For several months I’ve been video recording a variety of bands that have played at Lula Lounge. It’s a labour of love. It’s been difficult, and gratifying, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get permission to post a couple of the videos somewhere, probably YouTube soon.
My interest is in Afro/Latin/Brazilian music, and Lula is as good a place to see this as anywhere in Canada. The bands are fantastic, and that only becomes clearer to me, now that editing the hours of tape down to a few songs is through the first phase. I must know every note, every nuance of the four songs, by four bands, that I’ve been working on. And it gives me a chance to understand the complex relations of rhythm and melody in this music.
I’ve written about the process of constructing a representation of a musical event previously. Essentially, what I think is that while a literal allegiance to presenting the exact sequence of shots doesn’t guarantee an edit will reflect the music to the audience, constructing a fiction from shots collected from many songs and performances is inherently restricted if the finished work is to capture the truth of the performance.
Now I want to think about a different kind of truth, tied up with the cultural weight that the way performance is presented carries.
In his amazing book on Cuban music, Ned Sublette talks about the contrast between the European tradition that sees music as spectacle, ie a thing observed, and the tradition that comprises the African diaspora, of music as group event, without firm distinction between performer and audience. From conga lines, which he discusses at length, to the dancing of the blocos of Brazil, the collapse of that distinction is critical to music that brings musician and audience into a single entity that is the music.
Dance also collapses the distinction between performer and audience, and particularly the dances of latin music: salsa, mambo, cha cha cha, samba, bachata, merengue, and so on through the enormous list. A room with a band, a floor full of dancers moving—mueve la cintura, baby—is music that fully completes itself in a way totally outside the model of music as spectacle.
That difference, Sublette suggests, is the root of the prohibition on the most fundamental instrument of diasporic music, the drum. It is a prohibition which continued in many places into the last century. Sublette reveals a history—his topic is Cuba, but the reality is broader—of the prohibition of the hand drum, the drums of African religion, of African social groupings and communication: think of the talking drum. In the context of Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and the other places where cane sugar created an economy where slaves brought to work from Africa generally were worked to death, the threat of revolution by slave populations much larger than that of the colonial masters bred a constant terror that manifested itself in the banning of the instruments that brought the slaves together, in moving, dancing celebrating masses. Music where the musician exhorts the audience to get up, to move, to return the rhythm to its source was a threat of the first order, and all the more so after the successful slave revolt in Haiti.
The model for slavery in North America, including Canada when slavery existed here, while brutal as well, tended to favour the creation of slave populations that married, had children who in turn were enslaved: the result was a kind of assimilation where the slave population came to share a language—the master’s language, and sublimated the vast differences of their diverse African roots into a hybridized afro-american culture that eventually produced blues, jazz and rock and roll. Contrast this with Brazil or Cuba where for generations, young people, overwhelmingly men, brought to the plantations might not share a language or religion. But the drum, dance and rhythm were the basis for a communication that while a hybrid as well, was profoundly different: a hybrid created by people who were born in Africa, and who knew directly the cultural values and life of their origins.
These of course, are the places where what gets called Latin Music comes from: overwhelmingly from the places where the drum occupied a sacred place in an African-based culture that continually refreshed itself with new arrivals from their mother cultures. AfroAmerican culture, while just as prolific, fecund and inventive, is striking when the absence of the hand drum is noticed in blues and jazz, at least prior to the arrival of Cuban influence, in the form of Chano Pozo.
What is striking in Ned Sublette’s account is the essentially cosmopolitain, multicultural quality of the Latin music of Cuba, even at its origins. At the dawn of globalization, at the collision of multiple cultures in the outlying edges of empires, the music that emerged belonged to everyone and to no-one. The same is true in Brazil and elsewhere: this was a music that grew from a strong African root, but that endlessly adapted itself to the additions, modifications and interpretations of an essentially heterogenous population. There is no purity here.
