SOUNDTRACK: SPANGLISH FLY-Tiny Desk Concert #928 (December 31, 2019.
Spanglish Fly is a pretty funny name for a band
Spanglish Fly [is] one of the true pioneers of the boogaloo revival scene happening on the East Coast. For about sixteen minutes, our little corner of the building was the hottest Latin dance club in D.C..
The band (eleven members at the Tiny Desk) combine two styles of music to create a great deal of dancing fun in these three songs.
There is something absolutely infectious about combining the deep groove of an Afro Cuban tumbao bass line with a conga marcha, while the horns answer a call-and-response with the vocalists, all in a confined space.
The first song “Bugalú Pa Mi Abuela” opens with some clapping and that familiar conga style of piano from Kenny Bruno. It’s cool how the music jumps between this style and the grooving bass (including some cool bass slides) from Rich Robles. This song gets you moving right away and has a trombone solo from Ric Becker.
The second song slows things down and is a bit more serious. “Los Niños En La Frontera” has a slow burn of social consciousness. It means “children at the border.” And although the song is more somber, the musical is style rich and vibrant. It opens with shakers from Paula Winter and cymbals and timbales from Arei Sekiguchi. Then the piano jumps in with a call and response from the horns. In addition to a lead baritone saxophone line from Stefan Zeniuk, there’s also Matt Thomas on tenor saxophone and Jonathan Goldman on trumpet.
I haven’t mentioned the vocals yet because it’s in this song that both singers really demonstrate their power. Jessenia Cuesta sings lead first but in the end Mariella Price takes over and sings a different, faster more intense style. Their voices work together really well. And as the song ends, Jessenia holds an impressively long note.
The final song is “a song about shoes.”
The horn ensemble work that drives “Boogaloo Shoes” is worthy of the song’s title, a name taken from the classic dance form that drove East Coast teens crazy in the 1960s. The percussion immediately causes hips to sway.
This song is sung in English and features some more of that great piano and even some yips and yells from the singers. The chorus has a couple of really fun moments when Dylan Blanchard on the congas and Arei do fast drum fills. Matt Thomas takes a pretty lengthy solo on tenor sax and the end features a spoken word in which Mariella tells us that they are putting the “you” in zapata boogaloo. Jessenia Cuesta ends the song with one more great vocal turn.
It’s a really fun set and if your body is not moving during it, you must be dead.
[READ: January 6, 2020] “The Strangeness of Grief”
Recently, Michael Chabon wrote an essay about his somewhat ambivalent feelings about the death of his father. Now it is V.S Naipaul’s turn to discuss this as well.
Naipaul’s father was forty-five or forty-six when he had a heart attack. He was working for the Trinidad Guardian while V.S. was at school in Oxford.
Although his father was to receive half pay, he seemed unconcerned about the state of the family finances. Indeed, the episode seemed to leave him with a lightness of spirit. So he began writing comic short stories. They were quite successful. The BBC even asked V.S to read one of the stories in the “Caribbean Voices” program. The amount they were going to pay him would be the amount it would cost for him to get to London from Oxford. But when he told his father about the expense, his father decided to buy him a gift to show his appreciation.
The gift was an Indian brass vase. Unfortunately it was heavy and unwieldy and impossible to ship to London. So instead, he gave the vase to family members who worked in London. It was assumed that when they next traveled to London, they would bring it with them.
One day a telegram came from London–bad news, come now. It was news of his father’s death. He traveled back to London and when he got to the house he saw a vase that he assumed was the one his father had intended or him. He asked about it and the homeowners gave it to him happily. They had been puzzled by it because it came in someone’s luggage with no information.
The vase was shaped like an urn and could have held ashes. Over the years he drew and painted it and it became more of an object than a item of grief.
The essay jumps thirty years and he felt that he would be untouched by grief ever again. But he acknowledges that grief is a fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen.
Thirty years after his father’s death he received a call from his sister-in-law saying that his brother Shiva was dead. It did not surprise him since Shiva was a drinking man and he looked very poorly when V.S. last saw him,
And yet his brother’s passing hit him unexpectedly hard. He found that he couldn’t eat. This sorrow lasted two years and every event was marked by the distance from Shiva’s death.
The essay shifts again to V.S.’s wife Nadira who was living in Pakistan when she was younger. She adopted a cat that was left on her doorstep. She had the cat for seven or eight years after which time she moved from the city to the desert. The cat went with her but a cat cannot move places–it builds up an “extraordinary knowledge in its head, of friends and enemies and hiding places.” And sure enough, one day her neighbors told her that the cat was taken by a pack of wild dogs.
It was only when Nadira moved in with V.S. in a suburban town that she risked getting another cat.
The kitten they adopted was tiny and had been bullied by the other cats. The kitten was terrified, but it took immediately to V.S., calming as soon as he held him. He knew nothing about cats, but soon learned to love little Augustus. He loved its movements both when asleep and when it showed off its athletic grace.
But this story is not written during Augustus’ youth and he soon grew old and succumbed to arthritis. The end of the essay is one of pain and pain management for the cat. I only now just found out that V.S. himself is also now dead. He died in 2018.
Death and grief take many forms.
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