THE STEWARTS OF BLAIR

By Elijah Wald

"It's good to have fun. Isn't it?" Belle Stewart asks. leaning forward in her armchair at a friend's house In Waltham. She has just sung a ragtime song, a far cry froin the traditional Scots ballads for which she is known. She urges her grandson Ian to sing something and, when he demurs, prods him with "Well, if you can't sing, then take off your shoes and hum." Three generations of Stewarts laugh heartily.

The Stewarts of Blair are Scotland's foremost musical family. Tonight at 8 at Harvard University's Palne Hall they will be presenting a program of ballads and pipe music. Belle Stcwarl and her daughter Sheila will sing and Sheila's son lan MacGregor will play the pipes.

The Stewarts arc not typical Scots. They arc of the "traveling people" and even their oldest songs are English rather than Gaelic. "Long. long ago they called them tinkers" Belle explains. "Because they worked with tinware. making pots and pans and that. They were all self-taught, because they had never been to school, couldn't read nor write. That's what happened to the ballads as well. They rouldn't write them down and learn them, they just passed down from one to the other."

Belle's father-in-law was champion piper of Scotland for many years and her father "was counted the best singer In the whole of Perthshire." She herself was discovered through her songwrlting. Blair, a small town in the western Highlands, draws pickers from all over the country to its annual berry harvest and Bell wrote a song about them, "The Berryfields of Blair."

The song was learned by other singers and in 1954 a folklorlst came looking for the author. "The directions pointed to our house," Sheila recalls. “So he came and asked my mother if she had written that song and she said yes. That was the start of our career. It just went from there."

Belle, her late husband Alec and their two daughters have toured all over Europe and America. Sheila represented Scotland at the US Bicentennial and, when the pope visited Scotland, was chosen to sing for him. Everywhere they have found an eager welcome. "My husband and I came to the States in '74," Belle remembers. “We were only booked for three weeks, but they kept us for 11 weeks and four days and wanted us to stay for six months.”

The Stewarts are also subjects of a soon to be published book on tinker life by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. “There’s more goes to our tradition than just the song," Belle explains. “The folktales, riddles, superstitions, our cures for illnesses and our own language, which is not Gaelic. It’s called Cant.” Cant, the tinkers’ secret language, is now dying out, but not among the Stewarts. "I've a small dog at home, a very. very small dog, and he knows every word of Cant,” Belle insists.

Ian is now 29, Sheila 50 and Belle almost 80. “God’s good and I’m still here,” she says. Whether it’s according to my behavior or not I don’t know. But I'm still here and very pleased to be here." They are still learning new songs and trying new approaches "We never sang wi’ an instrument in our life,” Sheila says. "And we Just started now singing wi' the goose, that’s what they call the small parlor pipes.” And they still like to meet new people and take time to sit around and sing with them. “The man who made time made a lot of it,” Belles smiles, “and there's a lot of days not touched yet."

Back to the Archive Contents page

MARTIN CARTHY

By Elijah Wald

Martin Carthy has been a leading light of the British folk scene for some 30 years. He gave Bob Dylan the melody of "Bob Dylan's Dream," taught "Scarborough Fair" to Paul Simon and became familiar to American listeners as a member of Steeleye Span and through regular visits as a solo artist and with the Watersons. His work combines a devotion to old ballads with an innovative and amazing guitar style that has influenced a generation of European and American players.

In recent years, Carthy has been touring with his late '60s playing partner, fiddler Dave Swarbrick of Fairporl Convention fame. "In 1988 Dave phoned up and said 'Come along, for heaven's sake, let's do some work,' " Carthy explains, speaking from Philadelphia. "So we did, and we've done a tour of England every year since then.

We've not made a permanent relationship of it, because there's too many other things to do — that makes life interesting. But we came to the States in '90 and '91."

In a folk scene polarized between singer-songwriters and hardcore traditionalists, Carthy is generally placed in the latter category. Talking to him, however, or seeing him in concert, the historical roots of his music are less striking than the immediacy of his presentation. His first interest is direct communication, and he insists that even the fact of playing traditional music has a contemporary message.

“Standing up there and singing a folk song these days is a political statement,” he says. “For a start, you’re flying in the face of the ‘me generation,’ talking about ‘us music’ rather than ‘me music.' That is about as political as you can get. For me, it makes it socialist, and I'm a socialist. A democratic socialist, I would hasten to add."

The serious tone dissolves into laughter, and Carthy explains that "Dave's giving obscene salutes and goose-stepping around the room." As the talk turns to songwriting, however, he is back on track. Carthy says he wrote his first song, "Company Policy," in 1983, as a response to the Falklands war. "I realized that the whole folk scene had become depoliticized, and I was absolutely horrorstruck," he says. "So I determined to try and write a song. It took me bloody ages, but I did it and it was good, actually."

