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07/04/2005: "Improvising with Traditions"
Once again this year, the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife offers fascinating insights about the living nature of artistic tradition. In this brief review, I will highlight a couple examples in the visual and musical arts that I found especially interesting because of my own background in world art traditions.
The Folklife Festival is an annual event at the Washington DC National Mall, which presents cultural traditions from the United States and all the countries of the Americas, plus a limited selection of other countries worldwide. This year's focus is on the US Forestry Service, American culinary traditions, Latino music, and the culture of Oman. Whenever I am in the DC area, I attend as often as I can. My observations here are based on the second day of the festival, on 24 June, and I hope to return before it is over.
Oman, bordering Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Ocean, has historically served as a hub between Africa, India, and the Middle East. Omani attractions at the Folklife Festival include ceremonial dancing and a range of artisan goods including indigo dyed fabrics. As founder of a program focused on indigenous art materials of Latin America, I found it interesting that the name of the añil plant from which Latinos used to derive a blue dye, is precisely the same term in Arabic. Of course, the Arabs occupied Spain for eight centuries: not only did many of their words enter the Spanish language, many of their traditions also migrated eventually into the Spanish New World.
Because of my background in Latin American traditions, my attention was also attracted to the mostly Latino concert series, the first of which was titled "The Mexican Son". The term son, which literally means "sound", in this case refers to a particular musical genre that exists alongside and often blends into other forms such as the cumbia and ranchero.
The first group, a trio named Los Camperos de Valle, performed sones from the region of San Luis Potosí, accompanied by violin, a tiny jarana guitar, and a larger guitarra quinta. Some of the pieces were old standards, some were new compositional settings of contemporary poetry, and some of the pieces were almost completely improvised. Using a characteristic call-and-repeat style packed with falsetto grace notes and combined with tightly lilting choruses, the jarana player would improvise verses about any number of subjects -- a favorite of the evening was a series of rhymed commentaries joking about their visit to Washington, DC -- which then would be taken up with slight variations and inversions by the violinist.
The second group was a large, Chicago-based ensemble named Sones de México, which takes musical mestizaje to a whole new level, mixing in elements of Colombian cumbia, Caribbean Afro-Latino samba, Tex-Mex polka, as well as eccentric infusions of rock and roll, country, western swing, Celtic and klesmer jazz. Performing with a wide variety of traditional Mexican stringed instruments including harp and mariachi bass, they also played an amazing range of other instruments ranging from brass and wind to accordion and donkey jawbone, riveting the audience with happily hip interpretations of everything from ancient Aztec compositions to Buck Owens standards.
Additional Latino concerts in this series will present Puerto Rican mountain music, Nuyorican plenero music, and Salvadoran merengue. There will also be native American and back-country music, all of which is listed in the Smithsonian website (www.folklife.si.edu/festival/2005) from 5:30 -9 pm during most of the festival days. The regular daily schedule is 11 am - 5:30 pm, June 23-27 and June 30-July 4, 2005. An important new feature of the Smithsonian site is a downloadable archive of world musical traditions.
William Swetcharnik, 25 June 2005
