I remember sitting at 37 Arts during the heat of the presidential election over a year ago, with Fela’s double fisted cry for becoming the “black president” of Nigeria via his self-created MOP (Movement of the People) party resonated with an American audience thirsty for the same. That line did not get as much excitement this time around, partly because time calms enthusiasm, partly due to the fact that in this more public context, Broadway, many were just being introduced to this man. “Black President” was thematic throughout Fela’s career, and while the reigning political parties shut him numerously — he appeared in court over 200 times in his life–he never stopped labeling himself as king.

A pivotal scene in the performance occurred when Fela lived in America for ten months in the late ’60s. This is after medical school in London (the only way he could trick his parents into sending him abroad to study music), while Fela was still under the spell of the “other,” in this context meaning foreign cultures being viewed as utopias by the foreign eye. It was African-Americans that really inspired Fela to return to his homeland to rage the political battle, as he felt his peers had been too complacent in dealing with the government in Lagos. One-quarter of Africans live in Nigeria, and the country isn’t that large. Fela had assumed the general apathetic outlook; after reading numerous books and talking with Americans, his path was set.

This is represented in a great dance scene, with his Queens marching around Fela, handing him books by Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and his personal hero, Malcolm X (political hero; his musical god was James Brown). While residing in Los Angeles, he read the man’s autobiography over and over (as told to Alex Haley), later including him among the Orishas on his altar in his now-mythic club, the Shrine. This brief homage to the written word worked wonderfully: Fela carrying a stack of books, the Queens and male dancers performing a magnificent number while flipping pages, learning, sharing, communing, uniting, with the rhythm of “Originality/Yellow Fever” keeping the audience bouncing along to the beat.

Funnily enough, I did not notice Kanye’s new book, Thank You and You’re Welcome, in that bunch. Somehow the 52-page collection of “Kanye-isms” just didn’t match up to X’s illuminating life history. In Kanye’s words:

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.”

That books cannot autograph anything — authors do — should not surprise us coming from a man who could not even write 52 pages himself; his co-writer (read: writer) did. To be fair, I know plenty of people who do not read books. As a writer of them, it’s disheartening, but there are forms of both entertainment and education that I do not partake in. My friends do not, however, write books and then make a mockery of people who do so for a living. As any writer worth his or her weight will tell you, writing is an occupation, true, but that is not what drives them. A writer writes because there is no other choice. One could also say the same of a music producer, but when said producer merely recycles the same beat and style over the span of his “career,” it gets difficult to distinguish where the art is. In writing, we call that recycling, and in this case that does not denote something worthwhile. It is, unfortunately, something that makes money for the recyclers, thus making it a popular pastime.

Which is why Jones’s retelling of Fela’s life is so refreshing, the way he and co-writer (read: actual co-writer) Jim Lewis portray how the lyrics of this Afrobeat star pull directly from his life, one filled with turmoil and despair–”real life,” we can call it. Lesser man would have collapsed. Fela never wavered, even after his mother, Funmilayo (played by Lillias White), is murdered by the Nigerian government, even after many of his Queens were raped and tortured in his home compound, the Kalakuta Republic.

Given the rigorous nature of the performance, for the Broadway run, Fela is played by two men. For the show I attended, it was Kevin Mambo; previously, I watched Sahr Ngaujah. A recent New Yorker article, “Talk This Way,” peers in on the career of dialect coach Tim Monich, who has worked with hundreds of actors over the past two decades, teaching them (or as Munich might say, letting them teach themselves) about regional tongues. Monich points out how important it is for an actor to learn how to speak local dialects for their career. Mambo wears the role of Fela like a fitted suit; Ngaujah wore it like skin. After the show, you leave thinking of Mambo, “he played the role of Fela very well.” My thought after seeing Ngaujah was, “that was Fela.” To his credit, Mambo is very new to this role, and I could only imagine he may make the transition from suit to skin over time.

