on Thursday not quite believing it would be my last day in the DR after 9 months. But I didn’t have much time to reflect on it with such a full day scheduled. First I had to go to the police headquarters at the old airport with my lawyer, Eddy, to get my car inspected. Once they determined it hadn’t been stolen, I could finally get the registration transferred to my name. Afterwards, I had fifteen minutes before my rescheduled interview with Juan de Leon and Ricoche, so I stopped to put gas in the car. My temper already short, I went into a bit of a fury when none of their card readers would accept any of my perfectly good credit cards. This is one thing that has driven me a bit nuts here – every so often the bank won’t let a credit card pass simply because it is in the Dominican Republic. I’m not quite sure why this continues to look suspicious after I’ve lived 9 months in the country, but whatever. Half an hour, a trip to the ATM, and some swear words later, I finally made it out of there and, somewhat frazzled, to the interview at Juan’s office above a car repair shop: definitively my last interview in the DR in 2006. Next it was home to pack, get my deposit back from Dona Ana, and receive my visitors.
In the end, most of the Taveras clan made the trek down to my neighborhood: Chiqui, Laura, Yary, Felo, and even Chiqui’s sister Yahaira. They brought me a present of mangos from Dajabon. They looked delicious, but I knew there was no way I could bring them back with me or even eat them before leaving. Fun times packing bags, taking down mosquito nets, and washing dishes, all in sweltering heat, followed. Eventually El Buty showed up as well with the jars of sweets he’d been wanting to give me before I left, prepared specially by his wife. When we finished hauling all the luggage downstairs, where it would wait for me in Dona Ana’s apartment until my early departure the next morning, we celebrated with a game of dominoes, Coke, and Presidente I ordered from the colmado. (I’m going to miss having a corner store that delivers.) In order to protect my glass dining table from El Buty, who tends to slam dominoes down hard in classic Dominican style, we covered it with a flattened cardboard box.
But I still had more to do. First, I’d promised to visit Rafaelito and Domingo before leaving. Then, I was scheduled to have drinks with the Centro Leon crowd at a nearby bar, Palermo, at 8. This left little time for either dominoes or visiting, so we hurried to the car, El Buty to follow us in his blue pickup with a güira decal… only to find that his car wouldn’t start. He quickly determined the problem was lack of petroleum products, so now we had to return to the scene of my earlier gasoline-fueled fury with a gas can. Bringing this back to the waiting Buty, we found his car still wouldn’t start. And wouldn’t start. Really, this was becoming quite comical. And then it did start.
Out in El Ingenio, I made my farewells – though not tearful ones, as we knew that I’d be back next year. Rafaelito tried but couldn’t find the CD of his father I’d been wanting to get a copy of. Well, now he has seven months to search. I presented him with a can of chipotle chiles in recognition of the fact that he’s the only Dominican who eats spicy food with me. And I presented Domingo with a bag of mangos. After this, I only just had time for a quick but very necessary shower before my next appointment, picking up Noelia on the way. At Palermo we found Jose Enrique, the photographer, smoking outside with Carlos Andujar, the anthropologist. Carlos told me I had to leave to get my accordion, bring it back and play them a song. Too late, I told him: if I had to move one more inch, or if one more person gave me one more task to do, I was going to scream. So I perched myself on a barstool in the air-conditioned comfort of Palermo, ordered a house special (something involving rum, soda, and peach liquor) and a sandwich, and was soon feeling much better. Also in attendance at various times were Angela, Claudia (my movie-watching buddy from the gift shop) and a friend, Pedro Jose aka Pilito (who confessed I’d inspired him to start eating spicy food, and was making great progress on this front). Although Carlos had a bit too much whisky, it was all in all a good sendoff, and I went to bed satisfied if a bit sad, and strangely uncomfortable in the absence of my mosquito net.
The morning of my departure went surprisingly smoothly. Don Rafael helped me load the car, and my four enormous suitcases, two carry-ons, and carnival mask fit with room to spare. I found Hector awaiting me right where he said, at a gas station on Las Hermanas Mirabal. I presented him with two gifts: the Dajabon mangos (or all but one I’d decided to try to smuggle back) and a cell phone I was no longer going to use, since he didn’t have one. And at the airport, I encountered less than the expected resistance to my mounds of baggage, although I did end up having to pay $230 to get them back to the US. The tambora was worth it, though.
Now I’m back in New York, going through culture shock again. First of all, it was FREEZING when I got back. And then there was an odd lack of potholes and excess of traffic lights in the streets. I could drink the water, flush the toilet paper, and speak English to people in stores. But no plantains, no accordions, and for these and other reasons I found myself a little down when I woke up on my birthday Tuesday. Until my new cell phone rang, now playing Beethoven instead of “Lowrider.” I answered but no one replied for a few seconds. Then I heard an accordion striking up the tune of “Cumpleanos Feliz,” and then, was it Laura singing to me? With this phone call, from Santiago to New York, the Taveras family to me, the two sides of my life came together again and I felt content, even if I was 31.
