It's early Sunday morning in Manila, roundabout daybreak, my back aches, and work is screaming for my attention, but it is the Lord's day, the seventh day upon which one is 'sposed to rest. Unfortunately, being a workaholic, my idea of recreation is to write a gonzo Pearl instead of cranking out yet another high falutin' economistic development-jargon laden document.
To facilitate the endeavor, I have opted for a creativity soundtrack featuring Muddy Waters alternating with Bill Monroe under the headphones while allowing my fingers to roam about the keyboard, aided and abetted by random free associations generated from some odd corner of a now-presumably mature hillbilly intellect full of residual memories and burdened by an acute and growing awareness of human mortality and the fact that everything always ends up coming full circle.
Yep, it's one of those Pearls. In keeping with my protestations about heavy lifestyle demands in the previous Pearl, 'tis time for yet another spontaneous gonzolic ramble.
One of the more striking realizations that hit me when I returned to the Philippines in 1998 after 16 years in LA was that the relative isolation from international events and world at large I had experienced in early '80s Manila was long gone. During my stint as a USAID consultant, I stayed at the Robelle House, an atmospheric and aging colonial type Pension House preferred by free wheeling Western business hustlers, Ozzie oil workers, and spooks (often shacked up with moonlighting bargirls on week-to-week renewable contracts). I believe I told a tale about how I spent my spare time playing blackjack and proposing to my wife in three days in Blackjack Filipino Style).
Manila seemed so incredibly slow and out-of-touch! No good coffee, only instant, even in the 5 stars; no New York Times or Wall Street Journal except a week late if you got to the Intercon newsstand on a particular afternoon before the ex-pats snapped 'em all up. No American network television anchormen to keep one abreast of international events, and there was certainly no email or internet.
Contrast that to a recent typical day in Manila as lived by your humble correspondent sometime recently during this Year of Our Lord 2003.
Wake up at 4 am, check e-mail to see if one of my stateside clients needs something before the end of their working day, which happens about two out of five weekdays. Most of 'em are located in Los Angeles, which means it's 1 pm there when I arise. Should they indeed require long-distance access to my cognitive processing abilities, say a couple of slides for a Powerpoint or a short speech for a CEO client who had an unexpected speaking commitment pop onto his cluttered schedule, I gotta crank the deliverable out toute de suite, like by golly before I head out the door at 6:30 am. Check Google News (my home page) to see if the world has blown up; turn on the coffeepot to make a pot of brewed French Roast coffee ground from beans just the night before; perhaps a quick international call or chat session; and always ensuring that my daily roadmap/to-do list is in order and all files arranged. Then time to hit the road, Jack.Quick pitstop at a nearby hotel where I belong to the spa, mostly because of their nice twin setup of hot sauna and steambath; usual routine is sauna first, cold shower, then catch a couple of morning Bizasia type shows on cable, then the steam bath and another cold shower, then dress in monkey clothes. Grab a few local papers, and of course the AWSJ and IHT (read the local rags over breakfast), then head off to one of the development agencies that own me for the nonce, another day of being strategic, thinking big thoughts, writing reports, and otherwise contributing to further the development (or deterioration?) of 21st century civilization.Spend the morning in a variety of intellectual activities, with odd real time activities including keeping an eye on the score/play-by-play of the (recent) NBA finals on the net, going back and forth with constantly revised drafts of Important Documents on a three-way project between Manila, Washington, and London, and participating in 2 pm videocon with somebody in Tokyo (3 pm) and somebody else in Oslo (8 am). Couple of Starbucks breaks to punctuate the sheer modernity of the situation.Stop by a call center in the late afternoon (4 pm Manila time) to schmooze with the boss and watch agents handle calls from British customers (9 am London time); however, the really busy shift is graveyard, during which several hundred agents take stateside customer service calls and install software on computers located in places like Oklahoma and Chicago using escorted browsing tools.Spend the evening vegging out reading the international papers and newsmags, channel surfing amongst BBC (for news), CNN (for contrast and curiosity), and Fox News (for laughs) (two cable TV accounts meet the international media requirements of a diverse household). By the end of the evening, after a soak in a very hot tub to the appropriate soundtrack for the particular state of mind, and hopping on the computer to chat with colleagues in the states, Bangkok, and who knows where else and trying to answer a few of my piled-up emails, I am just about globalized out...Muddy Waters . . . and Bill Monroe?
I began this Pearl with a seemingly strange cultural juxtaposition between Chicago/delta blues (in the person of Muddy Waters) and bluegrass music (in the person of Bill Monroe). Might seem weird to some, but I goes way back with both fellers, with each inhabiting a small corner in the unconscious musical soundtrack I carry around with me. There's also a musicological link betwixt the two genres, although not sure I'll adequately explain it in this ramble.
I first met Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, in 1973 at the Beanblossom Bluegrass Festival located in beautiful downtown Beanblossom, Indiana. My late, beloved brother Paul - a 17 year old high school dropout at the time - was working for Bill as an all-purpose groundskeeper, equipment lugger, and concession stand guy. I was on leave from the US military, having recently returned to the world, and hadn't listened to much bluegrass (it being part of the cultural tradition against which I had rebelled, I had incorrectly stereotyped bluegrass as hicksville deluxe).