Returning home from Broadway, I watched Music is the Weapon, the 1982 documentary shot in the Kalakuta Republic. Jones captured the imagery from the time brilliantly. Being a staged production, his dancers blew away anything you’d see in Lagos thirty years ago. His dancers glistened, each muscularly defined and rhythmically astute, making it a visual feast as much as oral narrative. The two main female singers–White playing Fela’s mother, who struck the theater silent with her rendition of “Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am” as well as a new song, “Rain,” and Sandra (Saycon Sengbloh) countering Fela on “Water No Get Enemy”–were endearing and intimate, and Ismael Kouyate’s treatment of traditional African melodies was heartbreaking. As with the original, the Brooklyn-based band Antibalas (well, mostly Antibalas; some musicians were added), who most would argue single-handedly started the resurgence of Fela’s music in America, played the music live. Top moments: “Zombie,” “Water No Get Enemy,” Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am,” “Sorrow Tears and Blood,” and “Coffin For Head of State.”

That said, the only disappointments in the transition off and onto Broadway involved the toning down of certain political issues, and the atmosphere that created these issues. The show was made more palatable for Broadway audiences, which inevitably includes Midwesterners that happened to pick up a brochure in Times Square. Fela married 27 Queens (his dancers and many loves) in one ceremony. The off-Broadway production was true to that; this one counted only nine, and briefly glossed the fact. The invasion of the Republic was toned down, as was the psychedelic scene when Fela communes with the Orishas. As a friend, a man much more knowledgeable of theater than myself (and with a much better memory), commented, the dancing was “less modern” and more “neo-African.” Recalling the fact, I whole-heartedly agree, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Just a little less imaginative. Given that the show is still in previews, things could change before the actual opening date.

The biggest problem with such a toning down is that it takes the audience out of the real and into fantasy. The imagination is already largely at play with the production’s spectacular lighting effects and theatrical performance. It also removes us in time and space. True, there are moments that ground us in modern day America: the notion of the black president; one of the many coffins decorating the stage written out to “Sean Bell”; AIG being included with WTO and IMF and other organizations accountable for the Nigerian code for fraud, 419. A few months ago, however, the Shrine in Lagos was shut down yet again by the government, thanks to Fela’s son, Femi, speaking out against poverty and the lack of assistance in the very space his father made his pulpit until his death of AIDS in 1997. Sometimes hinting at problems is not the same as actually addressing them. Jones did a wonderful job at knocking the audience out off-Broadway. Here, he jabs hard, without the right hook. Again, the fact that he’s able to do so on Broadway makes the experience worthwhile for everyone, if nothing more than to expose a new audience to one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Extreme = good, in this case. It’s always hard to watch your children leave home—you’re never quite sure in what state they’ll return. Tekbilek was pleased with the maturation, or, should we say, re-gestation. If anything, he found the dance-heavy mixes amusing and inspiring, the fact that other musicians would re-craft his materials within the context of their own artistry. Later, when I asked him what music was currently plastered in his playlists, he replied, “I’m still a bit uneducated about what is going on in the outside world of music,” pointing instead to his Sufi heritage and breathing practices which continually force him to look internally for music. Still, he said, he did have fun dancing around to the Joe Clausell take on “Sufi,” as well as Junior Sanchez’s dancefloor-ready “Selemet.”

Those wouldn’t have been my choices. They’re not bad; this is such an excellent remix album, it’s difficult to define favorites. I appreciate Sanchez’s production skills. His beat just bores me—it’s exactly what I’d expect, not pushing any boundaries. I’m a longtime fan of Clausell, and his is a percussively rich midtempo gem. Thing is, Nickodemus and Zeb’s take on “Whirling” hits me on a gut and hip level. Zeb’s additional oud adds a rich and rounded dynamic that even the original didn’t have. (Always a danger that the artist faces when sending out a song’s parts to skilled musicians for remixing.) The electronic version is true to Sufi intent: the introduction, a slow, sweeping warm-up, before the spinning, the communion with the divine. I’ve dropped the track on dance floors and pretended a few hundred white skirts were flailing before me.

