Orlando, Florida

Backstage at the club...

Second US tour begins; The Big Easy; Lost in the shadow of Disney World; Festivals and headliners.

 Florida is a unique place. Besides Las Vegas, it’s got the fastest growing population in the US, where vast wetlands are drained to make way for golf courses, housing complexes, and strip malls. People here come from all over US and the Caribbean. Our first show in Florida this year is here in Orlando, home of Walt Disney World. Like much of America, it’s a place built largely on fantasies conjured out of an inhospitable wasteland.

Bats: Keeping Austin free of insect pests since five million b.c.

One of the first shows of our 2009 US tour was in Austin, Texas, a real playground for music fans and musicians, with dozens of great clubs. Each night at dusk one and a half million Mexican freetail bats emerge from their home under the Congress Street Bridge and go off to their gigs playing bass in alternative rock bands. Our next stop was New Orleans, whose musical pedigree is known to everyone. Our hotel was directly across the street from Louis Armstrong Park, not far from the Ninth Ward where the great trumpeter grew up.

The story of  American music begins in New Orleans, in places like Congo Square, where African traditions met with European instruments and styles to create the fusion which is the root of it all. Reggae’s origins in colonial Jamaica are similar, and the early Jamaican styles like ska influenced and were influenced by their Northern neighbors.

Katrina-Proof: Trombone Shorty from NewOrleans

New Orleans is no longer the city it was in the days of Storyville, when musicians like Satchmo and Jelly Roll Morton honed their skills elbow to elbow with pimps, prostitutes, and drunken sailors. It’s a still a pretty wild town, and the music scene is thriving, even after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, but most of the rough edges have been smoothed out. Children still tapdance and play trombone and clarinet on the street for spare change, and the locals, when you can actually find them, still have a lot to teach the rest of the country about hospitality and enjoying life.

 

Ghosts of Mardi Gras' past.

When I say it’s no longer the city it once was, what I mean is this: the charms of the city have been packaged like the other commercial products that drive the American economy. What is that nonsense about? It’s about advertising. It’s about marketing, capital investment, structures of business integration. It’s about money, risk analysis and the selling of culture. I’m not talking just about t-shirts and beads, I’m talking about a whole industry designed to sell our own culture back to us at a profit. I’m talking about the fact that there’s no real difference between the Vegas Strip, Bourbon Street and Disney World anymore.

The Life of Ignacius Reilly: an enduring New Orleans tradition.

This commercialization doesn’t just affect the culture, the commercialization becomes the culture. Everyone knows this, and many people just accept it: The Grammies, Billboard sales charts, platinum records, America’s Got Talent, MTV and the Eurovision Song Contest. This is music for many people, so lost from its social origins it’s barely recognizable anymore. Sales figures repace poetry, and tabloid soap operas receive more attention than the music itself. Soul, passion, innovation, creativity: these have become secondary.

Dave Matthews at Outside Lands

The first show of Groundation’s 2009 US tour was at OutsideLands, the largest festival in my hometown of San Francisco. The headliners on Saturday were the Dave Matthews Band and the Black Eyed Peas. After Groundation’s performance I enjoyed Dave Matthews’ show from out in the crowd with my wife Gillian and some new friends. From that distance Matthews himself was tiny, dwarfed by the high-definition digital projection of his own image which loomed behind him. While few musicians match the heights of his success, I think Matthews’ career is fairly typical in some ways. He started at the bottom, practicing and playing in small bars and clubs, paying dues, working his way slowly up the ladder to increasing rewards. I think the measured pace of his ascent has allowed him to keep his head level.

Earlier this year Groundation opened for another icon of the current pop music scene, Kanye West. In Europe, it’s not uncommon for independent bands like Groundation to be treated equally with corporate-backed giants like the Chicago rapper, who is almost as famous for his egotism as for his music. We were all looking forward to hearing whether he had the talent to back it up.

