Happy
Easter. Three ladies getting ready
for a brunch. The young one has
been trying on different newly bought dresses for the last two hours. The older one is slowly rising from
bed. The mother hen is telling
them to take certain things off and put other things on, and isn’t anywhere
near ready herself. The Internet
is down which has me ready too throw my computer at the wall, but otherwise,
I’m showered and shaved and ready to depart.
Ray Lema strongly exceeded expectations. The space we saw him in, this
“Post Mountain Art Space” strongly exceeded expectations. I’ll go back there
for sure. http://site.douban.com/192672/ After writing about jazz and African
music day after day. After
photographing people playing live jazz from the street in San Francisco, but
not getting inside, it was splendid to finally enter a hall, take some seats,
watch the lights go down and be blown away. Been way too long.
I wasn’t sure about the artist or the space in yesterday’s entry. Concerns were completely
unfounded. See the man if he comes
to your town.
His sparse approach on the keys which I’d had a bit of work
embracing on some of the earlier albums I’d sampled, took on an Ellingtonian
grace sitting there with his cherubic smile and his faint, but utterly convincing
voice. Here’s a man, which the
Post Mountain brochure suggested was born on a train, there in the Congo. And I thought of Zaire cum Democratic Republic of the Congo and
of what it must have been like to come up in Mobutu Sese Seko’s newly
independent kleptocracy of Afro Centrism.
I thought about ‘Rumble’s in the Jungle’ and of the tunes of Franco and
Tabu Rey, from that flowering period that changed pop music across the
continent. And I nodded and yelled
out appropriately to the stage as he finished the first and then the second
number. Within no time, it
was on.
Ray Lema in his youth, apparently played with Tabu Rey, who
has been profiled on DB before, but this show was certainly no Zaireoire; the style with multiple high-end
jangly guitars that swept out from central Africa in the 70’s. This quintet hadn’t even one guitar. On the on-line video of the quintet,
there is a bald, African bass player, one Etienne Mbappe, who thumped away
confidently. But last night the electric
bass was a hirsute gent whose stringy hair apparently reminded my daughters of
me when I grow my hair out.
Lovely. Can’t find his
name. Any rate, the man could
play. The drummer, Nicolas Viccaro,
aggressive, maybe a bit too aggressive for the mix that night, was certainly capable
and infectious in his own way. The
horns Irving Acao on sax and Sylvain Gontard on trumpet were well matched with
a sense of interaction and play that drew just about everyone in. Mssr. Gontard got off one solo in
particular that had me yelling things aloud like a moron.
And after, yet another number perhaps it was “Anikulapo”
that can only have been dedicated to Fela, referencing the giant’s middle name
that way and vamping off “Gentleman”’s lyrics that had me moving and tracing
the solo of just about each and every man on stage, the leader, Mr. Ray Lema
addressed the audience in a bit of Chinese and then in English. Then, finally, respectfully,
because the event had been hosted by the French embassy, he switched over to
French and sounded somehow even more centered, majestic and convincing. I was so happy to be there with my
girls, who rarely get to see live music, brilliantly delivered. It was a perfect birthday moment. As I said to everyone and no one on the
way out, the night before Easter . . . “this is my cathedral.” For all the times I write about gents’
who’ve passed, or spun out early, or cited obituary’s how wonderful to have
seen this gentleman, and exposed my family to this high art form of the African
Diaspora.
And no one had eaten.
So at 10:00PM or so when we left we began to crawl around the area near
by in the netherland of to-be-destroyed buildings that remain in that
crosshairs between the second and third ring road where the Dongzhimen
overpass, has been cut through.
Oh, great, Din Tai Fung will hit the spot and we plough in and are told
that the chef has packed it in for the night. Back on the crawl and up a block ahead there are four our
five spots that still seem to be serving.
“What kind of food do you guys serve here?” “Shanxi food.” OK. Cool. Fill up
the table with Shanxi food that doesn’t cost much and tastes real good and
unpack this show we’ve just seen before people start to pass out, tired. A birthday taken to its logical end.
And heading in today to this Easter brunch, we pass my
favorite twin trees in all of Beijing.
Off to the right are the twin jacaranda trees of the San Yuan Qiao cloverleaf. And today they are waxing, in full
bloom, purple bouquets outstretched, from top to bottom, indeed trumpeting 姹紫嫣红[1] This
is the time, which this pair of trees waits for every year. Most of the winter they are
barren. During the summer they are
shrouded in leaves that suck in day light but in no way distinguish the two
trunks. But for this week in April, you cannot ask for more than the two
hundred and fifty some odd heliotrope offerings that this tree make to our
city. If you visit our town in the
spring and come in from the airport by car, you can’t miss them.
I am biased because it is the anniversary of my birth. But April really is “the cruelest
month.” What else could ever be so
enviable and temporal?
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