Cheb i Sabbah created a journey out of “Shashkin.” In dependable Sabbah style, he plays on the darker elements to draw you in: it’s a hard beat with a sparse bass line; the synths are moody but not gratuitous. The effect: stunning. Smooth, clean, refined. Brooklynite Jordan Lieb pumps his version of “Laz” in a four-on-the-floor house cut. Its effects are jarring, in a warming sort of way. Minimalist techno shards fused with old school New York beauty. Brilliant. I play this whenever my first chakra needs a boost.

I assume Tekbilek would agree. We talked about pranayama and yoga. He references winds like a Chinese herbalist: your humor has to be lively, clean, regular. His words: “Yoga is the healthy coordination of mind, joints, and muscles. In order to help your mind, you must polish your joints by stretching and bending, and bend your muscles. If they are not open, they cannot coordinate together. This is the key to happiness. You have to control your mind by meditation, and exercise your body. Then comes breath control. Your diaphragm is your master.”

Your hips become masterful on this batch of remixes, which, for some god-awful reason, opens with a generic version by Tommie Sunshine. It sounds like he took a few Turkish elements and slapped them atop a pre-programmed Garageband beat. I was bracing for the worst thereafter. Reality is, the sunshine arose as soon as his is track was over. Other notables are the Amon Tobin cut, which sounds like it sprinted through a thousand filters in a large hall (Tobin’s creedo), and a nice broken-beat Kodomo remix, which plays out like a call to arms for space warriors. I also got my hands on a solid Kaya Project remix of “Toros” that wasn’t released on the record, but would have been much more meaningful in the opening slot. We can shift our iTunes around to appease our appetites, but never those of the producers.

Originally published on EthnoTechno.

Cheb i Sabbah

After championing a new breed of classically bent Indian sound merged with delicately polished digitalism, Sabbah re-roots, literally, himself in a new context of North African folk music. His South Asian series – Shri Durga, Maha Maya, and Krishna Lila – presented Western ears with a modernistic take on Hindustani and Carnatic traditions heard through 21st century ears. He kept the native temperament intact without flooding sitars, sarangis, and devotional poetry with pulsing electronic rhythms; instead, unlike most involved in these hybrid forms, Sabbah merely refined the originals with minimalist production. The coating was no mere sheen, but a new way of looking at well-formed material.

On his mix CD, As Far As, he moved from India to Africa, working Malian singer Salif Keita (singing on a Trilok Gurtu track), Morocco/Berlin fusionists Gnawa Impulse, and Bembeya Jazz vocalist Sekouba Bambino into his outernationalist approach. Now, completing the crossover, he returns to his Algerian homeland (and neighboring Morocco) with La Kahena, a record as nominally treated and stunningly gorgeous as the Indian predecessors. Recording an array of female vocalists from Arab, Jewish, Berber, and European backgrounds over eight tracks, Sabbah has upped the ante on the future of African music.

The opening song, “Esh ‘Dani, Alash Mshit” features raï vocalist Cheba Zahouania backed by lilting Arabic strings and a steady hi-hat/snare drum kick. After Algeria’s long struggle for independence resulted in the freeing up of French colonial rule in 1962, raï became a soundtrack to the disenfranchised population. Originally rural folk music played on the gasba (desert rosewood flute) and guellal (small goblet drum), today’s pop, rock and electronic updating by artists like Cheb Mami and Rachid Taha are a long distance from the disparate class it was birthed from. Singers crooned melhoun, an epic poetry form, and a movement of female vocalists (Cheikhas) began to surface, led by Relizane-born Cheika Remitti. Oran native Cheba Zahouania was born Halima Mazzi in 1959 and has mastered the meddahate style, which she displays here with enticing lyrical architecture. A far cry from her 1998 collaboration with Algerian superstar Khaled, “Together,” “Esh ‘Dani, Alash Mshit” is tinged with a degree of melancholy that seeps into every minute of La Kahena, making it a perfect leadoff.