Last Friday, the tables were turned on me. My friend Juan Miguel wanted to write a newspaper article about me and my research, so instead of me doing the interview I had to be interviewed myself. He’d give it a bit more glamour by including not only my teacher Rafaelito but also the big star El Prodigio in the story and photos. So at 10 AM, I was all ready for the photo session at the Centro Leon with a new outfit and manicure. A bit later, El Prodigio and his manager Yordy showed up, but unfortunately Rafaelito was sick and unable to come. Nonetheless, we all had a good time catching up as I hadn’t spoken with El Prodigio in a number of months. He invited me to play at his show on Sunday and we also agreed to meet up during his tour of New York in August to discuss some ideas for projects we had. He’s very interested in jazz and jazz-merengue fusions, so I thought I could introduce him to some people that might give him some new ideas.
Afterwards, I’d arranged with soundman Ricoche to go with him to meet businessman/típico patron Arnulfo Gutierrez, but when I arrived at La Super Regional, he’d already left. So that was off, but I was able to finally schedule an interview with Che, my favorite bass player, for 11 PM that night. He currently plays with Geovanny Polanco and I had to go to his show at the Tipico Monte Bar anyway, having promised Geovanny the day before. I did my best to get in a nap before the show, since at the TMB they always start so late, but it wasn’t good enough – I still felt exhausted and a bit grumpy when I finally met with Che that night. Still, it was an interesting interview, though we had to conduct it somewhat uncomfortably in the parking lot in one of the singer’s cars. Afterwards, I went in and took a table stage right with Che’s wife. The place was completely packed with young people. I thoroughly enjoyed the first set, as I hadn’t seen Geovanny play since his new CD had come out and thus was able to hear some tunes that were new to me. In the middle, he sent a saludo or greeting to me, “la musicologa.” The rest of the audience looked around curiously, doubtlessly thinking he was referring to some new típico star. The first set ended at 1:30 AM. When Geovanny came off the stage, he told me to prepare myself to play with them during the next set. But there was little chance I would still be awake and mobile enough to play at 3 AM so I gave it a miss. I had loads to do the next day, and a 5 AM bedtime wouldn’t help things any!
I’d mostly planned the next day to be a day of farewells and visiting people I hadn’t seen in sometime. First I got together with my carnival friends, stopping by Tonito’s house, then moving on to Betania’s where Jose Reyes came to meet us. We discussed our costume plans for next year, and Jose made some suggestions. We could save money by reusing the same mask, just repainting it and decorating differently. He liked the design and though we should keep using it so it would become a recognizable mark of Los Confraternos. Our mask combines the two main traditional types, joyero and pepinero, by having both smooth and spiky sections on the horns, and combining the wide beak of one with the upturned snout of the other. And I was assigned the task of investigating fabric selections. They hoped I would be able to find fabrics in the US that no other group would have, and that might turn out to be cheaper as well due to a monopoly in fabric sales in Santiago.
After that I realized it was already 5:30 and I’d been due to make an appearance at Denio’s house for a farewell-to-palos dinner “after five,” so I’d better hurry on over there. As I parked on the curb under the tree at the head of the walkway leading to his house, Denio and a few others were there to meet me, anxiously awaiting my arrival (as an American, I’d been expected to arrive closer to “on time”). Rum and beer were also awaiting me, and soon the party was going strong with palos and son in rotation on the stereo as the rest of the group arrived, including even Monchy and Papo, who hadn’t been to rehearsals since I’d started. Denio and the woman who helps with his kids were preparing yuca and stewed meat, along with some cooked vegetables and cheese for me, the lone vegetarian. They had just gotten food on the table when the power went out. Boy, was it dark! Soon candles appeared for us to eat by, and I chatted with Papo about music, universities, and New York: he’d spent most of his life there, but was now teaching languages at UTESA, a technical university in Santiago. He explained that to teach at one of the bigger, better-known schools like UASD, one had to have political connections, which he didn’t. As we talked it started raining, which sort of ruined our plans for a backyard palos rehearsal, so the guys brought the drums in instead. We played and drank, drank and played until after 11 – my last chance to practice until 2007! - when we figured we should both let the neighbors sleep and get some sleep ourselves. I had a record three performances scheduled for the next day, so I needed the rest.
I started the day by practicing. I needed at least six good songs for the gigs I was to play, and I had to choose them carefully, as I didn’t know who was likely to know the arrangements I would play. I also wanted to try out some merengues I’d never performed before, but wasn’t sure I trusted anyone but Rafaelito’s musicians to accompany me in those uncertain moments. I had planned to go over and rehearse the new tunes with Chiqui, but when I called he was already leaving for his own gig. Then I tried Rafaelito, but he was also unavailable. This was because El Ciego’s father had died just that morning and he had to attend the burial, unusually scheduled for that same day. For me, this meant not only that I would be unable to rehearse my new tunes but that I was now down to only two gigs, as one of the three had been an invitation by El Ciego to play with him at Rancho Merengue.