He is clearly proud, but says the experience did not lead to a spate of songwriting. "I find it very difficult indeed," he explains. "And the songs I've been singing for the last 30 years and the songs I've become more and more in love with are so bloody good. The standard set by folk song is so high that I wouldn't want to write anything below that. I mean, why do it? Why write some simpering crap when you've got stuff with real spine to it that's been handed down to you?"

Of course, part of carrying on that tradition is making it personal, refraining the songs so that they do not become inert museum artifacts. Carthy notes that, while most of his songs come from rural singers, his approach reflects his own background. "What I do isn't country music, it's urban music, by virtue of the fact that I'm a city person," he explains. "I'm not an actor. If I'm doing a Scottish song I won't try to sing like a Scotsman, I won't try and put on a regional accent. That's nonsense; it makes the whole thing into a pantomime, and it's much more serious than that for me. And much more fun as well, because you're able to concentrate on the song, to concentrate on the job at hand, which is communicating an idea from me to you.

"I feel these songs, and I don't feel as though I'm condescending to anybody, past or present. That's the important thing. It seems to be a direct line. Finally, after a lot of effort, I feel entirely comfortable with the repertoire that I have and I don't feel as though there's any kind of a pose involved. Anything I've learned about music I've learned on the road, on the hoof. So I don’t have an academic approach; to me, it’s real.”

Back to the Archive Contents page

THE WATERSONS

Something happens when you get a family singing together," Michael Waterson says. "The voices blend and create harmonies that aren't actually there. I mean, we sing plenty of harmonies, but we also do a lot of unison lines which create chords because of the way the voices blend. It's just something magic.

"Of course, I'm prejudiced because I'm part of a singing family," he continues, laughing. Waterson is a founding member of the Watersons, one of the most popular and respected groups on the English folk scene. The Watersons, who have been performing together for more than 30 years, will be at Old Cambridge Baptist Church on Dec. 4 in a special holiday program, "Driving Cold Winter Away" (telephone 666-8744).

The group consists of Michael and his sister Norma, her husband Martin Carthy, their daughter, Eliza Carthy Waterson, and family friend Jill Pidd. All except Carthy are natives of Hull, with lilfcing Yorkshire accents, and they sing the old songs unaccompanied, as they have been sung for centuries.

"I think a lot of the time the instruments actually limit you. if you're going to harmonize and move around in a song," Waterson says. Besides, he adds, "I play guitar badly. Norma plays, but wouldn't dream of playing on stage. So we just decided that we sang better than we played." He laughs again, before adding "Perhaps if more people realized their limitations there'd be more unaccompanied singing."

The Watersons have sung together for as long as they can remember. "We were brought up by me grandmother, and we always sat 'round the fire and sang," Michael says. "The songs weren't strictly folk songs; we used to do hymns and music hall stuff. [British folklorist] A.L. Lloyd put it very nicely: he said we learned the process without the songs. Then, when we came across the old ballads and folk songs, we liked 'em and they fitted in perfectly with the way we were singing already."

"Driving Cold Winter Away" is a new collection of songs, rhymes and stories, based on English winter festivals. "We're doing from November through to the New Year," Waterson says. "It starts with lighting the bonfires, the fire festivals, then the build-up to Christmas, the carols, through to hunting the wren, the New Year and the wassail songs."

Many Of the festivals he mentions are unfamiliar to most Americans, but Waterson is happy to explain. "Hunting the wren," for example: "On St. Stephen's Day, little boys would go out into the fields and catch a wren, loll it, dress it in ribbons, put it in a box and go from door to door, knocking on the door and going 'Please to see the king.' Because the wren was so small, you see, it was considered a magical bird and therefore a king above all of the birds."

Clearly, this is a Christmas program that goes beyond the standard Christian observance. "To me, it's the everlasting circle," Waterson says. "You were born, you live, you die and you come back again, even if you're only minerals in the ground. You move on. Many of the old religions were based on the idea that every year the year is reborn.

"What we have left in Europe and in England and America is just a few of the bones of what were ways of life to people," he says. "Not black magic or mysticism; just something they knew. When summer was finished and winter came on, if they lit a fire they helped to warm the sun up so it would come again the following year. It's a lovely idea, and you don't have to believe in it to believe in it, if you see what I mean."

The Watersons seem to replenish themselves as well. Members leave, new ones join, and a second generation has joined the first. Michael's daughter sang with the group for a time, and his nephew is also a musician, albeit in a heavy metal band. So will the Watersons be out singing folk songs 50 years from now? "Why not?" Waterson asks, cheerfully. "Some of us old ones might even be stubborn enough to still be here."

Back to the Archive Contents page

LA MUSGANA (1995)

By Elijah Wald

La Musgaña is a leading group in the Spanish folk revival, but member Luis Delgado is not surprised to find American listeners unfamiliar with its music. "Even in Spain this music is almost unknown," he says, laughing ruefully.

