The River, the Rain, and the Ocean
Hinojosa, Chiweshe, Baca and the Myriad Sounds of Water
BY LOUIS DUBOSE
FROM THE TEXAS OBSERVER
Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon
Tish Hinojosa has covered a lot of ground - artistically and geographically
- since she left San Antonio for Northern New Mexico, moved on from "Taos
to Tennessee," then returned home to Texas. She has shuffled through
country dancehalls with songs like "The Real West," performed in Korea,
where "¿A Donde Voy?" - a haunting, Spanish account of a young man's flight
from the Border Patrol - inexplicably went platinum. She has followed Don
Américo Paredes through as beautiful and evocative a collection of border
ballads ever put into one package, in "Frontejas." And most recently, she
has pursued Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana de la Cruz, and Octavio Paz, into a
Mexican labyrinth that resulted in the artistically daring "Soñar Del
Laberinto."
"There's always a river song in my work," she told an audience at
the Aladdin Theater in Portland. That river is often the muddy Río Grande -
the official border between Texas and Mexico. Three years ago she climbed
on a bus with Butch Hancock, Santiago Jiménez, and Don Walser, and pushed
that border northward. (Imagine a line that begins at Kingsville, extends
through San Antonio, follows I-10 west, and then begins to drift east of El
Paso's Upper Valley, and you will have some sense where the border is
today.)
Hinojosa is on a bus again, this time in the company of Zimbabwe's
Stella Chiweshe, and Peru's Susana Baca, on a two-month, thirty-city-tour
in which the three stars are billed as The Global Divas. "This is a
cool-ass show," said Hinojosa's longtime guitarist Marvin Dykhuis, four
dates into the tour, in the green room of Seattle's Meany Hall. For
Dykhuis, a Racine, Wisconsin, guitarist (mandolinist, charangista, and
vocalist) who moved to Austin ten years ago, this was a rare moment of
understatement. The three Divas - and the seven men who back them - are an
exceptional show. Conceived by International Music Network's Ann Marie
Martin, the tour inside the concert hall begins in Africa with Chiweshe,
moves to the Afro-Peruvian music of Baca, and concludes with Hinojosa's
interpretation of Texas and Mexico. Eighty years ago, Mexican intellectual,
historian, and goofball philosopher José Vasconcelos predicted that the
Spanish Conquest of the Americas, if it achieved nothing else with its
mixing of Amerindian, African, and European genetic stock, would produce
"La Raza Cósmica." Tish's frequent border crossings - and the music they
produce - have always suggested that Vasconcelos might have been on to
something; but at Meany Hall in Seattle, I think I witnessed the baptismal
rights of the Cosmic Race Vasconcelos once promised the Americas.
The music of Stella Chiweshe, "the mbira queen of Zimbabwe," is
almost a primal force. Locked into two major keys on the mbira and backed
by the sort of percussion that can only come out of Africa, it is both
mesmerizing and overwhelming. The mbira is a twenty-two-prong "thumb
piano," two tiers of metal tines that are plucked while they resonate
inside a large dried gourd. The result is a sound like nothing most
westerners have ever heard. It is a music that John Cage might have loved,
had he given himself over to the discipline of rhythm - or any discipline.
[distracting] Or something you would expect to hear in the work of the
beatific Lou Harrison, had he not been completely seduced by the sweeter
tones of the gamelan. On and on and on it goes, as the three men
accompanying Chiweshe move from gourds to drums to mbiras - or dance across
the stage and incorporate their hands and feet into the rhythm section.
Chiweshe opened with a song that she said began as a bus ride - a
"way to get us from here to there." Sung in Shona, the dominant native
language in Zimbabwe, "Mazarura" is a metaphor longer than the train that
pulls Alan Paton's narrative through Cry the Beloved Country. Yet on the
following afternoon, Chiweshe would complain about the difficulty of
performing three songs during one concert. "When you play mbira," she said,
"thirty minutes is not enough time to warm up." Often a single tune, she
said, can go on for hours. Chiweshe's electric Earthquake Band has toured
widely in Europe, but this small acoustic ensemble seems like it might
actually be playing the mbira as it was intended: to call on the spirits of
the players' ancestors.
When one of the Texas musicians asked me what I thought of Chiweshe's
performance, I said that I had the sensation it all had occurred under
water. If a river runs through Hinojosa's work, Chiweshe's music seemed
like it was played within a much larger body of water. On the following
afternoon, riding south on the tour bus from Seattle to Portland, I asked
Chiweshe about her music, suggesting that it was very spiritual. "It is
spiritual," she said. "It is not my music but the music of a spirit, and
that spirit is a person who lives at the bottom of the Indian Ocean."
Like the Spanish singer Paco Ibáñez, Susana Baca collaborates with
poets (living and dead) to produce the most extraordinary music.
(Musicalizar is the infinitive she uses to describes what she does with
verse.) And just as Ibáñez captures something of the essence of Spain in
his work, Baca's music is quintessentially Peruvian: literally, the poetry
of the legendary César Vallejo, put to music. On stage, Baca, a small,
elegant, barefoot black woman with a San Martín de Porres haircut,
constantly dances to a landó or a samba beat, singing in a voice of
exquisite range.