From Algeria we journey west to Morocco where B’net Marrakech (The Women of Marrakech) draw from gnawa, raï and chaabi (urban pop) influences. A roots-oriented group singing in Arabic and Berber, “Sadats” may be their first digital excursion. While just breaking the electronic realm, B’net is well known for innovation (given the three disparate musical forms they fuse and singing on anything from love and anger to the Moroccan soccer team). Krakebs (metal clappers) and handclaps lead a midtempo, pouncing rhythm as the group – led by singer Malika Mahjoubi – bounce call-and-response vocals effortlessly over the boisterous low-end. Bass stays predominant as “Sandya” opens with a finely tuned guimbri (bass lute), handclaps, krakebs and, finally, gnawa vocalist Brahim Elbelkani. Soon after a high-charged drumbeat kicks in and plays off the trance-inducing melodies.

“Sandya” is the most pop-oriented cut, and before staying upbeat too long Sabbah returns to the dark for the two-part “Alla Al ‘Hbab/Hajti Fi Gurini.” Playing the style aïta, which translates to “cry” or “call out,” we find a correlation in Ouled Ben Aguida with qawwali and bhajans. What exists in these three styles is an intense yearning to touch something beyond the human experience, and the voice is used as a transmitter in connecting to that unnamable source. La Kahena is, at foundation, a collection of devotional hymns, much like Krishna Lila before it. On Ouled’s cut such deep beauty exists in the plaintive longing of the male/female vocal interplay it is hard not to be pulled into the swirling lute-decorated rhythms. As desperate a song as this is, it serves as mere introduction to “Madh Assalhin.” Led by a grunting exhale, by the time the Moroccan Haddarates emerge you’re already led into an intimate space. This is the nature of trance music: to lull one to a personal vortex where, upon confronting inner demons, they can face themselves clean of any obstruction. It takes a while to get to – gnawa ceremonies last from sunset to dawn – but in the space of eight minutes Sabbah and friends come as close as possible. Comprised of five women singing sacred songs to Mohammed, “Madh Assalhin” is proof positive that faith is laden with insolubility.

The two-part “Alkher Illa Doffor/Ad Izayanugass” splices the tinde vocals of Algerian native Khadija Othmani. A sparse number filled out with heady psychedelica, flutes, drums and chants, it ends another dark trilogy before Middle Eastern singer Michal Cohen provides the most inspired, dance-floor ready cut with “Im Ninalou.” By this point one isn’t sure which direction – or how many – Sabbah has planned. Unlike the treacherous waters thus far navigated, Cohen comes forth with a refreshing purity matched by the rolling percussive backbeat and tromping string sections. With this number we move from head to heart and find openness, suddenly exposed, as if all the vulnerable lashes converge into safety.

Sabbah would not trick us into believing we can stay comfortable. Just as Dante’s journey explored the underworld and paradise equally, we need not suggest one lead to the another; rather, they form simultaneously. It then becomes a human duty to decipher and navigate how they see fit. La Kahena is an emotive album full of angry devils and caring mothers, the dark/light femininity men both crave and run from. It is a record of danger and beauty, capped with the 13-minute oud and qanun (zither) suite “Jarat Fil Hubj.” Casablanca vocalist Nadia appears for a few minutes between the instrumentals and continues with the hopeful reverence Cohen offered.

Crafted by the dexterous hands of numerous recurring characters, La Kahena is the work of many guided by one brilliant idea. Bill Laswell’s signature bass lines cannot be missed; Karsh Kale’s sturdy tabla is evident. MIDIval PunditZ’s Gaurav Raina returns to ProTool the record to the superior standard he set on Krishna Lila. Ney player/DJ Mercan Dede throws in a hand, as does cellist Rufus Cappadocia, composer Richard Horowitz, and violinist Bouchaib Abdelhadi, filling out the landscape these women paint. In so many ways, that last observation wraps up both La Kahena and life itself: the dark drudgery of men decorated by the poetic feminine, both swirling, clashing and, in the end, making the most beautiful music imaginable. If Africa is truly the motherland of human culture, she’s given birth once again.

