Music Archives - James Trumm

Halcyon Steel at Shirley Heights

September 9, 2018 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Every Sunday evening in Antigua, there’s a party at Shirley Heights, a restored 18th century British military lookout that affords a spectacular view of English Harbour. I got there after 5:00, in time to see the sun set and the sky change from blue to gold.

When I arrived, there were perhaps a hundred people there, though this tripled as the evening went on. Vendors were set up to sell their wares, grillmasters tended their Caribbean barbecues, and bartenders were busy pouring drinks.

People milled around taking in the spectacular views of Antigua and beyond.

Indeed, well beyond. When I looked to the southeast, I could see all the way to Montserrat, that poor doomed Caribbean island that was all but wiped out by volcanic eruptions between 1995 and 2000.

But the views, the food and drink, and the people were not what made the night a party. The missing element was provided by The Halcyon Steel Orchestra. No mere band or combo, this 23-piece ensemble makes a resonant and joyful noise the likes of which I’d never heard before. And it does sound like an orchestra. They played rich, multi-layered arrangements of standards ranging from Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood” to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love” to The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

As evening turned to night, the band ended with an amazing extended jam.

Then a reggae band took over and stole my heart with a great cover of Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello,” a tune that so easily lent itself to reggae rhythms that I wondered if it hadn’t originally been conceived that way.

I noted in an earlier post about how visiting Antigua during the low season was a somewhat lonely experience. This party was the one and only time I was with a big group of people. It felt good to be around people who were dancing and eating and drinking and having a good time. It rubbed off on me and gave me the lift I needed.

When I left, the party was still going strong.

Filed Under: Antigua, Music Tagged With: Antigua, Halcyon Steel Orchestra, Shirley Heights

El Local en Santurce and La Maquinaria de Tortura

August 21, 2018 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

I was at El Batey a couple weeks ago and got talking to the guy on the next barstool. This is something I’ve rarely done at other bars, but there’s something about El Batey that brings out my extrovert side. He told me he was in a band called La Maquinaria de Tortura (The Machinery of Torture) and that they were going to be playing a gig in Santurce at a place called El Local. I told him I’d go. Last night, I did.

I’ve never been anyplace quite like El Local. The front half of it consists of a bar and a sitting room that were apparently decorated by someone on work release from the local insane asylum, circa 1980.

It’s the sort of warm and sinister place where you’d be playing a board game and discover that your opponent had turned into a demonic clown or a large bipedal reptile, but you’d just roll the dice and take your turn.

The back half of the building was . . . well, let’s just say that the decorator hadn’t gotten there yet. This made it the perfect setting for the propulsive punk of La Maquinaria de Tortura. The sound was old school: 90 second songs screamed out incomprehensibly by sweaty shirtless men while a distortion-heavy guitar bashes out the same two chords over and over and over and…

…and meanwhile, people who will always be cooler than you no matter how many tats you get or indie films you direct sit by impassively digging the scene.

On the way out, I saw this sign for future fun at El Local.

Not quite sure what that’s all about, but I might give it a try. It’s a strange place. And so of course, I want to go back.

Filed Under: Music, Puerto Rico, San Juan Tagged With: Music, Puerto Rico, San Juan, Santurce

El Batey: The Rolling Stones’ Bar of Choice in San Juan

July 26, 2018 by James Trumm 3 Comments

There’s no neon sign outside of El Batey. No neon signs inside either. And praise be, no TV. The windows have bars, not glass. The floor is uneven and rank. The place is open late til 3:00 or 6:00 or whenever. The bartenders will play Iggy Pop on the sound system on request. It’s a punky-junky dive bar located on a less-touristed street of Old San Juan.

I loved it. I could see myself going there night after night, quietly killing off brain cells with cheap rum as I sat at the bar reading and thinking deep thoughts.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

There’s a lot of legend attached to the place. The Rolling Stones drank there when they were on the island. Some claim it was Hunter S. Thomson’s watering hole when he lived in San Juan, the place he’d go to gather the experiences he would later thinly fictionalize in The Rum Diary. Maybe. In any event, it’s the kind of place where you COULD have seen him back in the day.

The word “louche” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Inside, the walls appeared to be sweating. (No, I hadn’t dropped acid.) Scribbled signatures covered the smudged wall space like a net of black words, an effect that felt strangely cozy, but also kind of insane. The floor looked sticky from spilled drinks. The fragrance, a musty eau-de-ashtray combined with damp, ancient stone. In the dim, amber light our fellow customers all looked a little unwashed. You immediately got the message: this was not a frozen cocktail with umbrella kind of place.
― Laura Albritton, Uncommon Caribbean

It’s not a place for the rule-bound or the asthmatic. Despite a citywide smoking ban in restaurants and bars, people puff away in El Batey as if it were 1966. And the bathrooms are not for the squeamish or the dainty.