The backstage in Belfort, France was fairly lavish, and we were all enjoying ourselves: eating, drinking and socializing with Kanye’s band and crew as well as Dublin rockers The Answer and Olivia Ruiz and her group. A few minutes before schedule, amid an air of hushed expectancy, a fleet of white SUV’s pulled up, and Mr. West stepped out, wrapped safely in a cloak of security guards. He never actually entered the backstage area, but was brought directly to the stage, apparently so he wouldn’t have to meet or talk to anyone. During most of his time on stage he perched atop a sort of pillar, while his half-band (most of the music was prerecorded) toiled in the shadows behind him. At a certain point four dancers, stark naked and covered in gold paint, emerged. This should be interesting, I thought, but I was to be disappointed. The dancers struck poses of worship at West’s feet and stood motionless for the duration of the song, after which they had a brief stretch before resuming their function as stage props, finally exiting the stage somberly after ten minutes’ work as living mannequins.

Kanye West’s music is popular for a reason, it’s very catchy, and his self-confidence inspires respect, even when there seems to be little substance behind it. Many of the young people in the audience probably didn’t realize that a large proportion of the music West ‘performed’ was written by other people. One of the most recognizable samples was PYT (Pretty Young Thing) by Quincy Jones and James Ingram. Who? You might not know their names of the cats who wrote the song which was made famous by Michael Jackson.

The members of the band were shocked by Jackson’s recent death. Musicians all around the world were performing his music as tribute, and Groundation was no exception. I worked passages from “Off the Wall” into the live introduction to our song “Jah-Jah Know”. Once, the whole band spontaneously started playing Billie Jean. We call like to call this ‘quoting’. Jazz musicians often insert meaningful (or just whimsical) melodies into their solos: pieces of Christmas carols in the holiday season, for example. I remember working ye olde melody “Yankee Doodle Dandy” into a solo on July 4^th during our US tour in 2008. Kelsey and Ryan often quote reggae classics in their improvisation. It’s different from playing a version or a cover, and it’s definitely different from sampling. It’s just something that jazz players have always done. It’s a sort of playful thing, a challenge, part of the fun of improvised music.

I have to wonder whether music was much fun for Michael Jackson in the years before his death. He was a talented artist who clearly suffered a great deal, and he left a mixed legacy, but one of the things that we will remember is his failure to cope with fame.  It’s like being lost in a hall of mirrors, where all you can see are distorted reflections of yourself.  The connections of love and commitment between individuals vanish and become a one way ticket to isolation and vanity. This can happen to almost anyone, and I think people who find sudden fame are especially vulnerable, because they haven’t had the time to build up the inner strength to resist fame’s pitfalls. The result can be traumatic: breakdowns, burnout, drug addiction and alcoholism, all of which are prevalent in the music business.

Elvis, Michael, Britney Spears, all of them were deceived by the modern music business. It’s really no different from the fantasy that’s sold today as the American Dream: getting rich quick without having to earn it. Its a fantasy designed to insure our complicity in the mechanisms of our economy, and one that serves to keep people in line, isolating them, turning everyone into competitors rather than collaborators, keeping space limited on the top, making sure there are always plenty of vacancies on the bottom. For myself, I tend to think that anything worth having requires hard work, plus talent and a bit of luck.  For me, many of the guys up there on the big screen are little more than figureheads, no different from the corporate logos that permeate our cultural landscape.

At the end of Kanye West’s performance, the backstage was momentarily cordoned off by a platoon of security personnel while the diva was swept away to his hotel room, or wherever. Harrison said something very poignant to me at that moment, something like this: if Kanye isn’t careful, he’s going to end up just like Michael: isolated, lonely, a monster, an outcast.

Meanwhile the corporate machine chugs on, trotting out one new star after another and letting those that aren’t strong enough fall by the wayside to be trampled by the tabloids. Perhaps it will happen to Kanye West, who knows?

But what did corporate sellouts ever do to you, Diesel Dave, to deserve your derision? That’s a pretty good question, but you’ll have to wait about a week for the answer.