The Afro-Peruvian rhythms that shape her music, she said, were carried out
of Angola and the Congo by the Portuguese. And the way her three-member
band plays suggest that this was all developed somewhere other than a
concert hall. The percussion section, dominated by the cajón, a box turned
on end with a player sitting atop it as he pounds out a beat, also includes
a smaller cajita, a quijada, a complete lower jaw of a burro (whose
rattling teeth produce an abrasive hiss), cowbells, a water jar, and a set
of conga and bongo drums. And guitarist Rafael Muñoz has so skillfully
mixed the vocabularies of samba and jazz that he could probably step off
the Divas' bus and begin a solo career somewhere between Seattle and New
Hampshire (where the tour will end, on April 3).
But it would be hard for any ensemble to upstage Baca, who offers
up an extraordinary repertory in an extraordinarily pure and plaintive
voice. "María Landó," for example, is an evocative piece that has become
Baca's signature work. (And the quiet conversation between Baca's voice and
Muñoz's guitar on "María Landó" helps make it the centerpiece of her set.)
The song began with a poem written by Peruvian poet César Calvo, which was
later put to music by a singer named Chabuca Granda, before it was picked
up by Baca, who reworked the melody line.
After she performed it at a festival on the International Day of the Woman
in 1984, it became the anthem of the tens of thousands of women working in
Peru's cocinas populares: the public kitchens where women living at the
bottom of Peruvian society pool their meager resources in a common pot, and
cook huge meals that feed entire neighborhoods.
"María Landó" is also one of the songs that sent David Byrne south;
Byrne actually tracked Baca down at her home in Peru to ask her to record
the song. Like Hinojosa's "Las Marías," which was inspired by an Elena
Poniatowska essay about the Marías who pour into Mexico City to do whatever
work is offered them, "María Landó" tells the story of a woman who works so
hard that she doesn't have a moment to lift her eyes and look at the sky.
Pero para María, no hay madrugada.
Pero para María, no hay mediodía.
(But for Maria, there's no dawn.
But for Maria, there's no noon.)
And although "María Landó" came to Baca third hand, from a poet and a
singer who are no longer alive, she clearly owns the song, which she sings
in a strong voice that is complemented but never dominated by the
extraordinary guitar work of Muñoz. The single weakness of Baca's first
U.S. release, Susana Baca, is the mixing and overproduction that allow the
percussion tracts to dominate her voice. ("María Landó" isn't included on
Susana Baca but is on David Byrne's compilation, The Soul of Black Peru.)
"Luna Llena" is a small poem filled with imagery - a heron struggling in a
river, a full moon watching - which Baca sings almost a capella. "No,
Valentín" provides a workout for Baca's percussion section, and allows the
boys in the band to prove they can sing harmony.
I first heard Tish Hinojosa sing "Something in the Rain" eight
years ago in Lydia and Cynthia Pérez's Las Manitas Avenue Café in Austin -
on a winter night when the streets were so icy that only a few people had
shown up. Many in the small, intimate audience were overwhelmed by the raw
poetry of a young boy's first-person narrative of the central tragedy in
his life as a migrant farm worker. (The song is based on a Robert Granat
short story; it sometimes seems that Hinojosa can't read a book without
stealing a song). So it was interesting to observe that the response of an
audience of 1,250 in what is clearly one of the best concert halls on the
West Coast was not unlike what I had seen (and experienced) sitting with
two dozen of Hinojosa's homeys in Austin eight years earlier. There is, in
fact, one delicate, sustained note in the first line of the last verse
("Well talkers talk and dreamers dream...") that is so exquisitely
beautiful and evocative that it's impossible even to write about without
being deeply moved.
Hinojosa's "river song" on this particular night in Seattle was
prefaced by one verse of the wonderfully lachrymose "La Llorona," a
traditional Mexican song about a weeping woman who walks the banks of a
river looking for her lost child. The song, in this a capella
configuration, is a fine showcase for Hinojosa's voice, and it was
disappointing that her protracted interpretation of the first verse of "La
Llorona" is only the introduction to "Laughing River." But Marvin Dykhuis
kicks off "Laughing River" with a guitar lick he couldn't have learned in
Racine, and Hinojosa moves into her salsera voice and tempo, easing the
disappointment that arises when you realize that "La Llorona" has run its
course. Hinojosa's first encore, with Susana Baca, Stella Chiweshe, and
every musician on the tour bus was Isabel Parra's "Gracias a la Vida," with
Baca singing the second verse, then singing harmony as the piece became
more legato.
The combination of Baca and Hinojosa seems fitting not only because
they share the same language (almost, although the tour may well need a
translator who speaks both Mexican and Peruvian), but because they
obviously share the same peoples politics that many associate with Parra.
And both seem to share a commitment to lyrics that advance those politics
without being didactic. "María Landó" and "Something in the Rain" are both
songs that show rather than tell, each laying out the life of one character
and allowing the listener to come to her own conclusions. Moreover, the
music and presence of Stella Chiweshe provide a spiritual dimension to the
program - while also suggesting that music can transcend the limits of
language.
This show concludes with a fifteen-minute, multi-instrumental jam that is
yet another performance, unto itself. And somewhere between Berkeley and
Boston, Hinojosa will find a few days for studio work in Nashville, where
she is working on her third Warner Brothers album. She will return to Texas
to spend Easter with her family - floating down the Santa Elena canyon on a
raft, looking for another river song.
Photos by Louis Dubose
Article courtesy of:
The Texas Observer
307 West Seventh Street
Austin, Texas 78701
(512) 477-0746
(512) 474-1175 (Fax)
E-mail: editors@texasobservers.org
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