I prepared as best I could for performing with El Prodigio and then headed out to Champion’s Palace, a place out past Rancho Merengue and La Tinaja on the highway to Navarrete, which was where El Prodigio had told me he’d be playing at 5. But as I neared the Palace, I realized that was wrong, as the sign stated Nicol Pena was playing there today. Luckily, another sign appeared to point the way – El Prodigio was actually at Andy Ranch.
As I arrived there it began to rain: not a good sign for a gig at this outdoor, swimming- pool-oriented Rancho. I thought the place would empty out, but luckily it was only a drizzle and was over fairly quickly. The flip side was that the sweltering, humid heat returned just as quickly, making me regret my elbow-length sleeves. I sat with some people I didn’t know back behind the stage, the tamborero’s wife and friends, and ordered a Coke that it took 40 minutes for me to receive. Then I had to wait another half hour to get my change. At least El Prodigio was happy to see me, even though I scolded him for telling me the wrong place. Between sets, he introduced me to some friends who bought us a beer, but we didn’t have time to drink it before it was time for the second set. Halfway through this one, I took the stage to the surprise of all (or at least those who hadn’t seen me play before). I played La Cartera Vacia while El Prodigio sang, and then he asked me to call a second song. I selected El Puente Seco, but he said his saxophonist didn’t know it, being really a jazz musician rather than típico, so I went with El Cuento Comparon instead. Although the saxophonist didn’t know the mambos I played, he picked them up quickly. One man in the audience was so incredulous that I was playing, he came up on stage and put his ear right against the accordion. After listening for a minute, he stood up and nodded, indicating to the audience that it was no trick.
After we finished the place cleared out pretty quick, and I headed down the street to La Tinaja. I thought I would be late, arriving at 8, but they’d only just started. I greeted the emcee who has sung with me on several occasions but whose name I can never remember and entered the club, where I found Raul, Rafaelito’s son, seated in front of the stage. I took a seat beside him and listened to the first set, during which my hunger grew, so afterwards I went out to the roadhouse in front to see what they had to offer. The emcee accompanied me as I ordered rice, white beans, green salad, and a piece of fried cheese. After a while Rafaelito and the other musicians came in too, and we all ate enormous purple grapes together, dicussing (for some reason) asteroids and mass extinctions until it was time to begin the second set. When we came back, I found that two girls –friends of the Roman family- who had been at Andy Ranch had showed up here, too, following me from show to show. When my turn came I decided to risk it and try out one of my new numbers, El Tiguerito, even though I hadn’t ever played it with anyone else. With my friend the emcee singing, it came out quite well, and I followed it up with El Puente Seco, since I hadn’t been able to do that one at the previous gig. These went off so well that the sound man Cigua, so called because he is tiny like the Cigua bird, told me someone had said to him, “she plays like a man!” High praise indeed in tipico world.
I was pretty tired after all that excitement, but I still had one more stop to make. Otherwise, I didn’t know if I’d have time to say my goodbyes to John Taveras and my other friends among the staff at Rancho Merengue. So I hurried across the street, where I said goodbye to William, the emcee, Chimon güira, and several others. I made plans with Vilo to pick up the tambora I’d ordered, now nearly completed, on Tuesday. And finally John showed up as I waited in the drizzle outside, sad to hear I was leaving so soon. Like everyone else I’ve told I’m leaving he said, “but you’re coming right back, right?” “Well – next year,” I explained. “What?!? How can you leave for so long??” “Well, I am from there, not here,” I reminded him.” “No, you belong to us now,” he said, echoing the same sentiment I’d now heard dozens of times.
Monday was a day mostly for running errands. But I did work in one last dominoes game at Chiqui’s, and then Chiqui accompanied me to say my farewells to El Buty, the güira maker. But neither of them was satisfied with this goodbye, so they both agreed to come to my place to help me with my final packing on Thursday. I played with Buty’s cotorra, a smallish green parrot, friendly but not yet able to talk at only 6 months of age, until I realized I was about to be late for my last accordion lesson. There, I learned Las Indias de Bani at Manuary’s request. I’ll play it for him when I come back next year.
On Tuesday I’d scheduled a meeting with a different Chiqui, this one a cultural specialist at the Centro Leon, who had agreed to help me with my socioeconomic map of Santiago. While there, I planned to say my goodbyes to my friends there. After Chiqui gave me the data I needed, and Camilo presented me with a book of his poetry, I had a meeting with director Rafael Emilio where I gave him a give of a piece of Indian pottery from Arizona and filled him in on my accomplishments in the DR, and he in exchange presented me with a nice coffee-table book of photography by a Dominican artist of whom I’m a fan. Oddly enough, he also photographs Arizona scenery. Then I went back to see the friendly faces in the tabacalera (tobacco-rolling house) and purchase a doll of a tobacco worker in the middle of rolling a cigar. I picked mine mostly for his outfit: orange shirt, floral tie, and blue plaid pants. Stylish. But after lunch, where I had a final chat with my friends in the cafeteria, I had to make a quick split in order to get the rest of my scheduled activites done.