ALBUMS

Palya Bea: Álom-Álom, Kitalálom (Gryllus)
Beata Palya: Adieu les complexes (Sony)
Beata Palya: EgyszálÉnek (Sony)

Olah Vince & Earth Wheel Sky Band: From India to Ibiza (Hangveto)

Parno Graszt: Ez A ViláG Nekem Való (Podium)

Boban Marković Orkestar: Srce Cigansko (X Produkcio)

Csík Zenekar: Ez A Vonat, Ha Elindult, Hadd Menjen… (Fono)

Béla Bartók: Hungarian Peasant Songs/Mikrokosmos (Naxos)
Béla Bartók: 44 Duos – Hungarian Folksongs (Naxos)

Johannes Brahms: Hungarian Dances for Violin and Piano (Naxos)

BOOKS

Imre Kertész: Fateless (Vintage)

Sándor Márai: Embers (Pengiun)

Antal Szerb: Journey by Moonlight (Pushkin Press)

Frigyes Karinthy: A Journey Round My Skull (NYRB Classics)

Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon (Vintage)

Serge Moreux: Béla Bartók (Vienna House)

András Torok: Budapest: A Critical Guide (Park Konyvkiado)

Paul Lendvai: The Hungarians (Hurst & Company)

Robert Mandel: Hungarian Folk Instruments (Kossuth)

Originally planned as an outdoor class in a public courtyard attached to the residential building, thick clouds and doomed forecasts forced it to be moved into the fitness center. More intimate and makeshift—I spun while straddling a weightlifting bench—the night had a great energy everyone had a wonderful time. Everyone, that is, except one.

Being positioned slightly outside the studio floor in the weights section, I could see the room through a pulley machine. About midway through my set, I dropped out and three guest musicians—Haale, Matt Kilmer, and Joshua Geisler—played a live set for about fifteen minutes. It was part of the climax of the event. They began by playing live over a banging Nickodemus and Zeb remix of Turkish flautist Omar Faruk Tekbilek, raising their volume once I dropped the beat out. And, for roughly five minutes, it got loud. That’s what a climax does.

Funny thing is, the gym was still open during all this. Members were mostly fascinated, stopping their workouts to peer in, even dance a little to the speaker set up over me as a monitor. Suddenly, one rather pissed off member rushes at me. “You have to respect the members!” he yelled, commanding me to turn it down. He tried to touch some knobs on my mixer, not realizing that the music he was hearing was being created by the musicians not, oh, five feet from where he stood. After seeing my amused look, he figured it out, walking over to the main mixer, which their microphones were in fact plugged into.

I cut him off, telling him it was a benefit class for 9/11 firefighters, and that this part would not last long. He was relentless. His cheeks puffed out with breathless exasperation. I wish I would’ve thought to tell him that yoga could help with that. He yelled at me about respect again. Now, fire is a tricky element to deal with. When you can’t put it out with water, you have to use fire to confuse it, like how firefighters know to burn a clearing so that the first fire has nowhere to go. I replied that he was the one that needed to learn respect. While I don’t like confrontations, there are times when I’m grateful for my six-foot-four frame.

His body went into spasm when I mentioned the word respect, like I killed his baby panda. He told me to F off, and to not tell him about respect. I repeated my sentiment, he repeated his, then stormed off.  However I could keep him from turning off that mixer was going to have to do. All the musicians and students were having a moment of ecstasy, oblivious to the frustrated madman on the other side of the pulley. Besides, some situations aren’t meant for appeasing. They’re designed to be diffused. And sometimes diffusing means igniting.

At the end of the night, the man at the front desk came over to me, fervently apologizing. Apparently the member had screamed at him when he saw his (lack of) progress with me. I felt bad that the fire was routed to him, but at least madman was away from our equipment. Front desk worker was genuinely upset by it all, hoping that I was not mad. By the end of our conversation, we were laughing over the whole thing. That’s when he told me this gem, one so indicative of why someone would demand respect when so little already existed.

