Furuvik Zoo, Sweden

After five years the Swedish Police welcomed us with their special-but-familiarl brand of hospitality. Marcus got pulled out of line and strip searched all within our first two minutes in Sweden. Police dogs swarmed through the travelers coming and going. I really don’t want to believe that’s business as usual here. Everyone’s got their problems.

Except perhaps for Yared, a Swede and an African, and our good friend, who really welcomed us to Furuvik Reggae Festival. A first class set of bands came through, and he had hot rice & peas, dumplings, and brown stew chicken for all. After our performance, Kim and Jhamiela hung out with Marcia Griffiths in the circus ring that served as our back stage while I grabbed my camera.

Furuvik is famous for its animal park, and it held some strange fascination for me from the moment we arrived. They have some serious rides, and a Disney style-castle, which is always cool, but I was more interested in their chimpanzees. I spent half an hour trying to talk a zoo administrator into letting me take pictures of them.

“They don’t like to be woken up,” She said. “They get very irritable.”  She told me that their alpha chimp, Santino, stockpiles rocks in the morning to throw at the annoying humans who file past his enclosure every day. A Swedish primate scientist made his career telling other scientists about this behavior.

“Sounds dangerous”, I said. “But I’d bet he could pitch a fastball at a hundred and seventy. That’s like 250 kilometers.”

“Luckily, he has bad aim,” she said. She looked nonplussed. Probably most Swedes don’t care much about baseball.

Backstage bowling alley. “Groundation? You’re down by lane 25.”

Furuvik Zoo is not the strangest place we’ve played. We’ve played on boats touring Boston Harbor and the East River, bowling alleys, basketball courts, and the water park formerly known as Wet ‘n’ Wild in Salvador, Bahia. A few days ago we played in a defunct casino in Slovenia.There can be a surreal element to such experiences.  I don’t care, just tell me where to point my trumpet and when to start blowing.

The strangest moment of the tour so far was Freedom Taking Over in Ostroda, Poland. It’s the last song of the set. I’ve got my eyes closed because I’m so into it. I’m waiting to hear Kim, because she sings the part Don Carlos sang on the original recording. The recording of that song marked an important moment in Groundation, like the climax of a chapter in a book, and a kind of musical nexus. If you don’t feel the vibe at that moment, you probably never will. Anyhow, I’m waiting to hear this part and then I  can’t believe I’m hearing the actual voice of Don Carlos. I open my eyes and he’s really there, on stage with us, singing: “Oh yeah, oh yeah now.” And it was snowing in August*.

*If you thought I was tripping that it was snowing in Mid August in Poland, you were right. Apparently some bubble machine broke down and began launching thousands of little floating clusters of foam. I knew it was too good to be true.

Tolmin, Slovenia

UNPAID INTERNSHIP AVAILABLE!

Dream Job! Perform highly repetitive physical tasks at home alone for several years, annoying family and neighbors, after which time you may be offered a paid position at approximately half the minimum wage. Applicant shall be available all evenings, holidays, and weekends. Otherwise, applicant is on call. May require heavy lifting. Multiple safety hazards on work site. All equipment and expenses shall be provided by the applicant, including all transportation costs, retirement benefits and insurance. Applicant shall relinquish all rights, including those pertaining to copyright, disability, or the nonpayment of wages.

Welcome to you new career in music. If it isn’t a little discouraging, it should be. It scares your parents. Don’t be mad at them; it should scare you, too. It’s up to you to convince them it’s the right thing for you. That’s the same whether you’re still in school, or already working. For most of us, it really helps if mom and/or dad are into it. Many successful musicians I’ve met have had very encouraging parents. I was lucky. Even though my folks didn’t always encourage me in music, they accepted my career choice when they saw I was happy and no longer asking them for money.

Mingo was even luckier. His mom, Carolyn was a superfan. All her life she loved art and music of all kinds, particularly photography and exotic subjects like Chinese art. As a young woman in Northern California she dreamed of traveling to Paris, while at home she was at the center of some of the most exciting times in American music. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Santana were in their prime, and she heard them all.

When little Mingo was born, she transferred her enthusiasm for acid rock into supporting her son’s musical talent as Mingo took up the saxophone, switching to drums, and finally Afro-Cuban percussion.On the field,  Mingo was a three sport-athlete, but his mom couldn’t watch him get hurt, so she stopped going to his games. But she never stopped going to Mingo’s concerts, where he is only occasionally injured.

Carolyn Lewis was already a fan of Groundation, even before her son joined the band, so when he took the gig, she became a fixture of the front row, her camera blinding anyone unfortunate enough to be standing too near her son. Actually, she spent most of her time with the other fans in the house; we didn’t see her backstage too often. Maybe that was just Carolyn’s way of being a good mom.