First, the tambora. Vilo had given me vague directions to his house in an unmapped development just behind La Tinaja: “Turn right at the road before the bridge. Then ask someone where I live.” This actually worked just fine, although I missed the turn the first time around and had to double back. On the predictable horrible road, I stopped at a group of dominoes-players to ask directions, and it turned out I new one of the women there, a friend of the Roman’s. They pointed me further down the road, and indicated I should turn right before the school. When I saw the school I asked again and easily found the house. Vilo was on the phone, so I waited on the porch, where a light breeze helped me shed some of the pounds of sweat I was wearing as a consequence of the long drive in the hot sun. When he got off, he showed me my lovely tambora, a Syd-sized black one at a special Syd price, as well as some other models he was working on. We discussed how to get a goat skin (from a goat butcher down the street), how much to pay (300 pesos), how many tamboras one can get from a single goat (not even one, since each side requires two coverings), and how to tell the right-hand side from the left-hand side (the right hand side should play the male goat, and you can tell because the male goat has a black stripe down its back, which will then be down the middle of the tambora head).
I couldn’t dally too long, though, as at 5 I had arranged to interview Francisco Ulloa at long last. I’d been told he wasn’t playing much anymore because he had gone evangelical. I found that he is still playing, not only at his Sunday gig at Rancho Merengue but in other towns as well, but that he is also an evangelical Christian. Nonetheless, I enjoyed talking with him about his status as “the ambassador of merengue típico,” and his collaborations with Juan Luis Guerra and Felle Vega. But again, I couldn’t stay long as I had yet another appointment afterwards: this time with Arriba el Merengue host Gaspar Rodriguez and friend Bismar, who had offered to help me make copies of some historic típico footage Gaspar had on video. But as it turned out Bismar was called upon to work that evening, thereby foiling our plans. I decided to stop by Gaspar’s anyway, just to say goodbye.
He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I waited on the balcony with their maid/nanny drinking a glass of pear juice. When Gaspar and his wife finally showed up I was nearly falling asleep, but roused myself enough to snap some photos of the portrait of Tatico that hangs on Gaspar’s wall. Then they invited me to stay for dinner. To pass the time, the maid brought me beer and Gaspar brought me piles of photos and videos to watch. He had some amazing 1960s pictures of El Ciego and of Tatico. When I turned them over I found they were shot by Lalan, the merenguero and newspaperman that figures in the famous merengue “La Balacera” that Tatico composed about a memorable night the two of them spent in jail together. On video, we watched Nico Lora, Guandulito, El Negrito Figueroa (accompanied by a drunken dancer I found hysterically funny, and whom they told me was named Joel, a fanatical follower of the late accordionist), and Siano Arias (during this one, shot in a New York [?] apartment, the other late accordionist Diogenes Jimenez could be observed asleep on a chair). It was amazing to be able to watch these ghosts from the past I’d heard about but never seen, and I’m hoping to obtain copies soon. Anyway, it was all so entertaining I ended up staying past 11 PM without realizing it!
Wednesday morning being mostly free, I decided to take care of a few things with my car and thereby say goodbye to my mechanic, El Negro, who had taken such good care of me and El Cacharrito. At 2 I was scheduled to interview businessman Juan De Leon (Papote’s brother): Ricoche had set this up as an apology for botching our meeting time the other day. But when we arrived, Juan hadn’t yet returned from a business trip to Puerto Plata, so that was put off yet again. I did comply with my obligation to be reinterviewed on La Super Regional that afternoon, which was entertaining, although when asked to name my favorite performers, I missed a couple I probably should have acknowledged due to the stress of being on the spot. At least I got Fefita in there, and she called in after I was done to express her gratitude. After that, I went back to Tonito’s to pick up some bootleg DVDs he wanted to give me. He’d heard the interview and was tickled I’d mentioned my carnival activities with Los Confraternos.
I woke up on Thursday not quite believing it would be my last day in the DR after 9 months. But I didn’t have much time to reflect on it with such a full day scheduled. First I had to go to the police headquarters at the old airport with my lawyer, Eddy, to get my car inspected. Once they determined it hadn’t been stolen, I could finally get the registration transferred to my name. Afterwards, I had fifteen minutes before my rescheduled interview with Juan de Leon and Ricoche, so I stopped to put gas in the car. My temper already short, I went into a bit of a fury when none of their card readers would accept any of my perfectly good credit cards. This is one thing that has driven me a bit nuts here – every so often the bank won’t let a credit card pass simply because it is in the Dominican Republic. I’m not quite sure why this continues to look suspicious after I’ve lived 9 months in the country, but whatever. Half an hour, a trip to the ATM, and some swear words later, I finally made it out of there and, somewhat frazzled, to the interview at Juan’s office above a car repair shop: definitively my last interview in the DR in 2006. Next it was home to pack, get my deposit back from Dona Ana, and receive my visitors.