A notice scrawled on the men’s room door reminds people that access is limited to “1 (one) @ a time!”

The bar pulls off the trick of being simultaneously homey and deeply alien. Palimpsests of graffiti cover every square inch of every wall and part of the the high ceilings. How drunk would you have to be to stand on someone’s shoulders or climb a rickety ladder to write on the fifteen foot high ceilings? The writing is so multilayered as to defy reading and much of it seems to be in the Drunkish language, contributing to the strangeness of the place. But knowing that 50 years worth of earlier patrons appreciated the place enough to leave their mark makes the place seem intimate and human.

There are only two actual signs in El Batey. One reminds you of where you are. And the other reminds you that the president is a wanker — as if you might forget either of those things.

Business cards and other ephemera make up the lamp shades that surround the dim lights above the bar. A couple of clamp lamps light the corners of the other rooms. It’s dark, the vibe is chill, and the promise is anything goes.

And over in the corner, an old jukebox awaits quarters, hoping that someone will play “Paint It Black.”

Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

(Some of the photos in this post were taken by Josh Trumm)

Filed Under: Music, Puerto Rico, San Juan Tagged With: El Batey, Hunter S. Thompson, Puerto Rico, Rolling Stones, San Juan

At Rincón They’re Walkin’ the Nose

June 8, 2018 by James Trumm 1 Comment

It’s one of those rock lyrics I’d heard a hundred times and never understood, straight out of 1962, when a great song was one that sounded just right blasting out from the monophonic tube-powered radio speaker mounted in the center of the dashboard of your father’s mid-fifties Oldsmobile. It was Surfin’ Safari, the title song from The Beach Boys’ debut album. The chorus was easy to sing along to, but some of the verses were incomprehensible. This one, for instance:

At Huntington and Malibu
They’re shooting the pier
At Rincón they’re walkin’ the nose
We’re going on safari to the islands this year
So if you’re coming get ready to go

I’m from Toledo, Ohio. I’ve also lived in Boston, southwest China, and Tunisia. “Shooting the pier” and “walkin’ the nose” meant nothing to me. And I’d never heard of Rincón.

Then I moved to Puerto Rico and began hearing about a town on the west coast of the island where the surfing was awesome and the vibe was chill. I started noticing cars sporting this sticker:

So on Saturday, Lori Seubert and I made the two and a half hour drive there from San Juan to check it out. We wound up here:

It only took a few minutes for us to conclude that we’d come to the right place.

We began the day at Club Nautico, a breezy bar open to the the elements on two sides. They were doing a fair business at noon on a Saturday. The barmaids were friendly, the beer was cold, and surfboards hung from the rafters. It looked like the kind of place you could waste your days dissolving into cocktails, tall tales, and paradipsomania.

Properly lubricated, we headed for Maria’s Beach and stayed near there the rest of the day. We parked by a row of tourist shops, a café, and an oyster and clam bar.

We hiked the road up to the century-old Punta Higüeras lighthouse, a handsome landmark surrounded by a lovely public park.

Lori, of course, made friends with the native fauna right away while I admired the scenery from the high ground.

One of the stranger structures of Rincón was a blue building that, 55 years ago, housed an experimental nuclear reactor. Construction of the Boiling Nuclear Superheater (BONUS) Reactor Facility was begun in 1960. The plant operated between 1964 and 1968 and then was decommissioned due to “technical problems.” The building was decontaminated bit by bit over the next four decades and was turned over to the Puerto Rican government, which attempted to repurpose it as a museum. It’s unclear whether it still functions in that capacity. It certainly didn’t look like a going concern on the Saturday we were there. There was a fence around the property and a lone car in the lot, presumably belonging to the security officer patrolling there. The reactor dome made a bizarre backdrop to the beach scene.

It seemed reckless to build an experimental nuclear reactor just a couple hundred meters from the beach, especially in a community where tsunami evacuation signs are posted on every road. The reactor is just a few hundred meters from the beach. Fukushima, anyone? I couldn’t help but think that the authorities who sited it there probably figured “hey, let’s put it in an out-of-the-way corner of Puerto Rico–if it blows up, who cares?” In another weird twist, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

Later in the afternoon, we returned to where I had parked the 4Runner. We stopped into the T-shirt shop and met Michael, tall, tan, muscular, and handsome with sun-bleached brown hair to his shoulders.

