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This blogger, Richard Gehr, is not an employee of AARP. The opinions expressed in the blog are not necessarily the opinions of AARP and AARP assumes no liability for the content posted by Mr. Gehr or any other participant

November 04, 2007

Richard Gehr | November 04, 2007

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"Rock and roll is dead," art-folk revivalist Sufjan Stevens declared to New York magazine recently, adding for good measure: "There are great rock bands today, but you're watching the History Channel when you go to these clubs. They're just reenacting an old sentiment." This weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Stevens offered some bracing new sentiments in "The BQE," a new work commissioned as part of BAM's annual Next Wave festival.

Raised in Michigan and living in Brooklyn, Stevens is known best for his semi-serious long-term goal to memorialize each of the fifty states on an album, with richly detailed tributes to Michigan and Illinois already released. Following Thursday evening's performance, Stevens described his latest geographically specific work as a "bizarre and beautiful ode to one of the world's ugliest expressways" (the BQE, or Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is 11 and a half miles of bad roadway connecting two boroughs). Stevens functioned as both director and composer for the work, which combined a cinematic triptych projected above a 36-piece ensemble with a quintet of both off- and on-screen hula hoopers, whose spinning tubes offered a childlike visual parallel to the barreling vehicles onscreen. "The BQE" began with the sounds of electronic shrieks and ended with a triumphant explosion of fireworks over Coney Island. Inbetween, the work's several sections explored arrangements that evoked classical music, musical theater, and even rock music. You could hear echoes of "Over the Rainbow" early on and, later, the small-town hurly-burly of Charles Ives's marching bands. Among his many talents, Sufjan Stevens makes you feel at least a little proud to be an American.

For the even more entertaining second half of the evening, Stevens performed some of his more popular earlier works. Songs such as the yearning "Seven Swans," "Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head," "Chicago," and the shockingly sensitive "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." sounded majestic in their orchestral arrangements. Anyone not yet convinced that Sufjan Stevens was on to something that justified his anti-rockist sentiments would have had a hard time remaining a nonbeliever.

August 29, 2007

Richard Gehr | August 29, 2007

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Becoming a hula master involves more than simply learning how to sway like the waves, suggests Mimi Kirk's recent introduction to the world of hula in Smithsonian ("A Hip Tradition").

[T]he path to becoming a hula master is not universally agreed upon. Each hula school has its own particular steps and rituals. Several kumus seemed reluctant to describe these, instead uttering the Hawaiian proverb, "All knowledge does not come from one," when pressed about them. Dalire says students must study Hawaiian history, culture and language, as well as dance. Malama Chong, a protégé of Fonseca's, says lei-making and costuming are also important. In addition, students may be required to heed kapus (taboos), including abstinence and food restrictions. "It's a serious undertaking that requires years of training," Chong says.
With no written language, hula chants were used to transmit history, genealogy, and mythology from generation to generation. After evolving from centuries-old ceremonial tradition to kitschy tourist attraction, hula is today taught and practiced in both its old-school kahiko variation, with drums and chanting, and modern 'auana manifestations, with ukuleles, grass skirts, and sometimes expensively designed costumes. These Ka Pa Hula O Ka Lei Lehuamale kahiko dancers performed at last year's "Olympics of Hula," the Merrie Monarch competition held each spring. The festival is named after King David Kalakaua, AKA the Merrie Monarch. Kalakaua ruled Hawaii from 1874 to 1891 and restored many of the cultural traditions that had been banned by missionaries. The group Hula Halau O Lilinoe performs hula 'auana here. This year's overall victor was the male group Halau I Ka Wekiu; watch their winning flamenco-influenced 'auana here.

Japan's entry in this year's Academy Awards, Hula Girls (trailer here) depicts rural Japanese girls learning the hula. And if traditional hula dancing is too culturally unfamiliar, you can always stick to hula hoops.

June 20, 2007

Richard Gehr | June 20, 2007

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Young Peter Seeger answers the question, "What's that funny-looking guitar you're playing?" and provides the voice of American roots music in To Hear Your Banjo Play. This 1947 documentary was written by folklorist-musicologist Alan Lomax, directed by Irving Lerner and Willard Van Dyke, and can be viewed on the Internet Archives. It's a fine and gritty document of Southern folk music's then-living traditions, and it doesn't flinch from acknowledging the impoverished conditions from which they sprang. Woodie Guthrie and Brownie McGee also pop up during its concise sixteen minutes. [via Rummage Through the Crevices]

June 01, 2007

Richard Gehr | June 01, 2007

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Today's featured film on Folkstreams.net is Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait. Director Jim Carnes's 2001 film documents the Woottens, a Sand Mountain, Alabama, family who have been practicing Sacred Heart "shape note" singing for 150 years. The Sacred Harp is a hymnal published in Georgia in 1844, and its music is written in four note shapes used to teach the songs to groups. The technique evolved into a tradition that lives on in various Southern communities and families like the Wootens, who Carnes hangs out with at home, in church, and at Sacred Heart conventions.

Sweet Is the Day can be viewed online, purchased, or rented for public screenings at Folkstreams.net, the self-described "National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures." Other recent films featured on the site include three 1985 shorts comprising a Texas Living Blues series. (One of these, Les Blank's Cigarette Blues, compresses a sculpture made out of cigarettes, an antismoking message, and a searing performance by Sonny Rhodes and the Texas Twisters into four short minutes.) Style Wars is a classic 1983 documentary about the now-classic era of graffiti and hip-hop culture in New York. And Yasha Aginsky's Les Blues de Balfa looks at Louisiana's Balfa Brothers, a legendary Cajun duo.

Folkstreams.net is an altogether amazing online cornucopia of folk music, art, and culture. It opens windows onto worlds you may never have imagined existed. Spend some time there and feel proud to be an American.

March 26, 2007

Richard Gehr | March 26, 2007

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The Roches made it sound as though it were nearly impossible to get a hometown gig, but a few nights ago the New York Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side was packed with loudly appreciate fellow travelers. As well they should be. Sisters Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche are wise and witty songwriters, genetically enhanced harmonizers, nimble guitarists, and proudly eccentric. And Moonswept, their first album as a trio in eleven years, proves it.

Roches songs are often autobiographical, which means that on Friday, nearly thirty years after the release of their eponymous debut, the sisters sang about aging, regret, optimism, and simply struggling to get by in post 9/11 New York. Terre's "Gung Ho," which opened the show, pins mild irony ("Everybody said I would be OK/ Not one of them is standing to this day") to a perky melody the Andrew sisters might have harmonized closely, while Suzzy's "Huh" is a goofy series of non sequiturs (It's a no go, bad boy, I'd like to be a nice old, duh") suggesting a stalled love affair. The former Paul Simon back-up singers slipped into past tense with their a cappella version of "The Hallelujah Chorus," their chiming ode to another doomed relationship ("Ing"), their perfect band introduction ("We), and two secular prayers collected and set to music for their Harvard-sponsored Zero Church project. The Roches cover a remarkable amount of emotional territory in an evening and should seriously consider playing here more often.

Afterward I subwayed down to the Bowery Ballroom, where my (full disclosure) eMusic.com colleague Reid Genauer was leading his crackerjack Assembly of Dust band. The audience was considerably younger, and no less enthusiastic, for the AOD's neoclassic country-rock (some songs resemble a genetically engineered hybrid of the Band and the Dead) punched up with moves from the great underground improvised-rock scene that swept the Northeast during the nineties. The AOD's new Recollection practically defines gung-ho.