In the end, most of the Taveras clan made the trek down to my neighborhood: Chiqui, Laura, Yary, Felo, and even Chiqui’s sister Yahaira. They brought me a present of mangos from Dajabon. They looked delicious, but I knew there was no way I could bring them back with me or even eat them before leaving. Fun times packing bags, taking down mosquito nets, and washing dishes, all in sweltering heat, followed. Eventually El Buty showed up as well with the jars of sweets he’d been wanting to give me before I left, prepared specially by his wife. When we finished hauling all the luggage downstairs, where it would wait for me in Dona Ana’s apartment until my early departure the next morning, we celebrated with a game of dominoes, Coke, and Presidente I ordered from the colmado. (I’m going to miss having a corner store that delivers.) In order to protect my glass dining table from El Buty, who tends to slam dominoes down hard in classic Dominican style, we covered it with a flattened cardboard box.
But I still had more to do. First, I’d promised to visit Rafaelito and Domingo before leaving. Then, I was scheduled to have drinks with the Centro Leon crowd at a nearby bar, Palermo, at 8. This left little time for either dominoes or visiting, so we hurried to the car, El Buty to follow us in his blue pickup with a güira decal… only to find that his car wouldn’t start. He quickly determined the problem was lack of petroleum products, so now we had to return to the scene of my earlier gasoline-fueled fury with a gas can. Bringing this back to the waiting Buty, we found his car still wouldn’t start. And wouldn’t start. Really, this was becoming quite comical. And then it did start.
Out in El Ingenio, I made my farewells – though not tearful ones, as we knew that I’d be back next year. Rafaelito tried but couldn’t find the CD of his father I’d been wanting to get a copy of. Well, now he has seven months to search. I presented him with a can of chipotle chiles in recognition of the fact that he’s the only Dominican who eats spicy food with me. And I presented Domingo with a bag of mangos. After this, I only just had time for a quick but very necessary shower before my next appointment, picking up Noelia on the way. At Palermo we found Jose Enrique, the photographer, smoking outside with Carlos Andujar, the anthropologist. Carlos told me I had to leave to get my accordion, bring it back and play them a song. Too late, I told him: if I had to move one more inch, or if one more person gave me one more task to do, I was going to scream. So I perched myself on a barstool in the air-conditioned comfort of Palermo, ordered a house special (something involving rum, soda, and peach liquor) and a sandwich, and was soon feeling much better. Also in attendance at various times were Angela, Claudia (my movie-watching buddy from the gift shop) and a friend, Pedro Jose aka Pilito (who confessed I’d inspired him to start eating spicy food, and was making great progress on this front). Although Carlos had a bit too much whisky, it was all in all a good sendoff, and I went to bed satisfied if a bit sad, and strangely uncomfortable in the absence of my mosquito net.
The morning of my departure went surprisingly smoothly. Don Rafael helped me load the car, and my four enormous suitcases, two carry-ons, and carnival mask fit with room to spare. I found Hector awaiting me right where he said, at a gas station on Las Hermanas Mirabal. I presented him with two gifts: the Dajabon mangos (or all but one I’d decided to try to smuggle back) and a cell phone I was no longer going to use, since he didn’t have one. And at the airport, I encountered less than the expected resistance to my mounds of baggage, although I did end up having to pay $230 to get them back to the US. The tambora was worth it, though.
Now I’m back in New York, going through culture shock again. First of all, it was FREEZING when I got back. And then there was an odd lack of potholes and excess of traffic lights in the streets. I could drink the water, flush the toilet paper, and speak English to people in stores. But no plantains, no accordions, and for these and other reasons I found myself a little down when I woke up on my birthday Tuesday. Until my new cell phone rang, now playing Beethoven instead of “Lowrider.” I answered but no one replied for a few seconds. Then I heard an accordion striking up the tune of “Cumpleanos Feliz,” and then, was it Laura singing to me? With this phone call, from Santiago to New York, the Taveras family to me, the two sides of my life came together again and I felt content, even if I was 31.
Monday, June 12, 2006
The End Approaches...
6/5/06
After Heather left, I decided to investigate the options for sending some of my mountains of excess baggage back to the US, since David was there for exactly the same reason. In the cargo office, we found out that the minimum charge to send a package was 6000 pesos! Nearly 200 bucks, even if the package was only the size of an eyeglass case. Man, things went up since two years ago, when I send a big old marimba over for only $100. Luckily, as we again entered the airport, I heard someone call my name: the voice of reason? No, it was a member of Los Tuaregs, one of Santiago’s big carnival groups, who I’d met back in March during our parade through Ensanche Bolivar. Turns out he works for American airlines. He offered advice on bringing my carnival mask back: hand-carry it in a plastic bag. I protested I’d already have 2 carry-ons, what with my accordion and my bag of computer and camera equipment, but he said it didn’t matter if I asked for it to be stowed at the gate. Well, that was a load off my back, so to speak.
