If you don’t live around here (or if you live here but never leave
your bomb shelter) then you might not know that the [Lotus World Music
& Arts Festival](http://lotusfest.org/) is this big deal music
festival in Bloomington. Definitely the biggest event anything like
it in town, they close off streets and get about six venues to all
open their doors to whatever music gets scheduled by the Lotus
organizers. The town starts buzzing. Everyone in my circle of
friends gets really really excited.

Well, almost everyone…

Before I get into it, let me start out with a strong disclaimer.
Although I’m about to say some negative things about the festival, I
generally think of it as a good thing. I’m not trying to convince
anyone not to enjoy it. If you have a great time at it, I’m happy for
you. I have a good time sometimes, and I’ve had some valuable musical
experiences. So, I’m glad for it. But, the deal is, I generally
don’t have very much fun at the event, and I even struggle to enjoy
the music. So, this is a bit about my personal issues with Lotus.

To try to put it briefly, I’ll offer this analogy: imagine you were
attending a special dinner prepared by a number of excellent chefs
from around the world. You go to the event and what you eat turns out
to be: Three tortilla chips with mango salsa; one ravioli with saffron
cream sauce; one shrimp/daikon egg roll; A cup of borsht; and a nice
large bite of calamari. Furthermore, imagine that of that list, the
only thing you’d ever eaten before was ravioli, and that was with
plain tomato sauce. All the rest of them are cuisines that are almost,
if not totally, unfamiliar to you.

To me, although such an experience might fill my belly, it’d be very
hard for me to think of it as a meal. Sure, being exposed to
different things is an experience that I value. But when the morsels
are so small, it’s folly to think that you actually learned anything
about the cuisines you were being exposed to. Maybe you can get
enough of a taste to know that you’d like to learn more about it, but
I’d say that’s about as high as your hopes could reasonably be set.

Perhaps it’s because I like learning. If you offer to teach me
something about Ethiopian folk music, I want to actually learn
something and not just pass through a room where an Ethiopian happens
to be playing on an instrument unfamiliar to me.

Perhaps it’s because of my training in classical music, where sitting
still for 2+ hours and just listening is considered a normal way to
appreciate music. Come to think of it, it’s probably a small
percentage of my socio-economic class that has this experience even
once a year.

I don’t know. All I know is that the event, by and large, doesn’t
really make sense to me as an event.

Used to be I’d go with friends and debate here and there about what
we’d see. All sorts of conversations like “hey, and while we’re on
our way to the folk singer from Belarus, we can stop by and see what
this Cajun thing is like.” This “one bite of everything” approach
definitely left me confused, so eventually I decided I needed to be in
control of my own schedule.

So, this year I told myself “just pick a few items that sound
interesting, and go to those shows in their entirety”. So, I
deliberately avoided sharing the event with any of my friends–and,
seemingly all of my local friends (and a number from out of town) are
at this event, so that can take some work. Avoiding friends, though,
has the added benefit of making me feel like less of a downer. As Rob
pointed out, part of my problem with the event is probably just that
all my friends are running into me and saying “Wow! Isn’t this
AWESOME? Aren’t you EXCITED??!?” What do you say if it’s not true
about yourself? He’s definitely got a point.

Whatever the case, I went to the event with this strategy in mind. My
first goal is to see “Lura”, singing Cape Verdean Song. I didn’t know
where Cape Verde is (I’m sure very few in the audience did either),
but the description in the guide sounds good. However, I get there,
and there’s a long line outside the theater… I’m not good with
lines, I’m afraid, so I change plans and head towards the bluegrass
band King Wilkie. They are fine, fun, young guys playing old music.
It’s fine.

I try to sit and enjoy it. I enjoy it ok. But it seems to take a lot
of effort.

Q: How can you tell when you’re at a Lotus concert?

A: After every song, about a quarter of the audience leaves.

They stand up clapping
at the end of the song, and sometimes you even think “wow, they liked
that so much that they are giving an ovation!” No. They are thinking
about what they are on their way to.

The apparent leader of the Bluegrass band commented on this a few
times. He turned it into a joke, saying “well we’re going to slow it
down now, so that’ll probably get rid of a few more of you.” It was
funny, but I feel quite confident that his comments were based on a
real sense of disappointment. How would you feel if you looked out
into the applauding audience and saw that a substantial percentage of
the crowd was leaving? Even though you know that this is a festival
and they are just trying to take in some other music, how could it not
strike you as disappointing that your music isn’t enough to make
people want to stay?

And, even if you can cope with the disappointment, there’s still the
issue of how you put on a show for a crowd like this. Musicians put a
fair amount of care into crafting their set lists, what song to play
when, to give some shape to their overall performance. Needless to
say, that effort is wasted on at least half of everyone who is going
to hear your band at Lotus.

Finally, musicians talk a good deal about “connecting with the
audience”. Indeed, I’ve heard many interviews with long-time
performers who say that this feeling of connection is the only thing
that makes them feel like they can keep playing show after show, year
after year. Again, it’s gotta be difficult if your audience is
turning over like that.

So, having perused the reasons musicians might not like playing at
Lotus, I’ll continue with my story. Eventually I decided I wasn’t
haven’t *enough* fun, and became one of the people who left in between
songs. I went from the Convention Center to a bar (the Bluebird) to
hear Samarabalouf, from France, “channel the spirit of Gypsy guitarist
Django Reinhardt”. I got to the bar, I got a beer, I tried to get
close enough to the stage to see. I couldn’t. The band sounded good,
I guess. But I couldn’t get into it. I was probably too grumpy
already. I left after I finished my beer. At least the coming and
going seems much more natural in a bar than at a venue with seating.

