A Stunning Black Sea Music Summit at the Met
Billed as Strings of the Black Sea, yesterday’s show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art lived up to the boast made by the organizers’ emcee beforehand: it truly was a landmark concert. It was a New York Eastern European music summit, sort of the Black Sea equivalent of those early 60s Rolling Stones Revues with short sets from a nonstop parade of icons like Howlin’ Wolf, Ike & Tina Turner, Otis Redding et al. The emcee wished aloud for a series of full-length concerts by each of the individual performers here next year, a wish that deserves to come true. As with Debo Band at Joe’s Pub on Friday, there was incongruity in seeing most of them rip through one adrenalizing dance number after another in front of a relaxed, comfortably seated crowd in the museum’s sonically superb Rogers Auditorium. But the audience was energized; the ripple of excitement after it was finally over was impossible not to connect with..
Christos Tiktapanidis got the party started, solo on politiki lyra fiddle (also known as a kemence). What he casually introduced to the crowd as slow was fast and what was fast was lightning-fast, a bracing display of fingerboard wizardry, all split-second doublestops, through a crescendoing opening taqsim (improvisation), a stark levantine dance and a happier number that lept from 5/8 to 7/8 time. Beth Bahia Cohen and Ahmet Erdogdular followed with a brief duo set on the Turkish tanbur lute: she bowed hers, holding it upright like a fiddle while he played his guitar-style with a pick. The two doubled each others’ lines effortlessly through another opening taqsim, stately songs from the 18th and 19th centuries, a rapidfire dance by Cohen on kemence and then an inspired, chromatically charged dance number sung by Erdogdular, who’s rightfully earned acclaim as one of Turkey’s foremost exponents of highly ornamented traditional Ottoman singing.
Julian Kytasty brought the lights down with a somber, haunting solo performance on the wide-bodied Ukrainian bandura, a sort of cross between a concert harp and a lute that frequently took on the incisively pinging, staccato tone of a qanun or a cimbalom. He began with a rueful number sung from the point of view of a dying warrior, encouraging his young protege to pick up where he fell. He explained that the blind minstrels who’d traditionally played this repertoire had been brought to extinction in the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. “Singers are never popular with the powers that be,” Kytasty reminded, in a song that “could be straight out of today’s headlines,” a brutally cynical number detailing how truth gets trampled underfoot and thrown into prison while lies are held high for all to see, to be celebrated by the status quo. His dynamically-charged, virtuosic picking took on a flamenco edge on another lament that he managed to fingerpick while simultaneously tapping out a beat on the body of the instrument.
Nikolay Kolev played solo on the Bulgarian gadulka fiddle, an instrument which has grown many additional strings over the last century: his has fourteen, including the resonating, sympathetic ones. He immediately took the intensity to redline, on a couple of wild, hypnotic, rhythmically tricky minor-key dance tunes, a ruthlessly, fluidly efficient romp in the Middle Eastern hijaz mode that began with yet another taqsim and an anthemic tune in 6/8 that vividly and uneasily bridged major and minor without quite being either. The final act paired violinist Nariman Asanov, one of the foremost (and few) Crimean Tatar fiddlers in the US, with ubiquitous and characteristically energetic, witty accordionist Patrick Farrell (who seems to pop up on practically every first-rate Balkan music bill in town, and leads the absolutely hilarious, unique Stagger Back Brass Band). With a singlemindedness that made it seem as if they’d played together for years, they slowly fanned the embers of a violin taqsim over an accordion drone until they were blazing and then romped through a brief series of fiery, minor-key dances, one with a wickedly catchy klezmer feel. Farrell finally got to solo as Asanov held the rhythm down and made the most of it. The entire crew, minus Kytasty (who needed a chair and mysteriously wasn’t provided with one) encored with a simple, memorable Anatolian folk tune, seemingly a tea drinking anthem, Erdogdular’s unamplified vocals soaring over the song’s darkly tinged, chromatic four-bar hook. The next concert in this series is at the Ukrainian National Home on September 25 at 7 PM featuring the North American debut of Ukrainian sensations Tecsoi Banda.
