David Ernst chats with the World

Tuesday, 2005-09-27

Musings of a Lotus Curmudgeon

Filed under: music & dance, what I did today, journalism, philosophizing — David @ 1:39 am

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 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.

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