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Shepherd Express, Feature >>
The news is filled with wars and worries of wars. Civilizations appear to be clashing on the crawl spaces of cable news networks. Ethnic and religious rivalries are running amok. But as battle lines are being drawn across the globe, the sound of music continues to cross those lines.
At least that's the hopeful ideal behind "Global Union," a two-day, eight band, international festival of world music, held Sept. 16-17 at Humboldt Park. The lineup features everything from Tuvan throat singers covering "In-a-Gadda-Da- Vida" (believe us, it's better than Iron Butterfly's original) to a sultry diva wailing over an Arabesque combo with contemporary dance beats to a revved-up Balkan wed ding combo-cum-hardcore punk band. "Union'' is organized by Alverno Presents, the performance series, normally confined to the college's Pitman Theatre, that has become a consistent platform for world music in Milwaukee.
When asked about folk music, Louis Armstrong once quipped that he hadn't ever heard any music by horses. He meant that all music is folk music, created and performed by people, the only folks we know. Likewise, until we can hear the music of the spheres, or discover sonic cultures on other planets, all music is really world music. And yet the problematic term, coined in the 1980s as a marketing tactic, a dumping bin for all non-rock music from exotic places, has not only persisted, but has gathered a new set of meanings.
"The interesting thing happening today is that we have access to sounds in ways we never had before," explains David Ravel, director of Alverno Presents.
''World music used to be ethnographic field recordings from largely inaccessible places. It was thought to be the pure expression of other cultures, but purity means nothing in the era of the Internet. Nowadays we can be aware of anything in the world. It's no surprise that musicians are leading the way."
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Yat-Kah's frontman Albert Kuvezin explains that Western rock music has become a universal language.
The electric guitar is similar to a pen and paper which you can kind of use to communicate with people everywhere around the world, he said. Thanks to satellites and the Internet, he explained, even the most isolated areas, including his native republic Tuva in remote southern Siberia, are familiar with rock music.
In the early 90s, however, Kuvezin realized that no musicians were blending traditional Tuvan music with the increasingly popular sounds of the West, so he formed Yat-Kah to fill the void. The group combines electric rock with kargyraa, a form of throat singing where the vocalist creates multiple sounds simultaneously. For Kuvezin, it was a natural match. The popular rock artists he grew up with tried to modify and distort sounds through modulation, pedals and studio tricks. He happened to know a natural way to accomplish a similar effect with just his voice.
Yat-Kah's latest album is a collection of covering songs by Western musicians that inspired Kuvezin, including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley. It's not as loud as previous Yat-Kah releases, but even when the instruments are acoustic, Kuvezin's threatening, guttural growl should be enough to satiate metalheads. Particularly interesting is Yat-Kah's stripped-down version of Joy Division's lone hit, Love Will Tear Us Apart, where Kuvezin sings Ian Curtis lyrics while his throaty vibrations substitute for the synthesized melody of the original.
Unlike universal rock heroes like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, in the U.S.S.R., bands like Joy Division and the Cure were not widely popular, but to musicians in the underground they were legends, Kuvezin said. We got strong feelings from music such as this, especially during the time when there was a powerful communist and socialist system.
Kuvezin said those cult bands demonstrate how music transcends the language barrier.
People here don't understand the lyrics, he explained, but they still understand the main ideas and the mood of the song. 08/30/06 >> go there
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