To many Spaniards and virtually all foreigners, Spanish traditional music begins and ends with flamenco. In reality, though, Spain is probably the most culturally and musically diverse country in Europe. There are the Celtic, bagpipe-playing Galicians, the Catalans, the Andalucians and the Basques, each with their own folk styles. The members of La Musgaña have studied all of these, but their special love is the music of the central plains, the old Spanish heartland of Castilla.

Castilla, especially the region of Salamanca, has preserved one of Europe's oldest musical instruments, the pipe and tabor. The local variant, gaita charra y tamboril, consists of a three-hole flute fingered with the right hand while the left keeps time on a large drum suspended at the player's side. "In Salamanca the man who played this was a very important part of the community, present in every wedding, every celebration," Delgado says, speaking thickly accented English. "But the tradition has been almost lost. Our idea was to take this music and try put it on a stage."

Traditionally, the pipe and tabor is a solo instrument, but in the transition to stage performance La Musgaña added such unaccustomed companions as clarinet and electric bass, creating a sound that sometimes recalls the great French group Malicorne. "We had to make...it's not exactly changes, but musical arrangements," Delgado says. "You have to do this in trying to keep the music alive, so it doesn't become like a museum thing."

The difficulty was to broaden the music's appeal without losing its special flavor, and in this La Musgaña has succeeded impressively. Their latest album, "Las Seis Tentaciones" (Xenophile), conveys the group's unique flavor. There are hints of outside influences, from Steeleye Span to Japanese classical music, but the players have deep roots in their own tradition, and in the end they sound only like themselves.

Their strength is in combining the courage of innovators with the devotion of disciples. "This a difficult music," Delgado says. "It's not easy to play, especially the three hole flute and the tabor. You have to go to Salamanca and try to find a master teacher who shows you the way to play. It's an oral tradition, and you have to stay there and try to learn. That's what [group founder] Enrique Almendros did many years ago."

Once the traditional music was learned, the group tried to arrange and reshape it without losing its special flavor, a task Delgado says is far from simple. "What you play with the three hole flute is a natural music that comes out of this instrument," he says. "This is a diatonic instrument, it plays only one scale, but all the time jumping from octave to octave. When you have to play this on a clarinet or accordion or a modern instrument it is not at all easy. If you think it is, talk with Jaime [Muñoz], the man playing the clarinet."

After eight years together, though, La Musgaña sound thoroughly at home in their style. Like any good ensemble, they have found a sound that lives and breaths, and despite its ancient roots it sounds anything but academic. "This is dance music," Delagado says. "For people who do not know it, it is not easy to dance but it's easy to enjoy. It is exciting, not like easy listening music. It isn't possible to sleep in one of our concerts."

Back to the Archive Contents page

French Canadian Revels (1997)

By Elijah Wald

Benoit Bourque still laughs when he tells the story of how he became involved in French Canadian folk dancing.

"I started when I was 13 years old,'' he says. "I was at school, and I did a lot of sports, and one of my friends said, 'Oh, Benoit, would you like to come with me and join the folkdance group at school?'

"I said 'Dance? Are you crazy? That is for girls.' And he said 'Yes!'

"So that's why we started.''

Today, Bourque is one of the best known traditional step dancers in Canada, as well as an acclaimed accordionist and a master of "kitchen percussion,'' the rhythmic clatter of spoons and bones. With his partner, Gaston Bernard, who sings and plays violin, mandolin and guitar, he will be a featured performer at this weekend's Midsummer Revels at the DeCordova Museum.

The Revels, which provide a seasonal counterpart to the better-known Christmas Revels, are a celebration of the Summer solstice, and each year they are based on a different theme. This year, they introduce Bostonians to Les Feux de Saint Jean, an annual French-Canadian festival in honor of John the Baptist. There will be dancing and singing by a large cast of local performers, both professionals and amateurs, as well as Bourque and Bernard, the locally based Cape Breton fiddler Joe Cormier, and a Franco-American singer and storyteller, Michael Parent.

Bourque says that the St. John festival is the major cultural event of the year. "If you really want a good time to get the French Canadian spirit, this is the festival. Usually, it's on June 24, but we always have things happening all around that date and, when you're a folk musician, you are always busy, even more than at Christmastime. The origin is strange, because St. John the Baptist is something religious, but the origin was more secular. Around 1826 they started this big event to represent the French in Canada. At first it was not a religious thing, but the church realized that it was a very important event, and needed to be related to the religion. So now, there is something religious in it, but it is still very open.''

Patrick Swanson, the Revels' artistic director, traces the origin of the event even further back, to pagan agricultural festivals. Throughout Europe, Midsummer is celebrated with huge bonfires, the "Feux'' of the festival's name, representing destruction and rebirth. The fires will be represented here by votive lights and a torchlight procession, and there will also be a maypole, though not quite as people may remember it from their schooldays.