“He told me, ‘I’m going to demand my money back.’ The irony is that he has a one-year free membership.”

This blog originally ran on Yogamates.

Many of us know, or know of these struggles: parents divorcing, older sister to constantly bicker with, school bullies, first kisses, ancient old witches in the woods that heal broken bones with auspicious poultices. OK, that last might be a stretch, but not in Mitchell’s world, which, for 294 pages, is a wonderful one to inhabit (as are all his novels). We may not be able to express our childhood so well, but somehow he does it for us, with all the clarity we once had and continue to have during our better moments.

This is not to glorify childhood for anything it was not. Instead, we celebrate what we had by remembering what we have. While watching his parents’ marriage disintegrate—his father has been cheating with a grade school sweetheart; his mother begins running an uber-successful art gallery after raising two children—Jason grows tired of watching the constant one-upmanship they are putting each other through. People tearing apart others, others they supposedly love. His realization: “Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over til it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.”

The wisdom of the young.

Of course, Mitchell wrote the book at age 37. Sometimes it takes a while to become a kid.

We don’t always need to be discussing yoga to be doing yoga. What more can be added to such a poignant observation about the human condition? All else is commentary, not the heart of the matter. Like my close friend Dax always says, “Never do what you hate.”

This blog originally ran on Yogamates.

This is a more extreme example—of course we hope healthcare professionals know what they’re talking about. What he’s getting at is the tendency to write off our own responsibilities in the belief that someone else will take care of us. Much of this work is concerned with our attitudes towards other people, as well as personal situations, where too many choices can lead to making no choice at all. In a study of jam tasters, participants were first offered six different jams; then, thirty jams. Tasters at the table of thirty never tried more than six anyway; the table of six lead to a higher percentage of sales to boot.

True, this is common knowledge to marketers, who know that advertising one product in an ad is going to lead to more sales than trying to pimp five. What most interested me in this book is a study conducted with workers and their relationship to co-workers. Schwartz had already found that we generally brood over loss with more intensity than we get giddy with happiness, and that what makes us happy leaves shorter imprints than what makes us sad. When a worker was given positive feedback, but his co-worker was given more positive feedback, his level of happiness decreased. On the flip side, when he was given negative feedback, but his co-worker received more negative feedback than he did, he was not as sad as he first was (that is, he was more satisfied with a poor job performance that is not as poor as his cubicle mate).

Competitive edge is a biological drive. Our push to survive is what helped us populate the planet. I know that I, for one, take sports much too seriously (playing them; I haven’t watched a game of anything for years). I probably took a co-ed softball league in Brooklyn this summer too much to heart, especially after losing in the championship game. Still: happiness with a co-worker failing? Feeling defeated when we’re doing well, though not as well as another?

One of the greatest lessons to be learned in yoga is the community the practice creates. This does not stop people from bickering over issues within the community, or judging other communities. (As one of teacher, Raghunath Cappo, said before his class, gossip is a very low frequency language. It leaves both speaker and listener feeling dirty.) Then there’s the internal dialogue one has while on the mat. You’re in split pose with your front thigh a solid twelve inches from the ground, while the ballerina next to you looks like she’s as comfortable as can be. I know that habit as a practitioner, and see it as a teacher. It beats up your ego for a while, which is a good thing, because yoga is a humbling discipline, and we all have our “postures” that we’re comfortable in, as well as those that remind us not to take ourselves too seriously.

There will be no neat summation to this piece, because this is not the kind of topic that can easily be wrapped up. Instead, we end with an observation practice: How many times do we judge ourselves on the basis of others? What does that really get us? Do we boost our egos at the expense of people we don’t know, or of people we call friends? Does their failure make us feel better about ourselves? Does their success make us jealous? Tough questions, which is why yoga is a tough path to walk down.

This blog originally ran on Yogamates.