That done, I just had time to run home for my accordion before my lesson time. And after that, I only just had time to get home again before a torrential downpour began. If you’ve been following my chronicles, you’ll know how rain in Santiago is and you’ll already have guessed that I was about to be trapped in my home for some time. That was indeed the case – I couldn’t even make any phone calls since I discovered I was out of phone card minutes too late to do anything about it. So much for Monday.
Forced to arise early Tuesday by my friend Juan Miguel, I fueled up on coffee and headed to PUCMM, the private Catholic university where he teaches (its initials stand for Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra, but it’s better known as “Pucamaima”). He was all set to help me obtain the socioeconomic map of Santiago I needed for my dissertation. In exchange I had to help him edit an abstract of a paper he was proposing to give at an all-Bourdieu conference. We were successful on both counts, and also it was nice to see the verdant campus I’d never before visited. I felt strangely at home in the geography lab, surrounded by all the map paraphernalia that reminded me of my dad’s office when I was a kid. All in all, I grudgingly had to admit it had been worth arising early. After we finished our work, Juan Miguel called El Prodigio to set up a meeting he’d been talking about for a while. He hoped to write an article on the two of us, Rafaelito, and my merengue activities before I left.
In the afternoon, I set up an impromptu interview with old-time accordionist Julian Ramirez at his home, where I’d never been before. It was a nice place in a newly-built middle-class area, and he lived there with his daughter, the accordionist Raquel Arias. I’d never met her before – in fact, I think she’s the only of the female accordionists I hadn’t met or interviews. This was because, after having a few hits in the 1990s, she gave up her musical career in favor of evangelical Christian pursuits. This hasn’t deterred her father’s wild ways in the least, and he recently recorded a new album of double-entendre merengues. We discussed his years with the Trio Reynoso in the 1960s, his recollections of Tatico, and his views on modern merengue típico until I noticed just how close the thunder was getting and figured I’d better hurry to my next appointment at Rafaelito’s before disaster struck. My timing was right, as the downpour started just after I walked through the door. But I started getting worried as it went on and on, walking to the porch and peering suspiciously through the gate at the roundabout every so often. My worst fears were soon confirmed as the “lake” filled up, and I snapped a couple of pictures of people wading and drivers pushing their conchos, a souvenir of my time in El Ingenio.
The kitten Mauricio kept me company, falling asleep in my lap as I worked on my computer until Rafaelito got back from picking up his son Yorly from school. I felt my car was probably safe, as I’d parked it away from the highest water line I’d yet seen, but the rain was major and soon water was lapping around the tires. It was also lapping at Rafaelito’s door, and every time a big rig went by the waves it created splashed dirty water into the living room. Manaury took cinder blocks from the backyard and began to build a barricade. Mauricio got worried and climbed from my hands all the way up onto my shoulder, finally perching on the back of my neck. Some debris got caught on my car’s bumper and Manaury waded out to pull it away as Yorly and I balanced ourselves on a low brick wall to get a better, if precarious, look at the action.
I thought I might as well wait a couple of hours for the water to come down before attempting an escape from the neighborhood. In the meantime, Manaury copied a couple of CDs for me and I showed Rafaelito the basics of the Finale music notation program that had aroused his interest when I showed him the transcriptions I’d done a couple of months ago. But at 9 PM, the water in the roundabout was still at an impassible level. Rafaelito had to go out too, however, so he led me through a very roundabout back route through hidden and narrow, pockmarked dirt roads that eventually let us out back on the Circunvalacion, below the problem area. From there it was smooth sailing. I reached home safe but exhausted, though I still had to help Juan Miguel finish his Bourdieu abstract. After an hour and a half of my grueling questioning, he and I decided to call it done.
The next day, Wednesday, I was startled to find I had most of the day free, as I’d been unable to schedule any of the mountains of interviews I was planning for my last week in the DR for that day. Instead, I went to the gym for one last time, and then to the Lizardo archives for one last time. I was scheduled to be interviewed myself by Victor Reyes, a DJ on La Super Regional (the biggest típico radio station in town), at 6 PM so threw in the towel early to be sure to arrive on time. I thought I was early when I got there at 5:45 but I was wrong: I thought he’d said “at 6,” but he’d actually said “from 5 to 6.” Oops. There was only time for 5 minutes of interview before the Rancho Merengue hour ended, but we agreed to do it again just before I left next week. Still, the visit wasn’t a total loss, as I was able to interview Ricoche, Tatico’s soundman in the 1970s and today a technician at the radio station. Then, I rounded out the day with a visit to El Tiriguillo, my old haunt. I hadn’t visited in ages and felt a little guilty for having deserted my friends there. As it so happened, while some of the “regulars” like Papito were there, the owners weren’t, so I was unable to make my farewells.