Top Ten Songs of the Week 8/10/09
We do this every Tuesday, even today as we lie low in the heat. You’ll see this week’s #1 song on our Best 100 songs of 2009 list at the end of December, along with maybe some of the rest of these too. This is strictly for fun – it’s Lucid Culture’s tribute to Kasey Kasem and a way to spread the word about some of the great music out there that’s too edgy for the corporate media and their imitators in the blogosphere. Pretty much every link here will take you to each individual song.
1. The Oxygen Ponies – The War Is Over
Noir 60s pop redone as ferocious Bush-era antifascist rant. From their killer new cd Harmony Handgrenade.
2. Norden Bombsight – Snakes
Big dark noir rock tune like a lo-fo Botanica – magnificent stuff. They’re at Small Beast at the Delancey on 9/9.
3. Pray for Polanski – It’s a Lie
Scurrying noir blues, good stuff. They’re at Trash on 8/15 at 8.
4. Animus – Turkiko
AMAZING Greek/gypsy/Middle Eastern band. They will blow you away. They’re at Trash on 8/16 at 11.
5. Jesse Alexander & the Big Fatt – Pretty Promises
Boisterous, slightly Waits-ish oldtimey ska/ragtime inflected band w/horns and strings. “You’ll feel like you’re on drugs but in a good way.” At Trash on 8/15 at 11.
6. Kris Sour – LA Makeover
New Yorker shellshocked in El Lay – spot-on and catchy too!
7. Shonen Knife – Super Group
They’re back with a new bassist and sound exactly like they did ten years ago. And the song modulates! They’re coming to the Brooklyn Bowl in November.
8. Brother Joscephus & the Love Revival Revolution Orchestra – I Won’t Be That Man
Deliciously dark vintage 60s sounding New Orleans soul. They’re at Sullivan Hall on 8/14 at 10 opening for the Rebirth Brass Band
9. The Darlings – I’m Not Going
Sure, it’s a Jesus & Mary Chain ripoff, but it’s a lot of fun. They’re at Death by Audio on 8/14 at 11ish.
10. Willie Nile – House of 1000 Guitars
Sort of the NYC version of Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song, title track from the killer new album.
The Lucid Culture Interview: Painted on Water
Painted on Water is the innovative collaboration of two of the most pioneering stars in Turkish music, chanteuse Sertab Erener and guitarist/composer Demir Demirkan. A mix of traditional Anatolian melodies, American jazz, rock and funk, their brand-new self-titled album just came out this month. Lucid Culture had a few questions for the duo in advance of their live show at the “Turkish Woodstock” at Central Park Summerstage at 3 PM this coming Saturday, June 27:
LC: Whose idea was Painted on Water?
Demir: We came up with the idea of creating a project based on Anatolian musical elements that we can present to a non-Anatolian audience, together with Sertab. We wanted to bring out the large spectrum of musical elements of Anatolian music to the world stage so that it wouldn’t be too foreign but still unique to a wider audience. And we wanted our subject matter to be based on some of the principles of Anatolian and Eastern wisdom like sufism and taoism. Impermanence being one of them actually was the name root of the band. “Painted On Water” is the perfect metaphor for impermanence. The lyrics: “You and me is a long lost story painted on water…” reminds that our lives are colorful paint-drops and images which will be lost and forgotten in time. This is a rather positive point of view – no matter how impermanent our lives are, we still have to paint or picture on this canvas of life with attention and awareness.
LC: Who writes what? Sertab, are you the lyricist and Demir, you’re the composer, or do you mix and match?
Sertab: Demir wrote the lyrics to half of the songs and the rest were written by Phil Galdston.
Demir: I did the arrangements and harmonizing in the songs. In fact, there is no vertical harmony in Anatolian music, it’s a different system. I had to adapt it to a western system and build it harmonically first. The album was co-produced by Jay Newland, and he also mixed some of the songs. Some other material was recorded and mixed by Michael Zimmerling.
LC: Many of these songs are updates of Turkish folksongs – are these well known in your home country or have you uncovered some great obscurities?
Demir: Aegean Bride, the instrumental is actually an instrumental folk theme that I don’t think many people know about. We dug into the archives of a collector from Istanbul. We listened to more than a thousand recordings, some being so seriously old that you can hardly catch the melody. Some songs contain the whole melodies of the folk songs, some partial, and some I’ve written completely.