"It is quite different from what people think of now, the pretty ribbon dance with young ladies in white dresses,'' Swanson says. "That's a very Victorian idea of it. The maypole is really quite ancient, and the older idea was this kind of giant pole with garlic and mirrors on top, the idea being to attract the sky to mate with the earth. We'll have a maypole dance, which we invite audience members to join in, and a torchlight procession with a young John the Baptist, who is represented by a young boy having a bad hair day, dressed in a sheepskin, and we put him and a chair and carry him around.''

Bourque is perfectly comfortable with the mix of traditions in the Revels, and points out that the French Canadian tradition is itself very much a cultural melting pot. He says the first European arrivals in Canada, after the Vikings, were Breton fishermen with French Celtic backgrounds, but that they were followed by other French, English, and Irish immigrants, and there was also a strong influence of Native American music and dance.

He was also charmed by the troup of local musicians that has been brought together to join Bernard and him in the oddly named Big Mama's Kitchen Band. "They are very interesting people,'' he says. "And what is really special for me is these people, most of them don't make their living from music and being on stage, so they have the excitement of young people. I spent many years playing with people older than me, and they were very good musicians, but sometimes it was like they had played it all before. But the Revels people, though they are not all so young, they have that freshness and excitement. They do a different show every year, so it is always new for them, and I think you will see that excitement on the stage.''

Back to the Archive Contents page

Sophia Bilides (Greece 1997)

By Elijah Wald

WEST ROXBURY-- Sophia Bilides sits on the couch in her living room, looking a bit nervous. Though an experienced performer, she has done few interviews, and she wants to make sure to get everything right. She speaks slowly and carefully, often modifying her remarks to make them more precise.

Bilides (pronounced "Bee-LEE-thees'') only moved to Boston from Western Massachusetts this summer, but she has been an established presence on the local music scene for a decade. She is the foremost practicioner of the Greek singing style known as smyrneika, a close cousin of the more popular rebetika.

Both styles have their roots among ethnic Greeks in what is now Turkey. In 1922, the Greco-Turkish wars forced a mass emigration of Greeks from Asia Minor. Smyrneika is the music the emigres brought with them, named for the city of Smyrna (now Izmir). "My grandparents came from a village called Permata in central Asia Minor, and most of the residents of Permata eventually resettled in New Haven,'' Bilides says. "Growing up, I was part of this uniquely Anatolian "village'' within the larger Greek-American community. The Permata elders spoke to each other in Turkish, while my parents' generation spoke Greek, and my generation spoke English - which illustrates the route the refugees traveled.''

Bilides was interested in music from an early age. "I had a very rich musical upbringing as far as all the different influences that came my way,'' she says. "I was in a Greek household, and I also heard Greek music in the church and at dances or weddings. But my mother was Italian, and when we went to her house my aunts and uncles would burst into Neapolitan songs. And then the neighborhood I grew up in was African-American, so I had that culture influencing me as well.''

As a singer, Bilides first pursued a classical career, getting a degree from New England Conservatory. Soon, though, she found herself drawn to the American popular songs of the 1930s and 1940s and, even more, the Greek songs of the same period. At the time, this was considered a distinctly odd choice, even in the Greek community.

"I would often get the question, 'Why are you doing this old music?,' '' she says. "There was a tendency to want to look forward and not to look back, which is common with any immigrant community.

But I thought the songs were wonderful. I loved the way they encompass both ends of the emotional experience: You have the great masters singing these very virtuostic laments that are so emotionally compelling, and then on the other hand you have songs that say 'Let's eat and drink, dance and sing and make music and make love, precisely because we are refugees and our spirit can not be broken.' The body of songs that came out of that experience just touches me.''

The music's obscurity, however, presented Bilides with a problem. "There was no one to learn it from,'' she says. "The best teacher I ever had was my variable speed tape recorder. I would listen to the virtuoso singers on those old 78s -- Dalgas, Eskenazi, Kanaropoulou, Roukounas -- and I would slow it down so I could hear all the notes. The only way I could learn the musical language was to imitate what they were doing. Then, after a while, I reached a point in my development where I could add my own ornaments.''

Bilides also had to find musicians who were willing to adapt themselves to the music she loved. Currently, she performs with simply a trio, including her husband Tom Groggan on guitar and Mike Gregian on doumbeleki, a Greek drum. Bilides fills out the musical mix, playing the santouri, a sort of hammer dulcimer. "I had never intended to accompany myself,'' she says. "I felt the singing was more than enough to occupy me, and the tradition definitely did not include female instrumentalists. But I fell in love with the sound of the santouri as soon as I heard it -- rich and dark, and at the same time delicate and shimmery -- it just mesmerized me. ''

Bilides' CD, "Greek Legacy,'' has a larger ensemble of musicians, and shows the depth to which she has submerged herself in the tradition. "I had to unlearn a good portion of my classical training,'' she says. "Because Greek singing is much much more in the nose and the throat than the head tone that you strive for in classical singing. I was tempted to use that, but I thought it was disrespectful to the tradition, because you either try to emulate the sound or not. I've never presumed to represent this music as a Greek-born person might, but I try to sing it the way I hear it.''