On Thursday I had three appointments: one at the spa and two interviews. In between these I figured I’d better get my nails done in time for my weekend performances, but due to my haste and my car’s non-power steering, I of course made a mess of my right hand in short order. I hoped my audiences would feel it was the thought that counted. More successful were the interviews: first I visited El Ciego in his lovely house in Llanos del Gurabo, where I also met his several amusing dogs and birds. Afterwards as we chatted I told him about my car and how I’d been searching for a name for the thing. As nicknames for humans are popular and even necessary here, so are vehicle names. Rafaelito had even written a merengue about one fan’s car, “El Campirolo,” and I had dreams that one day my 1984 Honda Civic could have its own merengue as well. El Ciego asked me to tell him about it, so I did: “it’s old and a little ugly, but not too ugly. It runs OK. But when it rains a lot of water comes in from underneath. Your feet get wet and you wonder if you’re at the beach,” I told him, giving the best description I could for the blind man’s benefit. He laughed. “Let’s call it El Cacharrito,” he suggested. I liked this. It means something like “the little piece of junk,” or “the jalopy.” Chitty chitty bang bang, perhaps. “You can use the name, but you must tell everyone it was Bartolo who picked it out!” El Ciego insisted. I agreed to his terms. Later I filled Rafaelito in on the news and he agreed to compose a merengue titled “El Cacharrito” for next year when I return. “Make sure it talks about everything I’ve gone through with it in the roundabout of El Ingenio. Like when we were bailing water out of it until midnight,” I suggested.
The second interview of the day was with Geovanny Polanco, a young star in the merengue típico world. Actually, I though he was much younger than he is due to his baby face, but he’s one year older than me. It took me a while to find his house, in a newly-built gated community on top of a hill next to Cerro Alto. But find it I did, and we had a most interesting conversation. “You know what’s funny?” I asked him. “They call you el mambologo (the “mambo-logist”), while I’m a musicologa (musicologist).” “That is funny,” he agreed. He invited me to his show the next day at típico monte bar so he could play a merengue from mambologist to musicologist.. As I left I heard someone practicing güira in the gatehouse. Tipico is everywhere.
After Heather left, I decided to investigate the options for sending some of my mountains of excess baggage back to the US, since David was there for exactly the same reason. In the cargo office, we found out that the minimum charge to send a package was 6000 pesos! Nearly 200 bucks, even if the package was only the size of an eyeglass case. Man, things went up since two years ago, when I send a big old marimba over for only $100. Luckily, as we again entered the airport, I heard someone call my name: the voice of reason? No, it was a member of Los Tuaregs, one of Santiago’s big carnival groups, who I’d met back in March during our parade through Ensanche Bolivar. Turns out he works for American airlines. He offered advice on bringing my carnival mask back: hand-carry it in a plastic bag. I protested I’d already have 2 carry-ons, what with my accordion and my bag of computer and camera equipment, but he said it didn’t matter if I asked for it to be stowed at the gate. Well, that was a load off my back, so to speak.
That done, I just had time to run home for my accordion before my lesson time. And after that, I only just had time to get home again before a torrential downpour began. If you’ve been following my chronicles, you’ll know how rain in Santiago is and you’ll already have guessed that I was about to be trapped in my home for some time. That was indeed the case – I couldn’t even make any phone calls since I discovered I was out of phone card minutes too late to do anything about it. So much for Monday.
Forced to arise early Tuesday by my friend Juan Miguel, I fueled up on coffee and headed to PUCMM, the private Catholic university where he teaches (its initials stand for Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra, but it’s better known as “Pucamaima”). He was all set to help me obtain the socioeconomic map of Santiago I needed for my dissertation. In exchange I had to help him edit an abstract of a paper he was proposing to give at an all-Bourdieu conference. We were successful on both counts, and also it was nice to see the verdant campus I’d never before visited. I felt strangely at home in the geography lab, surrounded by all the map paraphernalia that reminded me of my dad’s office when I was a kid. All in all, I grudgingly had to admit it had been worth arising early. After we finished our work, Juan Miguel called El Prodigio to set up a meeting he’d been talking about for a while. He hoped to write an article on the two of us, Rafaelito, and my merengue activities before I left.
In the afternoon, I set up an impromptu interview with old-time accordionist Julian Ramirez at his home, where I’d never been before. It was a nice place in a newly-built middle-class area, and he lived there with his daughter, the accordionist Raquel Arias. I’d never met her before – in fact, I think she’s the only of the female accordionists I hadn’t met or interviews. This was because, after having a few hits in the 1990s, she gave up her musical career in favor of evangelical Christian pursuits. This hasn’t deterred her father’s wild ways in the least, and he recently recorded a new album of double-entendre merengues. We discussed his years with the Trio Reynoso in the 1960s, his recollections of Tatico, and his views on modern merengue típico until I noticed just how close the thunder was getting and figured I’d better hurry to my next appointment at Rafaelito’s before disaster struck. My timing was right, as the downpour started just after I walked through the door. But I started getting worried as it went on and on, walking to the porch and peering suspiciously through the gate at the roundabout every so often. My worst fears were soon confirmed as the “lake” filled up, and I snapped a couple of pictures of people wading and drivers pushing their conchos, a souvenir of my time in El Ingenio.