His father had been one of the American hippies who came to Rincón to chase a dream and a wave and the next good high. There he met a woman who had a place there and they never left. And they apparently passed on the hippie aesthetic to their son.

After chatting with him and buying a couple shirts, we went down to the beach to watch the sunset.

Lori and I weren’t the only couple enjoying the sunset. Down the beach from us a bride and groom were being photographed while their wedding party hung out and watched. Another couple watched the sun go down from their surfboards and then paddled in together.

When there was no more of the sunset to be seen, we headed to the café we’d passed by earlier, ate pub grub, and listened to a three-man band doing covers of old Santana tunes. At one point, Lori shot pix of me while I was perusing a tourist info table and plotting our next Rincón visit.

Oh yeah . . . my surfing friend Shannon tells me that “walking the nose” is about the same as ten toes on the nose, a/k/a hanging ten. It means to surf while standing at the very front of your board. It can only be done on a longboard by the most highly proficient surfers.

Filed Under: Music, Puerto Rico Tagged With: Puerto Rico

27 Curaçao

October 31, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Many people and institutions sustained me during my five weeks in Curaçao. Bed & Bike gave me a place to live and work. La Cantina del Patron nourished me with tapas and cold beer. But it was 27 Curaçao that fortified my rock n roll heart.

27 takes its name from the age at which so many great musicians cashed their check. Robert Johnson. Janis Joplin. Brian Jones. Alan Wilson. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. Kurt Cobain. Amy Winehouse. These musicians are immortalized on the walls.

But 27 is not a monument to the dead – it’s a space for the living. Live bands perform there several times a week. Rock predominates, but Latin music and hip hop also get their due. Here are some of the best moments from my hours there.

One of my favorite groups was The Charming Bastards, a band committed to carrying the rock n roll torch in Curaçao. Most of their selections were well-chosen covers, both of well-known tunes and deeper tracks – everything a great party band should do.

The biggest show I attended was on October 7, which was when Barry Hay’s Flying V Formation took the 27 stage. I bought the third ticket that was sold for this event, which attracted a couple hundred people (a big crowd for Curaçao).

Barry Hay was the frontman for Golden Earring, a Dutch band that had a big radio hit in the US with “Radar Love.” He has an interesting history, being a Jewish kid born in India to a Dutch mother and a Scottish father. He lives part-time on Curaçao, where he reportedly DJs a radio program.

I’m always wary of going to see older rockers. There are things that many of them did with their voices and their instruments when they were younger that they just can’t do anymore. But Barry Hay seemed to have lost very little of his vocal timbre. He certainly knew how to put on a fine show. And he looked damn good for 69 too. His new band, Flying V Formation, was a multinational ensemble of younger musicians who rocked hard and tight.

The opening act that night was a singer/songwriter from The Netherlands who calls herself PollyAnna. She was one of those opening acts that I’d be happy to see as a headliner sometime. With a voice and style reminiscent of Joni Mitchell, she did a set of of self-penned songs with beautiful melody lines and lyrics that ran from whimsical to introspective.

Andres Mercedes y Los Presidentes are a Latin ensemble from Curaçao. They play salsa, merengue, bachata, and other styles and attract a crowd of locals. The women get dressed up to dance for this band. I don’t know enough about Latin American musical styles to comment intelligently on their shows (yes, I saw them twice), but I loved them. I’ve never been able to dance, but if there’s one genre of music I wish I could move to, it’s this stuff. You can’t be alive and sit still while this group is playing.

In moments of idle musing, I’ve sometimes thought how cool it would be to open my own club. I doubt I’ll ever actually do it. But if I did, I’d model it very closely on 27. It’s worth a trip to Curaçao to visit.

Filed Under: Curacao, Music, Travel, Willemstad

At the Chess Records Studio

June 21, 2015 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

These are the back stairs to the musical history of Chicago and the world.

In the 1950s, numerous blues and R&B legends walked up those stairs to this room, which back in the day was a recording studio.

Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Little Walter, The Moonglows, Howlin Wolf, James Cotton, Archie Bell & the Dells, Lonnie Brooks, Solomon Burke, The Four Tops, Percy Mayfield, Otis Rush, Jimmy Rogers, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Etta James, and Aretha Franklin climbed those stairs. And in that studio, they recorded the music of the Great Migration, the electrified blues that came out of Chicago in the 1950s. Then Chuck Berry came along, combined the electric blues with a country beat and and twang. In the Chess studio, he recorded “Maybellene,” one of the first and most popular rock n roll records:

Encouraged by Muddy Waters, Berry in 1955 brought to Chess Records a recording of his version of Willis’s tune[1] which he had renamed “Ida May” and a blues song he wrote “Wee Wee Hours”, which he stated was inspired by Joe Turner’s “Wee Baby Blue”. To Berry’s surprise, Leonard Chess showed little interest in the blues material but was enthusiastic about the commercial possibilities in a “hillbilly song sung by a black man”. Chess wanted a bigger beat for the song and added a bass and maracas player to the trio at the recording session. He also felt the titles “Ida Red” and “Ida May” were “too rural”. Spotting a mascara box on the floor of the studio, according to Berry’s partner Johnnie Johnson, Chess said, “Well, hell, let’s name the damn thing Maybellene” altering the spelling to avoid a suit by the cosmetic company. The lyrics were rewritten at the direction of Chess as well. “The kids wanted the big beat, cars, and young love,” Chess recalled. “It was the trend and we jumped on it.”

Ten years later, the rock musicians of the British Invasion came to Chicago to record at Chess, in an attempt to get the sound they had heard on American blues records. The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling Stones, among others, recorded there. The title of the Rolling Stones’ jam, “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” was a reference to the Chess Records address.

Though the building is now primarily a museum, the Stones still show up, as recently as 2014, to get the Chess sound. Some of the components of that sound, apart from the configuration of the studio room itself, were these two pipes, which rise a few inches from the floor by the back wall of the control room.

Originally, the music being performed in the studio was picked up by a mic hanging high on the wall at the far end of the studio. It was tweaked in the control room and played through studio monitors. The sound then travelled down those pipes to the mics connected to the tape recorders, which were housed in a room under the control room. This gives Chess records their echo-y, live sound, the sonic texture you’d experience at a blues club.

Today, 2120 South Michigan Avenue is home to Willie Dixon‘s Blues Heaven Foundation and serves as a museum, concert venue, and school for young musicians. Some of the old recording equipment is still on site and provides an object lesson in how far recording technology has come in a half century.

I was privileged to get a private tour of the facility from Willie Dixon’s grandson, Keith Dixon Nelson.

Keith graciously allowed me to play his grandfather’s bass — quite a thrill for me.

The land adjacent to the studio is now a small park, with a stage for outdoor concerts.

The site has also been acknowledged by the Chicago Landmark Commission.

I went through a major blues phase in my twenties. I lived briefly in Little Rock, Arkansas and listened to a radio station there that played gospel by day and blues by night. I would sit up late listening, electrified by what I heard. Later that summer, I took a bus to Greenville, Mississippi to the Delta Blues Festival. The smell of the Mississippi mud baked hard by the sun mingled with the sounds of electric guitars and wailing harmonicas coming from the stage. I had an experience of synesthesia, where the music and the unique smell intertwined inside me. It was one of the most memorable concerts I’ve ever been to. Many of the musicians who performed there had come to Chicago and Chess Records decades before. Now they were returning to their roots. Now years later, after seeing the Chess studio, I felt like I had seen where those roots produced the blossoms that became the electric blues and rock n roll.

Filed Under: Chicago, Music, USA Tagged With: Chicago, Music, USA

Dar Kmar: The Audience

January 20, 2015 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Although I came to hear the band, I came to see the audience.

Perhaps because half the band is a percussion section, it was almost impossible to sit still during the music. The drumming, the smoke, the accelerating tempo, and increasing volume combined to put people into an ecstatic dance trance.

There were a few brief moments of repose between numbers. I noticed that women in the audience outnumbered the men by about three to one. People generally danced in single-sex groups, and not as couples.

After I’d taken a bunch of pictures, I sat down to sip some tea. But one of the concert organizers came over and grabbed my arm and motioned toward the center of the room where people were dancing. “Je suis un phototographer, pas un danseur!” I protested to no avail. But really, I didn’t need my arm twisted.

Filed Under: Music, Sousse, Tunisia Tagged With: Music, Sousse, Tunisia

Dar Kmar: The Band

January 19, 2015 by James Trumm 1 Comment

First, you have to heat the drums. Camel skin gets more supple as it warms, producing a deeper, more resonant tone.

I was deep in the Sousse medina on a Saturday night at Dar Kmar, yet another venue that has no signage, no advertising, and no definable address. I’ve lived in Sousse for almost six months now and I hadn’t even heard of it until recently. It’s an extraordinary place, a house of music, art, food, and Tunisian culture. Finding it was difficult, but well worth the effort.

