Dee Dee Bridgewater

Moment that made the concert: during the encore, Dee Dee (who loves nothing more than crowd connection and interaction) invited audience members on stage to dance while she sang her Malian-influenced bluesy songs to the accompaniment of African rhythms and instruments. The crowd was on its feet in the hall. An old man with a cane slowly made his way onto the stage, deliberately set the cane down and (there is no other way to say this right) began to BRING THE FUNK. He danced with soul as the delighted audience clapped.

She looked queenly and avant-garde in her bizarre and elegant stage costume, a piece of art itself, a sensuous black silk sheath dress, an art deco creation tiered and folded, like a cake or the Chrysler Builing, accompanied by a jaunty hot pink scarf and a wild black headwrap.

I must admit that for the first two or three songs of the concert, I was skeptical of Bridgewater's vocal power in spite of her winning (and wide!) smile. She talked an awful lot between songs and while I liked to hear about her inspirations and intentions in bringing together Malian music and American blues and jazz, at first it seemed like a lot of hype. Her voice was overshadowed by the powerful voices of her two Malian musical guests, Mamani Keita and Kabine Kouyate. The band was great, especially Cherif Soumanou on the kora (a Malian instrument that is like a cross between a guitar and a harp) and one of the percussionists on an instrument which is a banjo precursor (I've forgotten the name of this).

However, I was thoroughly convinced of Dee Dee's vocal abilities a little later in the show when she began to sing more blues- and gospel-inspired songs, often blending this vocal tradition seamlessly with the Malian tradition. Her rendition of Nina Simone's "Four Women"("Peaches") was emotionally powerful. Her new album's title song, "Red Earth" was also strong. She really has a talent for connecting with the audience and for tapping into the emotional power of a song, hamming it up without empty artifice, and her passion for interpretation was great. Clearly she had made a powerful personal discovery of Malian music and culture and wanted to share it. The audience ate it up.

Renaud Garcia-Fons Trio

OK, Renaud Garcia-Fons was fantastic last Friday. Phenomenal. Virtuostic. As in, one of the best concerts I've ever been to in my life. Admittedly I have been rather slavish in my adoration of a few of these Mondavi-sponsored performances; I assure you that this is because I am often easily pleased, rather than a mindless automaton of the marketing "machine." Garcia-Fons can play the double bass. Yes. He can make sounds emerge from it that I have never heard. At times he played it with the bow in the classical style - at other times he plucked it in the more percussive stand-up jazz style. He made it a flute; I closed my eyes and heard woodwinds. He made it a cicada; he made it a sitar at one point, and a fiddle at another. Then it became a drum.
The trio had excellent chemistry - both the guitarist's quick-fingered flamenco work and the drummer's passionate percussion interwove seamlessly with the double bass. The tones were rich and lovely, and full of stories.
I loved this so much that I'm fully prepared to buy a copy of Arcoluz (the Trio's most recent live CD) at import prices, on a graduate student's budget.

Shaolin Warriors

On Sunday night, the Shaolin Warriors brought the Mondavi a show rich in the Shaolin kung fu tradition, a centuries' old martial arts practice developed in feudal China to defend the temples from marauders.

For my husband, this night would go down as history as the night he tried unsuccessfully to pry a stainless steel bowl from the stomach of a monk in a state of great physical and spiritual concentration. Not an experience known to many.

Neither is the experience of watching another monk chop what appeared to be a whole head of Napa cabbage on his stomach, using his belly as a cutting board. "Cutting-board abs," my husband joked. Later, several of the Warriors broke metal bars over their heads with defiant shouts.

The monks weren't all flash and pain management though. Their feats of strength and more importantly, their martial arts are grounded firmly in Buddhist practice and in mindfulness. The show followed the stucture of the seasons in the monastery, letting action rather than narration tell the story. The ease with which the masters and their students performed their work was stunning, particularly that of the bearded priest (who often weilded the priest's staff) and of the two acrobatic young boys, monks in training.

At times the recorded music was slighty stilted, but the monks made up for this in their tremendously inventive choreography. One of my favorite parts of the show was the demonstration of each of the major kung fu animal traditions. My husband and I counted tiger, frog, snake, crane, monkey and mantis. There was also a weapons demonstration, featuring the use of the iron fan, whips, tiger hooks and other unusual or improvised (brooms, for example) weapons. The drunken master style, in which the martial artist acts drunk in order to appear off-balance and thus vulnerable to attack, was also fun to watch, and got a lot of laughs from the audience.