Coaching myself to stick with my strategy, I went to the First
Christian Church to hear a woman named Badi Assad play Brazilian
Acoustic Music. I did stick with my strategy. I arrived before she
took the stage. I watched the entire thing. She is a remarkable
player. Some of what she did was too saccharin for my tastes,
but… yeah, excellent skill on the guitar, and did some amazing
“vocal percussion” things, including the humming while beat-boxing
trick that my brother and I learned to do from friends in Jr. High.
Oh, she was far better at it than we ever were, though. Quite
impressive.

But she really won me over when she started introducing a song by
saying “You all have heard of the prepared piano…” I think I laughed
out loud… Or maybe I offered a hoot of approval… Whatever,
that’s a pretty big assumption to make that everyone in your audience
has heard of a prepared piano, unless it’s a concert of 20th century “classical” music (and even then…) “…but I am not a pianist, so I want to
play you this song on a prepared guitar.” Her prepared guitar was
still essentially a melodic instrument (unlike a prepared piano which
mostly, imho, becomes a rhythmic percussion instrument), but she
certainly achieved unusual timbres from it, and her melody line
focused on bent notes spanning a few steps, like a steel guitar or
something. And as much as this might seem gimmicky, it didn’t come
off that way to me. Very tasteful, very honest sounding, like we were
hearing the thoughtful experientation of a full-time musician. Which,
of course, we were.

She ended with an extremely impressive bit that gave new meaning to
“mouth percussion” because she hit her head, face, and chest to give
life to an unpitched presentation that put most drum solos I’ve heard
to shame. All of this, when her guitar playing is so good that if she
did nothing but play the guitar, you would still consider her a world
class musician. An amazing performer. I was pleased.

She, by the way, also bemoaned the departure of such large parts of
the audience after every song. She seemed to be consoling herself
outloud, in nice words “this is such an exciting festival, with so
many things to do.” She did eventually joke about how it was like
musical chairs. Kind of funny.

Later I talked with some of my friends about her performance. One
friend mocked her sickeningly sweet vocals. Another friend said that
she heard nothing but guitar solos. This makes very apparently what I
think is inherent in every coming/going at a concert like this: faced
with only five minutes of something, our natural human tendency to
make sense out of things encourages us to simply summarize what we’ve
seen and assume by extrapolation that the other 70 minutes would have
been about the same as the 5 that we saw.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a musician myself that I put myself so in the
musicians’ shoes on this — and really, that doesn’t explain it,
because it does seem like most of the musicians love to play at the
festival — but I’m bothered by the idea that these people devote
their lives to a certain musical exploration… a certain style, or
merging of styles… they belong to cultures that have cultivated one
or most musical styles over the course of generations… and, because
of the nature of the event, we, the attendees, are naturally tempted
to believe that we *understand* something about what we are exposed to
based on a ten minute listen. If there’s anything that I actually see
as a negative social force about Lotus it’s this, and it applies even
moreso to “World Music” as a genre: While being aware of the breadth
of musical traditions in the world is a goal I absolutely support,
believing that you have gained awareness of the *depth* of another
culture’s music through a brief exposure is possibly more culturally
insensitive than not being aware of the tradition in the first place.

In any event, Badi Assad finished her show, to very warm applause. I
decided I’d run back to the bar to drink another beer and see what
Balkan Beat Box was like to decide if I would make time to see them
the following night. Wow, they weren’t what I expected: loud,
electronic dance music, with south-eastern European melodic material.
They were working the crowd into a dancing frenzy, and you gotta like
that. I couldn’t get into the dance scene here very well, almost
certainly because I knew I was headed back to the church for another
sit-down concert. But clearly the band and the audience were feeling
a strong sense of connection. That’s cool. I finished my beer and
headed back.

The last show of my evening was Jake Shimabukuro, I had heard called
“the Jimi Hendrix of the Ukulele.” It was very easy for me to relate
to Jake. I suspect the main reason for that is that he is like me: a
young American dork who grew up listening to classic rock, but who
likes listening to lots of other stuff too. Granted, he’s from Hawaii
and is of Japanese descent, but… I know a fellow dork when I meet
one.

Jake is a phenomenal player. I think the comparison to Jimi
Hendrix is a bit misleading, but he certainly redefined my
expectations of what could be done musically with a ukulele (which, by
the way, was the first string instrument I learned to play). But,
unlike the virtuoso who preceded him on that stage (who, by the way,
he lauded in verbose dorky language before he started playing) this
virtuoso felt like someone I was friends with. Certainly part of that
was his personality, but I honestly do think there’s something to the
notion that it’s easier to relate to people from one’s own culture.
Shouldn’t it be?

So, I was glad to see Jake. Some other shows were still going, and I
could have caught the tail end of one of them. But I didn’t feel like
it. I went home. In retrospect, I wonder why I would think that I
might want to hear more music in an evening than 2 hours of
virtuosic solo string playing by two amazing but highly contrasting
performers. Isn’t that enough?

For me, it is. I’m sure it would be for many happy Lotus attendees.
But, clearly, many people are getting something out of this experience
that I’m not getting. Some friends of mine just want to go to
whatever they can dance to. Some friends just like the feeling that
all sorts of music is going on all around them. There’s some feeling
that people like the collage effect of having all this stuff mixed
together in the evening. I like collages, but I can’t get over the
feeling that this collage is being made by a local committee out of
the torn canvas of oil paintings by artists from around the world who
weren’t thinking of their work as a part of a collage. Or, to use a
different metaphor, I’m so interested in the beauty of the trees that
it pains me to focus on the forest. In this case, the trees are
created by artists whose work I want to learn about, but the forest is
glommed together somewhat haphazardly, to make an event that seems
disturbingly unnatural to me.