To Bilides, the proof of her success has been the reaction of older Greeks. "They love it,'' she says, beaming. "That's the best validation, after any concert, when the elderly people come up to me and grab my hand, and they're effusive about it. They say, 'Thank you so much for singing this. I remember hearing it as a little girl or a little boy.' Or 'I remember my mother singing this.' ''

Bilides has devoted roughly equal attention to singing at Greek cultural events and bringing her music to outsiders. "I like staying in the community and singing for them, but also getting the music out,'' she says. "I can't recreate the cafe-aman [where the music was traditionally played], but I like to try to place the audience there as much as possible, to have them picture the sense of a Greek cabaret as it might have been in the '30s and '40s. I love sharing this tradition, because I love the songs and I think they're fun. And I like trying to get people to join in, and to sing along on a few choruses.'' Sophia Bilides and her trio will perform a concert of smyrneika at Devlin Hall, Boston College, on Friday evening (325-3987).

Back to the Archive Contents page

Iva Bittova

By Elijah Wald

It is no easy feat to describe Iva Bittova's work. The Czech singer-violinist, who normally performs solo, plays music that includes elements of both deep folk tradition and the contemporary avante garde, while sounding completely natural and organic. Both her singing and playing have their roots in Balkan folk styles, transmuted through some twenty years of experimentation into something new and different.

"I say this is my own folk music,'' Bittova says, speaking in strongly accented English from her home in a village near Brno. "Some people say it's kind of alternative music, or avante garde music, but for me it's more folklore, my own folklore.

Its inspiration is from nature, and also when I was a child I listened to a lot of folklore music from East, like Balkan, Romanian and Hungarian. My father played classical music, so I also listened to that. But I like very much authentic folklore music, but really authentic.''

On her first American album, "Eva Bittova'' (Nonesuch), the pieces tend to start simply, with the tonalities and melodic feel of Balkan traditional music, then to expand in surprising directions as Bittova explores the possibilities of the original sounds. Her technique, both as a singer and player, is formidable, but what is most impressive is the imaginativeness of her excursions. When she plays a familiar piece, the Yiddish theater song that Joan Baez made famous as "Donna, Donna,'' it is so transmuted as to be virtually unrecognizeable.

"It is very hard to have a category for this music, because it is not usual.'' Bittova says. "When I start first to play, some people in the audience are smiling at what I do, because it's a special sound for them. But I think my music is quite natural. Most of the inspiration is from nature, silence, and my children. I live in the village, a very quiet place, I have a garden and forests around and this is something what I really like. And in my music there's no affect, no special image, it's really straight to the people with the emotion.''

Many modern musicians who speak of nature and quiet produce work that is so amorphous as to be a sort of aural wallpaper, but Bittova's work is anything but background music. Often warm and beautifully melodic, it can also get weird, with shrieks and odd bowing techniques. At its best, it really does have the strengths of a self-created folk music, the direct, stark power of the Balkan vocal tradition or Hungarian fiddling.

In keeping with this sound, Bittova says that she prefers to play without any amplification, though this is often not possible. Playing acoustically gives her a natural sound, and also allows her to move freely around the stage and even up to the audience. Indeed, she has been noted for the theatrical movement of her live performances, though she downplays the importance of this aspect of her work.

"I studied as an actor, but I never feel my performance as acting,'' she says. "I was very happy and successful in the theater, in very avante garde theater, so I have some experience of this and I can feel very relaxed to walk on the stage and to make some little effects, but this is not my [primary] plan, to make show for the people. The first point of my work is to make good music. Then, just for relaxing, improvising, I can make some kind of humor on the stage, and I can use some little effects. Some people say it's a very big difference to see my concert live, some people they prefer it, but I heard also that some people like to close their eyes and just to feel the energy and listen to the music, and don't see what is happening.''

Bittova has been in the United States before, but without an album, and her work has been known only to a tiny audience of cognoscenti. This tour will presumeably reach a somewhat wider range of listeners, but, unlike many performers reaching for the American market, Bittova speaks of her previous visits with marked ambivalence.

"The U.S. is a huge country and the style of life goes very fast,'' she says. "This is something which is extremely different from what I really like. I like to be in quiet. Of course, I just have experience from the big cities -- for sure there must be some beautiful, quiet places -- but for me the feeling is that the life goes very fast and if the people go to see a concert it's just one flash and one moment in the whole day, they have so many pictures and so many sounds in the mind. So I like to come to play, but I hope that I will bring to the people some part of my place, my silent place.''