There is a poetry in such fighting, combining our delight of motion with our amazed disbelief. I feel this in good kung fu movies, in the Matrix's "bullet time" or while watching parkour too.

Grupo Fantasma

One of Grupo Fantasma’s symbols (which adorns one of their concert posters) is the king cobra. Like the hooded snake, Grupo strikes quickly and keeps holding on, but the venom is truly intoxicating, inducing dancing, heart palpitations and (sometimes) shortness of breath.

Unlike BeauSoleil, I’d never heard of Grupo Fantasma. If you haven’t heard of them, their very name (a kind of “team awesome”) has a bullfighter’s bravado that makes you feel you should have known it. I wasn’t sure if they would live up to their hype as a great Texan Latin dance band.

I needn’t have worried. While more traditional than comparable Latin rock bands Control Machete, Ozomatli and Kinky, and lacking the level of energy, innovation and experimentation of the latter, their strength was their musicianship and easy charisma. They played original and traditional cumbias and salsa tunes with great skill and near-flawless arrangement, keeping up the energy of the crowd and encouraging audience participation in their songs. “Chocolate” and “Vida Guerra” were particularly catchy and got even more of the crowd up and dancing on a sweltering night. Their cover of a Tower of Power funk song was an unexpected (and enthusiastically received) treat.



I do wish that even more people had danced earlier in the concert. But I am the kind of person who never wants to be sitting down at a concert unless it’s classical or jazz. A lot of the concertgoers did dance, though, even in the heat, and by the end of the night there was a big crowd in front of the stage.

I spotted a Mexican flag waving in the audience, and delighted in the sight of couples dancing salsa and meringue expertly, and at the twirl of a woman’s black and red folklorico skirt! Did not spot Dancing Rat Lady.


Several guitar solos and trumpet solos throughout the concert were a big highlight. These were the kind of arresting (not just obligatory) solos that you only hear rarely: intoxicating in their skill and shining notes.

BeauSoleil

Hearing BeauSoleil in the Quad made me remember searching for armadillos in the backyard of Le Jardin Inn, listening to the proprietor warn my family and I about the nest of baby water moccasins he found “right by heah.” *Gulp*

They made me remember powdered-sugar lace on beignets at the Cafe du Monde, New Orleans, Cajun music and dancing at Mulate's, watching old couples dance Acadian waltzes and especially eating po' boys and muffaletta at a roadside greasy spoon on stilts in the bayou surrounded by shrimp boats and Spanish moss. Also, the woman who made us pancakes on the anniversary of her husband's death in a house filled with taxidermy. She showed us a picture of him; a barrel-chested man holding a snapping turtle the size of a toboggan, conjuring the hurricanes for my family and I with a hush. A thirty-foot alligator (no lie) that he had penned, breathing not far away from us. The Mississippi, the Mississippi, the Mississippi.
All pre-Katrina, of course.

Who’s BeauSoleil? These guys are the real deal, preservers and reinventors of the Cajun tradition, and they are really fun to watch, putting on a free, rollicking show in the Quad last Wednesday night. They cook up a genre-hopping blend of zydeco, blues, Latin, country and jazz. Don’t think you like Cajun music? There’s a good chance you really do. They’re fronted by renowned innovator Michael Doucet, and backed by a washboard player/percussionist, a bassist and an accordionist with a shiny red accordion.

“It’s like Louisiana in August” Doucet quips, as the crowds begin to gather in the muggy Quad and the evening begins its slow roll as dragonflies drift with easy two-steps and waltzes as smooth as can be. Then Doucet punches up the music, reminding us in the audience that BeauSoleil is foremost “a dance band.”

As the sun sets, the music quickens and Doucet’s vocals and fiddling rock along to the infectious beat. One of the best things about the Summer Fest concerts (besides the freeness and a break from summer school papers!) is watching the multiage crowd get up and dance. The peoplewatching is prime: there’s the twirl of neohippies in patchwork skirts, punks with Mohawks nodding along to “Cajunization Blues,” a old man rocking his all-purpose jig, a woman with a pixie cut in a bubble skirt cutting a rug with a quick-stepping young guy and best of all, the strange sight of a pale blonde woman in a tie-dyed tank top dancing with her pet rat.

Yes, you read right. Rat. A black and white spotted one, it slunk around her shoulders and appeared quite pleased with the music as she rhumbaed and shimmied along. I so tried to get a picture of it, but couldn’t! Sorry guys.