In March of this year Carolyn lost her battle with cancer. Mingo missed Groundation’s South America tour in order to support his family and manage his mother’s funeral. Her death brings to five the number of parents Groundation members have lost in the last four years. I think it has changed us in subtle ways. We channel some of our grief through our music, and the tour continues, around and around.

At lunch yesterday Mingo told us he’d always felt sad when his mother visited his dreams, but last night seeing her had left him feeling good, free for a time from the grief he’s felt.

“She never made it to Paris,” Mingo told me. “But when she saw my photos of the Eiffel Tower she said, ‘Now I don’t have to go.’”

Diesel Dave Chachere August 15, 2013

Portland, Oregon

My dad, 1928-2010; A Man of Parts; The Paper Bag Test; Mysteries of the Seminal Seminary; A Blog Rebooted.

My dad wishing me and my wife a happy marriage. He claimed to have no part in intelligent design.

It’s been more than three years now since my father died of cancer in the spring of 2010. I remember the hearse drivers waiting patiently as I helped dress him in his favorite suit and sent him off. Despite objections from his wife and others he’d decided to donate his body to the University of California Medical Center so young doctors could confront the mysteries of life and death, using his body as their textbook. For him, it was nothing more than another teaching gig.

To me, this seemed both a generous decision and a fitting one. Marvin Lancelot Chachere’s life had been devoted to education in all forms. Socrates was his constant touchstone: a man who would rather die than suffer foolishness, lies and ignorance. Marvin taught American students in Moscow and Thailand, garnered degrees in Math and Philosophy. Teaching was not actually his first choice for a career. He’d narrowly avoided joining the priesthood. I’m glad he didn’t, considering the fact that if he’d fulfilled that ambition, I’d never have been born.

He was the titan of my childhood in more ways than one: strong enough to lift sacks of cement all day in the summer sun, able to build or fix anything, seemingly capable in everything he turned his will to. Sometimes he stumbled. He’d lost a court case once, he told me, but the judge had given him a compliment that made the monetary loss seem insignificant: “I have no compunctions about imposing this fine on you,” the judge had said. “I suspect it will be no more than a minor hardship, for you, sir, are a man of parts.”

A man of parts, was what my father always aspired to be. A man of many talents: incisive, responsible, prudent, tenacious, a man who would land squarely on his feet no matter what happened.

That judge’s words were more accurate than he knew. My father faced plenty of adversity. He often reflected on two of the greatest setbacks in his early life.

The Diesel Diaries do not represent the views of Safeway Foods or its affiliates.

The first involved what was known as the ‘paper bag test’. Southerners, creoles in particular, used a convenient rule of thumb to determine whether one of their number was likely to pass in the world of whites. You can try this test yourself. Stand in front of a mirror. Hold a brown paper bag up to your face. If your skin is lighter than the bag, congratulations! You can probably pass as Spanish or Italian, which, if you’d lived in the Southern United States in the the days of Jim Crow, meant that the promise of the American Dream might still be attainable if you were willing to live a life of imposture. Darker than the bag? No problem, let me show you to the back of the bus.

As I’d mentioned, the wise patriarchs of the Catholic Church refused to let my father take his final vows and become a priest. In his terminal interview, they offered my father three reasons. First, he was too attached to his earthly family. Second, he loved beauty, in the form of art and music, presumably to the detriment of his love of god. Standing there in the office of the monsignor, reeling from the shock and disappointment, with blood rushing to his face and pounding in his ears, my father never actually heard the third reason. To the day he died he never knew what his third “shortcoming” was.

In a daze, he packed his things and boarded the bus for the long journey from Vermont back to his home in New Orleans. It was a crushing blow. The priesthood was one of a very few routes out of Southern poverty, and that door was now closed to him. I imagine that darker paths may have presented themselves to him in the face of this defeat, but he did not choose them. He turned instead to another light which shone just as bright as religion had, a light which would guide him for the rest of his life. He sought truth in philosophy, humanism, and rational positivism. In short, he replaced god with man as the center of the universe.

What does any of this have to do with music, jazz or reggae, Groundation or Rasta? I don’t know the answer to that, other than to say that this is who my father was, and he, in part, made me who I am, and I, in part, make Groundation what it is. When my father died in May of 2010 my perspective on life underwent a number of changes. One result was to suspend the writing of this blog for more than three years, but also to reflect on my fathers life, and the lives and deaths of our parents, and how they affect us and our music. So it’s in his honor that I endeavor again to share with my family, friends and the fans of Groundation some of the thoughts and experiences I’ve accumulated during my life on the road.

Cheers, D.