JPP, Hanggai, Slavic Soul Party
So here I am, Lotus Fest Day Nummer Eins, and having reluctantly passed up the Paganini-playing child fiddlers of Kirkwood Avenue, I resolved upon the First United Methodist Church as my first venue of choice. My program had described the sound of JPP with a prosaic epigram of traditional Finnish folk string, which I thought meant that people would be dancing and proselytizing in the church walkways. Something, it goes without writing, that I couldn't pass up.
Instead I seemed to have gone to the wrong place. Expecting relatively mead-addled Norwegians, I was instead confronted with six older gentlemen playing the melancholic vibratos of a dirge as the senior listeners hesitated towards their seats. Consisting of four fiddles, one bass, and one blocky set of keys that is difficult to describe (the sound mimicked the strange surrealism that you hear when cartoons affect flashbacks), JPP's ensemble was larger than what one normally hears in folk music. The dynamics reflected this and indeed, the music itself seemed to wear down heavier.
In my experience with folk music, it is either charmingly or annoyingly redundant and the sounds of the Finnish were no different. However whereas folk in the realm of the Celtic fiddle and pipe is played in the higher registers, this Finnish folk is stocked much more with the middle and occasional lower registers. Collective and heavy, the fiddle generated a strange mix of sounds, like a modernized baroque or a Norwegian Boccherini.
Although I contemplated surreptitiously leaving the church several times, JPP turned out to be good listening fun albeit tinged with a somewhat disengaging Hebrew listlessness. Perhaps a bit flatter than other fiddle music, the melodies of these fiddlers stayed consistent and climbed seldom, with only occasional sharp crests to higher octaves. This was a cause for some, although not too much, musical drama as the instruments climbing by half steps until a major was reached before the melody would spiral down and repeat: interesting, not entirely engrossing, and rather difficult to classify.
The parting tune reflected this fact with a medley highlighting the ranges that Finnish folk could encompass; from heavy Hebrew wedding march to the minor chord circus beat that sounded almost like something from Charles Ives.
I exited the church and, as poor map-reading skills would have it, found myself suddenly in the midst of seven head-banging Chinese men who call themselves Hanggai. In terms of distinguishing sound, nothing can really do the music of Hanggai proper justice though I shall endeavor to explain all the same.
Imagine the soundtracks you've heard in "Memoirs of a Geisha," or "The Last Samurai," or in any Chinese Restaurant you've ever been in. Now, add the amplifier, a raucous, inebriated crowd and bare-chested vocalist, and gurgling throat singing, and you're closer to understanding Hanggai if only by inches.
Simply put, these seven Chinese define oriental music in ways you and I never could have imagined, unless of course your imagination includes flaming red cowboy boots, sloppy Russian trepak-ing, and microphone strumming like an electric guitar. In the mind of Hanggai, all culture was fair game.
I suppose I could write about the cross-cultures of Chinese-punk and American rock, the harmonic blend of heavy bass and glottal vocal accompaniment, but you'd probably rather read about how the lead vocalist thrust out his microphone like an enlarged phallus, or how he roared Chinese cries to the spirited audience, of which about two per cent were actual Chinese.
Although the message might have been garbled with too much choujiu, Hanggai proved to their audience that American rock, at its finest imitation, can be a worthy rival to the original.
I closed my night by wondering to the big IU tent because I didn't want to be caught in the impending rain and it was here that I caught my last performance of the night.
It really wouldn't be diminutive to say that the sound of Slavic Soul Party was something like a gypsy street band with major groove and one hell of a beat. Or maybe that they were the result of a wayward clash between punk attitude (Slavic Soul Party hails from Boston) and a jazz ensemble. Either way, the outfit, sporting nine stern (almost Slavic)-faced players with trumpets, trombones, percussion, and an accordion to boot, generated a sound that the crowd couldn't have lapped up any faster. Never before have I seen such serious grooving en masse. The pulsating audience and the percussion seemed better suited for the marching band field than for humble Bloomington.
Yet as powerful as their sound, Slavic Soul Party was as much a spectacle for the eyes as it was for the ears. A saxophonist with the facial hair of a younger George Lucas improvised madly over the melody of a dervish dance while the spirited bass-drummer, hair sprouting wildly like a mad scientists' marshaled the players into beat. The cries that accompanied his tramp across the stage were ecstatic. It stands to the Soul Party's credit that even after an hour, when the drummer raised his mallet to the audience, the thundered approval of the grinders, head-bangers, twisters, and foot-stompers couldn't be distinguished from the actual thunder that rang overhead.
Post by Brandon Cook