Back to the Archive Contents page

Duquende

By Elijah Wald

Though few people noticed the fact, last year’s visit to Symphony Hall found Paco de Lucía, for the first time, working without his brother Pepe as the vocalist for his group. Instead, he had a young singer whom many consider the finest of the new generation of deep flamenco cantaores: Juan Cortés, or, as he is known to the flamenco world, Duquende.

The name, Duquende explains on the phone from his home in the Sabadell neighborhood of Barcelona, is the Russian Gypsy equivalent of "duende," the Spanish word that is usually translated as "soul." It was given him when he started performing professionally. That happened very young, even by flamenco standards.

"I started singing when I was only nine," Duquende says, speaking in fast, street-accented Spanish. "Camarón de la Isla played guitar for me. He was here in Barcelona, and he invited me onstage, saying he would play the guitar. For me, it was marvelous, to be able to say that had happened to me."

Camarón, who died in 1992, was the greatest singer in modern flamenco. Like de Lucía, he was from Algeciras, and the two were frequent partners. He was a singing star, who very rarely played guitar, and for him to back up a child was the highest possible form of support and encouragement.

For Duquende, that moment shaped his future. "Camarón was my roots, that is where I come from," he says. "As I see it, for everything in old-style flamenco, and everything that can be, Camarón was the perfect singer. He had the tone, the rhythm, everything. He had all of flamenco. He had his own style, but based on the old ways. He always listened to the old singers and was a great aficionado of singing."

For a flamenco artist, afición is the most important single attribute. It is not traditionalism, exactly: Duquende, like de Lucía, has worked with horn sections and electric instruments. It is, rather, an understanding and passion for the essence of the music. Anyone can be born with a great voice or fast fingers, but to truly be flamenco one must be immersed in its world, studying, listening, eating and breathing it. Duquende was born into a family of Gypsy aficionados, and the sound was around him from birth.

"My grandfather played guitar and sang as well," he says. "It was a traditional thing, a family thing. Even today, in my house there is always flamenco. After eating, all the time, there is always a guitar playing."

Duquende says that it is this that sets Gypsy musicians and dancers apart from Payos (non-Gypsies) who have studied flamenco: "This is our custom. We get it from the old women, the old men. The Payo does not live this, and I think it is very important. One can hear the difference. I very rarely make a mistake" guessing if an artist is or is not a Gypsy.

Though, then again, there is de Lucía, who is by birth a Payo. "No, no, no," Duquende laughs. "He is in the life. Paco is not Payo, he is a myth, a star of flamenco. He is more Gypsy than the Gypsies."

After Camarón’s death in 1992, Duquende became something of a standard-bearer of the harsh, deep flamenco vocal style. He worked together with Camarón’s longtime guitarist, Tomatito, who accompanied him on an excellent solo album in 1993 (available only as an import). Thus, it was perhaps logical that de Lucía should choose him as a vocalist. Still, Duquende says that the invitation was quite unexpected.

"He had heard me on tapes, and at parties, Gypsy parties, flamenco parties," he says. "He would be there, drinking his little glass and listening. Artists like to do this, when they don’t have to work they like to get together in a bar with four or five aficionados and listen to singing, dancing. But it was a very great surprise when he called me at my house. It was my dream, the dream of my life, that Paco would call."

One wonders if it was the similarity to his old partner Camarón that attracted de Lucía to the young singer, but Duquende thinks not. "My style resembles his, but everyone has his own weapon, and does what he can in the moment, when the duende comes out," he says. "And a guitarist looks for a singer who can be his weapon. It is not a question of style, he wants someone who speaks, who has something in his singing."

Duquende has been touring with de Lucía for two years. He has a vocal on the guitarist’s new CD, "Luzia" (Blue Thumb), and de Lucía plays on two cuts of a recording Duquende hopes to complete before flying to the U.S. Since flamenco has traditionally been a singer’s music, some vocalists might not want to live in the shadow of a guitar virtuoso, taking only a couple of solos a night, but Duquende says it was his goal to be with de Lucía, and he intends to remain in the sextet as long as he is welcome.

After all, flamenco singers do not normally tour around the world. In flamenco, as in blues, the lack of aficionados has put the spotlight on instrumental virtuosity rather than vocal soul. Guitar flash is more accessible to a new audience than the darkly passionate sound of a great cantaór.

Which is something of a tragedy. Like deep blues, deep flamenco is in danger of disappearing. "There are very few young aficionados," Duquende says. "Few young people take the time to listen to the old people, to gather roots from below in order to do new things, to base themselves in the classic style, el flamenco puro."

So, will the music survive, or are we now seeing its last gasp? "That, one never knows," Duquende says. "Flamenco is a mystery, and enchantment." He pauses, and laughs: "One never knows how the hare will jump."