Working with music on video as I’ve been doing inevitably makes me wonder about where I might go with it, and the obvious answer is television. The CBC is the media organization directed by parliament to reflect images of Canada back to Canadians, I hear. So what do they have to offer?
As a friend who I talked about this with today remarked, the model that dominates at the CBC is the Rita MacNeil special. For a different generation (mine), the model would be Don Messer’s Jubilee. THis show, a part of my youth, was always a troubling, if minor aspect of my early attempts to understand the world I was growing up in. Every week, a parade of people who appeared to me to be absolute non-entities played jigs and reels, sang in voices that seemed to have survived form a previous era where spitoons and pocketwatches were quotidian. The overall effect was one that still produces a feeling akin to insects under the skin: a sense that life would be full of people like this, who presented this Westworld like facade of homespun earnestness while still suggesting that they knew what total bullshit it was, and dared you to say so, while not eliminating the possibility that they really believed this crap. A kind of Amish Television network vibe, if that makes it clearer, or maybe The Truman Show creepiness, without the falling light. In fine, a sense of aghast awareness that this country was a sausage skin of cultural self-delusion stuffed to bursting.
It turns out that that impression is entirely current, while the specifics of what actually goes on the air is a bit out of date.
It is a fact that I don’t have much interest in television. I hear about it, I get snippets of it here and there, but the moving image for me is DVDs, YouTube, and what I roll myself at Lula. So, being unfamiliar with the current state of the National Broadcaster, I went to their site, and found their programming schedule.
And what did I find? I found that in a 7 day a week, 18 hour a day schedule, 126 hours, more or less, of television each week, the CBC devotes precisely no hours of broadcasting time to music.
Stop and think about that. In one of the world’s most multicultural cities (it becomes truer, the more you say it), in the country with the highest per capita immigration rate in the world, where among other things, eighty languages are spoken in the school system, where a walk of ten blocks could easily have you hear ten languages spoken, and see shop signs in 5, the agency charged with reflecting the country back to itself devotes absolutely nothing whatever to reflecting its musical culture.
It almost—but not quite—makes me miss the days of Don Messer, or even Rita McNeil.
The difference between the empty musical void of the CBC, and the dynamic, endlessly shifting cultural and linguistic milieu of the club could not be greater. It’s hard to reconcile these things.
Yes, music is a form of communication that exists when common language is absent: so, for that matter, is dance, the other part of the club. These were things that contributed to the genesis of what is now called Latin Music. But some of the same conditions obtain here in Canada today. Yes, Canada is a country of immigrants, an aspect of the globalization that by some reasonable standard began with the colonial train wreck of Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and elsewhere. So why is music not part of what Canadians see when they watch television—as virtually all of them do, every morning and evening of every week of every year of their lives, even when they find themselves dying in a hospital bed, the gnomic eye staring back at them as they wheeze out the ghost?
I don’t really know. I think that the Rita McNeil model of music on television is part of the answer, though. Although I have never, ever met anyone who expressed the slightest interest in Don Messer, Rita McNeil, Cape Breton fiddle music, all of which are part of the some continuum that is relentlessly promoted by the CBC as the paragon of Canadian Music, its easy to understand why they get the attention. All of them are aspects of the precise reverse of what Latin Music is: they represent purity, where Latin Music is a hybrid; they represent national (which in Canada means regional) culture, while Latin Music is inherently international and cosmopolitain; and they represent something that belongs uniquely to us, a quality that seems at best questionable and at worst repellent, like something that no-one outside of our borders (and 99% of people inside of them) ever found anything to like about. By contrast, Latin Music—and here we’re talking about the broadest possible sweep, from NuevaYorkean salsa to the Buena Vista Social Club to Astor Piazzola to Shakira—is something that seems to find a home absolutely everywhere it lands.
The idea that culture is about purity, and about what is uniquely, distinctly specific to the place is the thing that makes Latin Music invisible to Canada’s cultural commissars, who have a view of what consitutes culture as antiquated and restrictive as the never-world that Don Messer’s Jubilee proposed.
[This article continues here.]