I was told they have music there every Saturday. The band on Saturday evening was a ten-piece traditional Tunisian ensemble.

The evening was my first extended exposure to traditional Arab music played live. The band was heavy on the percussion and vocals, accompanied only a keyboard and a shawm. Each song lasted perhaps fifteen minutes. Generally they began slowly and quietly and grew louder, faster, more percussive, and more passionate as they went on. The effect was hypnotic and got the crowd up on its feet to dance (see the following post). I plan to go back for more.

Filed Under: Music, Sousse, Tunisia Tagged With: Music, Sousse, Tunisia

American Music at the Movies

October 12, 2014 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

I’ve put together a film series for the American Corner here, a library and cultural center jointly funded by Amideast and the US State Department. The idea is to present different genres of American music through the presentation of movies that feature the music in its cultural context. The first film, Lady Sings the Blues, will be shown at 5:30 this Wednesday and all are invited.

Here’s the program for the whole series:

1. Lady Sings the Blues. 1972. Jazz. Starring Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor. The story of the life and career of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday.

2. Crossroads. 1986. Blues. Starring Ralph Macchio, Joe Seneca, and Steve Vai. A young and gifted classical guitar player dreams of playing the blues.

3. Easy Rider. 1969. Rock ‘n’ roll. Starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. Two hippie bikers ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of America.

4. The Commitments. 1991. R&B. Starring Robert Arkins, Michael Aherne, and Angeline Ball. A working-class Irish band is determined to bring soul music to Dublin.

5. Walk the Line. 2005. Country. Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. A chronicle of country music legend Johnny Cash’s life and songs.

6. O Brother, Where Art Thou? 2000. Folk. Starring George Clooney, John Turturro, John Goodman, and Holly Hunter. Escaped convicts travel across Mississippi in the 1930s trying to find a buried treasure.

7. 8 Mile. 2002. Hip hop. Starring Eminem and Kim Basinger. A young white Detroit rapper tries for his chance at fame.

Filed Under: AMIDEAST, Music, Teaching, Tunisia Tagged With: AMIDEAST, Music, Teaching, Tunisia

Sidi Bou Saïd: Ennejma Ezzahra

September 18, 2014 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

The last stop for me in Sidi Bou Saïd was a tour of Ennejma Ezzahra (The Star of Venus), the grand villa built in 1912 by Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger. Photography isn’t allowed inside the villa, but here are the views of the approach and a shot from inside the villa looking out.

The baron was a painter, an enthusiastic proponent of Arab culture, and a musicologist. As The Rough Guide to Tunisia notes, he “was one of the moving spirits behind the important inaugural Congress on Arab Music, held in Cairo in 1932, the first time Arab music had been treated as a whole and as a culture heritage worthy of both study and preservation.” He collected many traditional musical instruments, published a journal devoted to Arab music, and painted many portraits of Arab musicians. He wrote a six-volume treatise on the history of Arab music and maintained his own private orchestra. Fittingly, his villa today is now known as The Center of Arab and Mediterranean Music. It houses the Baron’s collection of instruments and is used regularly as a performance venue.

One of the most interesting feature of the villa is a water channel that runs through the entrance hall to the formerly open-air (now covered) plaza where performances take place. Apparently the Baron believed that the sound of gently flowing water enhanced the aural experience.

The villa itself would be a must-see on anyone’s Sidi Bou Saïd itinerary as a showcase for various Arab design styles. There is a cedar-ceilinged room built from wood imported from Lebanon. There are alabaster lamps built right into marble walls. Every room has a pleasing symmetry to it; it you see a bed built into one side of a room, you can bet that there will be an identical bed built into the opposite side. The villa was used as a location for a film adaptation of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine.

There is also an fascinating story about the Baron’s son, Leo d’Erlanger and his American wife that is recounted in a wonderful 1987 New York Times article:

As the stuff of romance, Edwina Prue’s story was hard to beat. There she was, a poor girl from America in a railroad station in London in the 1920’s when a nobleman saw her and fell in love with her. He did not introduce himself, but later traced her to her home in the United States, sent her orchids and a letter, and eventually married her.

And so Miss Edwina Prue, born in New York and brought up on a ranch in New Mexico, became Baroness Edwina d’Erlanger, wife of Baron Leo d’Erlanger. She is a widow now, after 47 years of marriage, in her 80’s and spending her time, variously, in Geneva, in London and in a palace here [in Sidi Bou Saïd] that many rate as one of North Africa’s treasures.

I hope to return sometime for a concert in this incredible space.

Filed Under: Music, Travel, Tunisia Tagged With: Music, Travel, Tunisia