Back to the Archive Contents page

Alessandra Belloni

By Elijah Wald

In medieval Italy, women overcome with what would later be called hysteria were said to have been bitten by the tarantula. They would go into a sort of trance, and dance what came to be known as the tarantella. Over the years, the tarantella became a popular folk dance, but never completely lost its roots in mythology and folk medicine.

Alessandra Belloni has devoted her life to researching and performing the tarantella and other traditional musics and dances of Southern Italy. She has also become a virtuoso percussionist, written up in such magazines as “Modern Drummer” and “Percussion Source.” Which may surprise some people, since her principle instrument is the tambourine.

“The tambourine is a very complicated instrument,” Belloni says, on the phone from Sao Paolo, Brazil, where she is conducting a series of concerts and percussion workshops. “Of course the silly version of tambourine playing is just to hit it like that, you know, but it is a very important instrument in many cultures. In North Africa, Turkey, Egypt, the tambourine is even a classical instrument, in the orchestra.”

Belloni, who appears at Johnny D’s on Wednesday, was born in Rome, but her family was from the south and she had a grandfather who played tambourine, snare drum and mandolin. “He played this folk music,” she says. “And when I was little I was really embarrassed at family gatherings when they used to play this music, because we all wanted to listen to rock ’n’ roll, you know. But then, in the '70s, there was a big revival of Italian folk music and theater and I got interested in that, and I saw people play this tambourine, especially Alfio Antico.”

Antico was a shepherd from Sicily whose playing inspired a tambourine revival. “In Italy he's really like a legend,” Belloni says. “Because he was the first one to take this technique to a very high level. When I saw him perform, something clicked, because my grandfather used to do that. He inspired me, but I really learned the most in the street, by following these rituals that happen mainly in the summer in very remote areas in the South of Italia, in Campagna, Puglia, Calabria, Sicily.”

Belloni sought out villages that had maintained ancient, often pre-Christian traditions, and did her best to join in and learn the local music and dances, which often lasted from evening till dawn. At first, she encountered a good deal of suspicion, but as her drumming technique improved, so did her reception: “In the beginning I would get suspicious looks and a lot of challenge -- especially the men would check me out to see if this woman could really drum. But once I reached that point where I could just play without getting tired, I don't have to prove myself. People now know who I am and I'm really well received and it's fun.”

Today, Belloni says, nearly all the percussion is played by men, but traditionally the style she plays was a woman’s style. “The large frame drums go back to the ceremonies of Isis, they come from Egypt, and also were used in ancient Greece and Rome. Women priestesses used this drum a lot for rituals, for the Earth Mother, for Cibele in Rome and also for the Moon Goddess. Men played it too, but there was a whole specific ceremonial aspect that was a women’s tradition.”

Belloni says that, much to her dismay, this tradition has largely died out in recent decades. The women who played in honor of the Black Madonna, for example, a practice with pre-Christian roots, were from a culture that has virtually disappeared. “They were peasants, working the earth. The frame drums that they used, the tambourines, they used to make with the sifters that they used to plant seeds into the earth. They used to just put a goat skin and the little jingles on these, and make a tambourine.

“So, all of this was totally connected to the rituals for the earth. Now, the women don't work in the fields so much, and they've been taught by the modern society to be different, to be civilized. So they take a job or try to look sexy and imitate the women they see on TV. It's the same problem that is happening all over the world, with the society. They lost touch with the earth, and with that they lost both physical and inner strength. That's what I believe very much. This is very profound for me. To learn this style is not just to learn the technique, to develop the skill, but it gives an immense amount of power, inner power, and I rediscover a female energy that comes from the earth.”

Belloni first came to the United States in her teens, and has been based in New York ever since, though she has often returned to Italy to study and perform. In 1980, she was co-founder of the South Italian music and dance group I Giullari Di Piazza, and she has collaborated frequently with the acclaimed frame drummer Glen Velez. At Johnny D’s, she will be accompanied by African drummer Tony Vacca, in an effort to explore and reintegrate the African influences in her music.

“It's gonna be my first time to do this repertory with mainly African percussion,” she says. “It appeals to me, because I do believe that this form of music therapy and this healing drumming originated in Southern Italy, but in the history most of it comes from Africa, because Africa is closer to us than Northern Europe. All of this connected in the ancient times, and it makes a lot of sense to do it now in America, because it really is like continuing the normal evolution of this music.”

Belloni will be playing and singing music from all over Southern Italy, as well as from other Mediterranean countries, and dancing both the “Tarantella di Ogliastro,” a musical exorcism, and the “Pizzica Tarantata,” a trance dance to cure the mythical spider’s bite. While, to her, this music and dance is both deeply spiritual and medicinal, and she will be doing a workshop the following Saturday on that aspect of her work, she adds her performance is not just for anthropologists, historians, or healers. “This music is really live, with an immense energy,” she says. “It's really a lot of fun.”