Sertab: We had to play around with some of the melodies to adapt them into English language. Every language has its own musicality. Melodies modified themselves a little bit with the English lyrics.
LC: The cd opens with an Al DiMeola cover? Demir, are you responsible for this?
Demir: Yes! We asked Al DiMeola if he would play three songs in the album and then Mike Stern and I played one the songs before he came to the studio, and it sounded good. So while Al was on the way to the studio, I came up with the idea to open the album with a two-guitar piece and have Al DiMeola play both. I finished the piece just before he came in to the studio and I handed over the notes to him. Sometimes your heart and mind becomes one and you accomplish things that you couldn’t be able to if you have a very close deadline. Of course when he played it, it’s magic, it turns into music!
LC: The jazzier stuff on the cd carries a great deal of familiarity – it seems that you two grew up with jazz. True or not?
Demir: I studied jazz part-time in college in Ankara, Turkey and then some more in Hollywood. Honestly, jazz never has been my “real thing.” I know the idea, some of the things I write might fall close to the genre but real jazz performers play them and make it into real jazz. When I perform them, they come out mostly blues or rock. On the other hand I like listening to jazz.
LC: Nothing But to Pray is my favorite on the album. It’s especially haunting. What are the origins of this song, and what have you added to the original?
Sertab: I applied my own singing style to the melody. I wanted it to sound unique without falling into any style or category.
Demir: I harmonized the melody in away that I believe fit with the story line. I felt like I was creating a context where the event was happening. It’s really strange when you harmonize a melody that doesn’t have any. The melody begins to change meaning with different harmonies. Maybe some other person would use different harmonies and the whole thing would mean something else. To give a literal example – a bird was flying before the sunrise; a bird was flying before the sunrise over the silent battlefield…you know what I mean? The setting changes the meaning.
LC: What does your song Shehnaz on Shiraz mean?
Demir: The original name of this song is Sehnaz Longa. Sehnaz is a female name. Longa is a certain instrumental style in Ottoman music where instruments play fast passages in unison, roughly. I thought I’d swing this melody and harmonize it and put walking bass lines and improvisations in it. When I started swinging it I thought “Oh Shehnaz must be drunk!” Then I fantasized about a beautiful harem lady who’s getting drunk and dancing. She would be drinking wine and the wine would be a shiraz. So, that’s the story…Shehnaz on Shiraz!
LC: Will someone be doing real live Turkish ebru waterpainting via projection onstage at your Summerstage show like you have at your club concerts?
Sertab: Unfortunately not at the Summerstage, because we will be playing in daylight and the projection doesn’t work…
LC: The bill you’re playing on is amazing, some of the most innovative and important artists in Turkey playing together for the first time in New York – is this an everyday kind of program in Turkey or would it be as special an event there as it is here?
Sertab: There are only a small number of festivals in Turkey, and they are mostly rock festivals. Normally this lineup is one that you couldn’t come across with. This is also an unusual situation for Turkey.
Demir: I have always liked MFO and I know them personally. Great guys besides being great musicians. It’s gonna be my first time sharing the stage with them at an event. I knew Husnu before he made his solo career. He plays clarinet incredibly but not a lot of people know, I actually witnessed this in one of my TV music recordings that he plays the trumpet in such a way that I’d never heard. He plays Turkish music on trumpet!
LC: Will this be like a bunch of old friends hanging out, or do you the various bands involved – MFO, Hüsnü Senlendirici etc. – all travel in different circles?
Sertab: Well, we are living in New York now, half the year, so we’ll walk to the event from our home in Upper West Side. We were at a dinner last night with everyone but everyone travels separately I think. Half of MFO isn’t here yet. When we get together, it’s a lot of laughing and great times!
LC: Anita Baker’s coming to town, is that something you’d be into, or way too mainstream for you?
Demir: I would love to see her but I’ll be in Turkey. July 27th right?
LC: Yeah. That was a trick question actually.
Sertab: It is actually too mainstream for me but I always like to listen to high class performance singers.
Painted on Water play Central Park Summerstage this Saturday as part of the “Turkish Woodstock” festival Istanbulive with Turkish rock legends MFO, iconic clarinetist Hüsnü Senlendirici and the NY Gypsy All-Stars. Doors are at 3, admission is free and early arrival is extremely recommended.