Three days of stunning bluegrass music (aside from the Bill and the Bluegrass Boys themselves, I seem to remember Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys and Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys as highlights) caused me to see the light. That particular Bean Blossom festival, the seventh, was recorded by MCA Records (Bill Monroe, Bean Blossom, MCAD-8002) in a portable 16-track studio. A mellow crowd of about 75,000 people showed up, representing a major bump for the local economy, as Brown County, Indiana, my point of origin, had a sum total of 7,000 or so souls at the time scattered about amongst the hills, hollers, and dirt roads.
If you ever have the opportunity, watch High Lonesome: The Story of Bluegrass Music, a well-done documentary featuring a great deal of excellent music, including footage of the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival. The cultural story it tells is that of my forebears, specifically the migration of hillbillies from Kentucky/Tennessee into the factory towns of Indiana and Michigan (see Finnish Saunas, Scotch-Irish Roots, and Moonshine Whiskey, and mebbe give a listen to Commander Cody's Gonna Highjack Me a Big Jet Plane).
Bill Monroe, who spent his early years in Rosine, Kentucky, lost his mother when he was 10 and his father when he was 17. His older brothers (he was the youngest of eight) had already hightailed it north in search of work, and Bill soon followed to take a blue collar job in Whiting, Indiana, an industrial town outside Chicago. Bill's first job, which he held for five years, was stacking barrels in an oil refinery. But he had a serious music jones, and the Monroe brothers (Bill and Charlie) were soon playing square dances and eventually got a radio gig on KFNF in Shenandoah, Iowa. By 1939, Bill had left the refinery behind and formed the first incarnation of the Blue Grass Boys, which fairly quickly made the transition from radio to the Grand Ole Opry.
Bill had learned his licks in part from a black guy named Arnold Schultz (named after the family who had owned his ancestors before the Civil War). Bill once told of having first seen Schultz at a square dance, playing in a black string band of guitar, banjo, and fiddle: "...There's things in my music that come from Arnold Schultz; I tried to keep in my mind a little of it, which I could salvage to use in my music. ...I wanted some blues in my music."
Bluegrass music features many polyrhythyms that are jazz-like and influenced by African music. One of the fundamental differences between Western and African music has to do with treatment of rhythm and meter. 'Meter' refers to the pattern of beats/regular distribution of accents. 'Rhythm' refers to the force behind the beat, the bounce that teaches us to anticipate when the next beat will occur. In Western music, rhythm has been pretty much absorbed into the meter, making them from a listening perspective pretty much identical. This has the advantage of allowing for the incredibly symmetrical and complex architecture of, say, a Bach cantata or Beethoven symphony. Thus, we 'know' when each beat will occur based on a predefined 'time' (4/4, 3/4, etc.).
But in African music the rhythm and meter function independently. In the typical African ensemble you'll hear a solo cantor, a chorus, gong and bell ringers, 3-4 drums, and perhaps a xylophone-type instrument, all playing in different rhythms. The constant crossing of rhythmic boundaries creates an illusion of multiple syncopation. The same thing happens in bluegrass music.
South-to-North migration of poor folks wasn't limited to hillbillies, and by the end of World War II, poor black folk like the Mississippi Delta's McKinley Morganfield were making the long trek on the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago. Morganfield had been living on Stovall Plantation in the delta in 1941 when a young Alan Lomax, accompanied a 300-pound "portable" tape recording unit in the trunk of his car, stopped by his shack to make a few recordings (cf The Complete Planatation Recofdings (1941-1942 Library of Congress Field Recordings, Chess/MCA CHD-9344). In Chitown, he reverted to his nickname of Muddy Waters and electrified his guitars to play the same licks he'd played back home but loud enough to be heard over the crowds.
Sure, I can try. With regard to bluegrass, one could mention that bluegrass music is extremely popular in Japan, with Kobe in particular being a hotbed of activity. I once heard an excellent Japanese bluegrass band at a festival in North Carolina, although details in memory are sketchy. However, must admit there's not much in the way of bluegrass music in Manila.
The blues is another story. As related in Sweet, Sweet Music, Manila has a hot music scene and numerous excellent musicians. I've been far too busy to listen to live music much the last couple of years, and the fact that Lampano Alley disbanded demotivated me. Thus, I was thrilled to learn that Binky Lampano and Tomcat Colvin were returning to town to breathe new life into Lampano Alley. Their long-awaited CD is in the can, with anticipated release date of July 12th, and Lampano is playing a series of gigs around town. Binky has an incredible blues voice that is very reminiscent of Muddy, and listening to the chemistry between Binky as lead and Colvin on Mississippi sax (harmonica/mouth harp) reminds me of the smoking interchanges Muddy had with Little Walter on many of his early tracks.
I'll be trying to spend a little of my "spare" time with Binky and Tomcat this coming week, including catching whatever gigs I can and talking to them on a personal level. I want to get a handle on how a world-class blues band evolved in Manila, how Binky (a trueblue Pinoy) learned to sing da blue so masterfully, how Tomcat (an ex-jazz drummer and Asian Development Bank professional from the Carolinas) ended up at a youngish 60+ blowing the mouth harp like Musselwhite. Inquiring minds want to know.
Will see what I can come up with in the next Pearl, which I'll try to get up in time for the CD launch in a couple of weeks. Watch for it, and be ready to help out the boys with enthusiastic orders for same...
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