The kitten Mauricio kept me company, falling asleep in my lap as I worked on my computer until Rafaelito got back from picking up his son Yorly from school. I felt my car was probably safe, as I’d parked it away from the highest water line I’d yet seen, but the rain was major and soon water was lapping around the tires. It was also lapping at Rafaelito’s door, and every time a big rig went by the waves it created splashed dirty water into the living room. Manaury took cinder blocks from the backyard and began to build a barricade. Mauricio got worried and climbed from my hands all the way up onto my shoulder, finally perching on the back of my neck. Some debris got caught on my car’s bumper and Manaury waded out to pull it away as Yorly and I balanced ourselves on a low brick wall to get a better, if precarious, look at the action.
I thought I might as well wait a couple of hours for the water to come down before attempting an escape from the neighborhood. In the meantime, Manaury copied a couple of CDs for me and I showed Rafaelito the basics of the Finale music notation program that had aroused his interest when I showed him the transcriptions I’d done a couple of months ago. But at 9 PM, the water in the roundabout was still at an impassible level. Rafaelito had to go out too, however, so he led me through a very roundabout back route through hidden and narrow, pockmarked dirt roads that eventually let us out back on the Circunvalacion, below the problem area. From there it was smooth sailing. I reached home safe but exhausted, though I still had to help Juan Miguel finish his Bourdieu abstract. After an hour and a half of my grueling questioning, he and I decided to call it done.
The next day, Wednesday, I was startled to find I had most of the day free, as I’d been unable to schedule any of the mountains of interviews I was planning for my last week in the DR for that day. Instead, I went to the gym for one last time, and then to the Lizardo archives for one last time. I was scheduled to be interviewed myself by Victor Reyes, a DJ on La Super Regional (the biggest típico radio station in town), at 6 PM so threw in the towel early to be sure to arrive on time. I thought I was early when I got there at 5:45 but I was wrong: I thought he’d said “at 6,” but he’d actually said “from 5 to 6.” Oops. There was only time for 5 minutes of interview before the Rancho Merengue hour ended, but we agreed to do it again just before I left next week. Still, the visit wasn’t a total loss, as I was able to interview Ricoche, Tatico’s soundman in the 1970s and today a technician at the radio station. Then, I rounded out the day with a visit to El Tiriguillo, my old haunt. I hadn’t visited in ages and felt a little guilty for having deserted my friends there. As it so happened, while some of the “regulars” like Papito were there, the owners weren’t, so I was unable to make my farewells.
On Thursday I had three appointments: one at the spa and two interviews. In between these I figured I’d better get my nails done in time for my weekend performances, but due to my haste and my car’s non-power steering, I of course made a mess of my right hand in short order. I hoped my audiences would feel it was the thought that counted. More successful were the interviews: first I visited El Ciego in his lovely house in Llanos del Gurabo, where I also met his several amusing dogs and birds. Afterwards as we chatted I told him about my car and how I’d been searching for a name for the thing. As nicknames for humans are popular and even necessary here, so are vehicle names. Rafaelito had even written a merengue about one fan’s car, “El Campirolo,” and I had dreams that one day my 1984 Honda Civic could have its own merengue as well. El Ciego asked me to tell him about it, so I did: “it’s old and a little ugly, but not too ugly. It runs OK. But when it rains a lot of water comes in from underneath. Your feet get wet and you wonder if you’re at the beach,” I told him, giving the best description I could for the blind man’s benefit. He laughed. “Let’s call it El Cacharrito,” he suggested. I liked this. It means something like “the little piece of junk,” or “the jalopy.” Chitty chitty bang bang, perhaps. “You can use the name, but you must tell everyone it was Bartolo who picked it out!” El Ciego insisted. I agreed to his terms. Later I filled Rafaelito in on the news and he agreed to compose a merengue titled “El Cacharrito” for next year when I return. “Make sure it talks about everything I’ve gone through with it in the roundabout of El Ingenio. Like when we were bailing water out of it until midnight,” I suggested.
The second interview of the day was with Geovanny Polanco, a young star in the merengue típico world. Actually, I though he was much younger than he is due to his baby face, but he’s one year older than me. It took me a while to find his house, in a newly-built gated community on top of a hill next to Cerro Alto. But find it I did, and we had a most interesting conversation. “You know what’s funny?” I asked him. “They call you el mambologo (the “mambo-logist”), while I’m a musicologa (musicologist).” “That is funny,” he agreed. He invited me to his show the next day at típico monte bar so he could play a merengue from mambologist to musicologist.. As I left I heard someone practicing güira in the gatehouse. Tipico is everywhere.
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