I just love it that Yahoo! chose today, Valentine’s Day, to include Bodywork U in their directory. Links from big directories like Yahoo! are highly regarded by the search engines, so I’m very happy to have received this bit of link love today.
Two of the better world music acts I’ve ever seen were in town over the weekend. Both the Sweet Honey in the Rock show on Saturday night at the Paramount and the Hugh Masekela 9:30 show at Jazz Alley on Sunday night were very lightly attended. Where were you guys?
About half the seats at the Sweet Honey in the Rock show were empty, which really surprised me since they have a huge natural following here in Seattle and they were on their way to the Grammy Awards the next night.
As we waited in line in the garage to get into the Hugh Masekela show, the Jazz Alley folks apologized for the delay in getting us into the late show and promised that we’d get the same multi-encore show that the early crowd got. It didn’t turn out that way. Mr. Masekela was obviously put off by the numerous missed lighting and sound cues from the production booth (and you’ve got to wonder what he thought about the maybe-one-third-full house), and after about a75-minute set he and the whole band tromped off the stage never to be seen again. Don’t get me wrong, the show was great. His “Chissa All-Stars” included two great singers and a fabulous singer/violin player, and the band (keyboards, percussion, drums, 2 guitars, bass) totally rocked. Except for the lack of an encore, they were totally present for us.
I mentioned the light turnouts at these shows to a friend who has produced several Seattle world music events and he said that many of the local venues rely on word of mouth and their routine announcement channels, sometimes neglecting promo for individual acts. I did see a couple of small newspaper ads for each of these shows (which is how they ended up on my Seattle world music shows announcement page), but I’d love to figure out what happened here. Is interest in world music on the decline in Seattle? Were these shows inadequately promoted? Or is something else going on?
I played dununs with Naby’s band Lagni Sussu at Hidmo last night. It was a very fun gig, one of those nights where pretty much everyone in the place was up dancing.
As is often the case with Naby, it was a bit of a pick-up band, with Etienne Cakpo, Souleymane N’Daiye, and me (if you know these guys, you know that mentioning me in the same sentence is pretty much blasphemy; they’re real-deal, lifelong musicians, while I’m a dilettante late-comer) sitting in on percussion along with Eduard Souarez on drum kit and Mohammed Shaibu on guitar - and Naby on balafon and djembe, of course.
The highlight of the evening for me was having Sawe Imani come up and paste a dollar bill on my forehead and give me a big hug as I was playing. Sawe is one of my favorite dancers and dance teachers, and it means a lot to me that she appreciates my music. I started developing my chops several years ago playing for her Wednesday-night class at Spectrum, and I appreciate her patience (and that of Carold, Thaddeus, Ryan, and the other drummers) as I developed my drumming skills.
Naby is alway showing me cool dunun phrases. This one really seemed to get the dancers going (ballet style; D = dununba, K = kenkeni, actually a kenkeni/sangban flam):
1 * + * 2 * + * 3 * + * 4 * + * D . D D . . K . . . . . . . K .
(If you can’t read this notation, drop me a note and I’ll explain it in more detail.)
The Fremont Noodle House Group celebrated its tenth anniversary today. About 20 folks showed up for the big event. Rishi comped us some appetizers. Karen presented me with a bowl filled with golden noodles. Liesbeth gave me a bar of her hand-crafted soap, a product that was developed with the help of the noodle group. I was dubbed the “Noodle Daddy” by Helene. I passed along “hello”s from Rahul and Griggs, and a number of other old-time noodlers showed up in person: Liesbeth, Lyle, Tim, Raven, Page. And we had a couple of new folks - Liesbeth’s friend Sandie and Liz’s boyfriend - as well as a number of current regulars: Greg, Paul, Matt, Roger, and Josh. It felt really great to be back on the other side of Fremont Ave., where it all started, and back in Rishi’s capable hands.
Rishi is now the co-manager of Jai Thai in Fremont. I’ve always like Jai Thai, but now that Rishi - who was our waiter back at the old Fremont Noodle House in the late ’90s - is back, it’s looking even better.
Listening to Anu Garg of Wordsmith.org on KUOW this morning, I was reminded of a word that I coined a while back: oxymoronym. Conflate oxymoron, which means a phrase of two contradictory terms (like “jumbo shrimp” or “pretty ugly”), with the -nym suffix (as in homonym or synonym), and you get oxymoronym, a word whose meaning is the opposite of its presentation (length, pronunciation, etc.). For example, vast or instantaneously.