Back to the Archive Contents page

Greek traditional music

By Elijah Wald

Greece boasts one of the richest and most ancient musical cultures in Europe, but in general the Greek concerts on this side of the Atlantic are limited to contemporary pop. That makes next week’s Festival of Greek Music and Dance at Brookline’s Hellenic College particularly welcome. The most extensive festival of Greek traditional styles ever to come through town, it will include instrumental ensembles from Epiros and Crete, an Epirot polyphonic chorus, a Cretan dance troupe, and a rembetika group, performing and giving workshops on their respective styles.

None of the groups will be familiar to many readers -- or even to most Greeks -- but a sample cassette proves all to be first-rate. Their styles are, in a sense, the ancestors of modern "world" fusions, formed at a crossroads of cultures and showing influences from Europe, Asia, Arabia, and all the varied seafaring peoples of the Mediterranean. They can sound like medieval European ensembles one moment, Arabic orchestras the next, or a fascinating blend of the two.

While the musicians come from different regions and traditions, all have deep roots in the folk past, the days when music-making was an avocation rather than a profession. "In the older days it was something you did part time," explains Michalis Skoulis, who plays in the ensemble of his father, the lyra virtuoso Vasilis Skoulas. "They mainly participated in weddings, in baptisms, in any social events, just where they lived. Because back then they didn’t have cars to go around. They would be invited to play and the weddings would take place for three or four days in a row, and they wouldn’t stop at all. And then, when they didn’t have weddings, they would have sheep to take care of or different other occupations."

The lyra, which reaches back to the Minoan period, is probably the oldest surviving European member of the violin family, a three-stringed, mandolin-shaped, bowed instrument that he rests on his knee to play. His Cretan quintet also includes mandolin, guitar, and two laoutos, or Greek lutes, long-necked descendents of the Arabic oud.

Skoulas explains that Cretan music comes in two styles: love songs and the "revolutionary" music they will play for the Anogia Dance Ensemble. "They’re all rebellion dances," he says. "Rebels used to dance them to exercise their bodies before they would go to fight. The rhythm that they use is quite fast, and the dance itself it reveals a revolution within it. And you need strong men to dance it."

Skoulas’s group and the polyphonic chorus will be performing the oldest styles on display at the festival, music that harks back to the dawn of European civilization. Similar traditions underlie the somewhat more instrumentally modern ensemble of Petroloukas Halkias, a revered clarinetist whose quintet includes two clarinets and violin along with laouto and percussion. At 66, Halkias can boast more than 50 years as a professional musician, including 19 living in New York, but could not be interviewed, as he speaks no English.

All the above groups give workshops on their styles on Thursday, and perform a concert next Friday. Friday’s workshop and Saturday’s main concert will feature Maryo and the Tombourlika Ensemble, playing the most popular of Greek folk styles, rembetika and smyrneika.

Rembetika, often compared to flamenco or blues, appeared in Greece’s harbor cities around the turn of the last century as the music of sailors, criminals and prostitutes. "The first of the rembetiko songs they come from jail," explains Yiannis Alexandris, the band’s leader, who is based in the northeastern port city of Thessalonika. "In Thessalonika there was a very old jail, and there have been many people suffering in the older times."

Maryo, whose strong voice shimmers with Mediterranean melisma, is one of the few divas of traditional rembetika, a music that has been adapted and popularized by recent Greek stars, but is rarely heard in its pure form. "The pop singers, between other things they sing some rembetika songs in the modern way sometimes," Alexandris says. "But Maryo is a traditional singer, she has been singing since she was about 13 years old, and playing the accordion with her father around the country[side] of Greece. And only in the last 5, 6 years she starts to make recordings and things like that. She’s one of the last singers who can sing very good rembetika music, the real rembetika."

Alexandris’s group will also be playing smyrneika, an older, related style brought by Greek immigrants from Asia Minor, or Turkey. In keeping with its geographical roots, the music mixes instruments from the Greek and Eastern traditions, and the sextet will include bouzouki, accordion, violin, the Arabic oud, the Persian santouri (a hammer dulcimer), and the baglama, a sort of tiny bouzouki ("so small that you can put it in your pocket," Alexandris says).

Old as all of these styles are, all remain popular in their native regions, and the musicians say that there is no shortage of work. Skoulas, for example, says that their concerts and tavern appearances are crowded with young dancers who show the same enthusiasm as their parents or grandparents.

"It’s a minority music, but it is very strong," he says. "My father says that it has always been the same situation, and that the young people are always there. Because you’re born in a certain place and you have certain ways of growing up, certain things that come out without anybody teaching you how to do them. You understand what I’m trying to say? It’s something like the accent. Like the New York people, they grew up in New York, they hear other people talking in a certain way and they grow up talking the same way. This is the same thing: You grow up in a certain place, you see all the people around you dancing, and you dance as well."

Back to the Archive Contents page