WORLD

Globalfest looks to the past as well as the future

Mary Lipp

December 10, 2006

Can you be nostalgic for a place you've never been? This year's Globalfest will present several bands that re-create times and places that few, if anyone, in these parts ever experienced. In fact, the musicians themselves were never there. Still, they conjure up a spell strong enough to create a place you will want to visit again.

Dominic Cravic, a French guitarist playing jazz and rock in the 1980s, also loved bal-musette, a style born in poor Parisian districts in the 1880s that spread to the upper classes through the early 20th century. The musette dance halls swung to a variety of partner dances - waltzes, tangos, fox-trots.

Bal-musette, Cravic said, has the "perfume of a homemade music played for dance for ordinary people and some high-society members who liked to hang out with the 'milieu,' the hoodlums, pimps, et cetera."

In the 1960s, he said, "We had the arrival of our French version of pop rock 'n' roll, what they called Les Yeh Yeh. The musette style was considered corny - oldie but not goodie - and was swept away. It took 25 years before audiences turned their ears again to what could be considered their own roots."

In 1985, Cravic met a fellow nostalgist in Robert Crumb, the iconic American underground cartoonist, who also played mandolin and banjo and was a fan of old jazz and blues.

Crumb and Cravic hunted down 78 records and found like-minded musicians to create Les Primitifs du Futur. Now their 2000 album, "World Musette," is being released stateside by Sunnyside.

"We like to play some songs close to the way they were played, to keep that tradition alive, and we love that sound," Cravic said, "but what we prefer is writing new songs with a personal approach."

The Primitifs are reverent but not overly serious, swinging but always lovely - even Fay Lovsky's playing of the saw is hauntingly pretty despite its mild absurdity.

Then there's the California group Dengue Fever, which re-creates, of all things, the neon glow of Cambodian pop bands from the 1960s. With the heavy U.S. presence in Southeast Asia at the time, psychedelic rock permeated the region's music. Decades later, an American traveler, Ethan Holtzman, discovered the forgotten style and decided to form an American band to reproduce the cross-cultural music. The Los Angelenos felt they needed a female singer, finally stumbling upon Nimol Ch'hlom singing in a Cambodian expatriate bar.

The group's first album comprised covers of Cambodian pop tunes, while their most recent, "Escape From Dragon House," has them writing original tunes within the style. With the trippy, trebly swells of Farfisa organs punctuated by surf guitars, the music evokes the sound revived in the "Nuggets" series. Ch'hlom's powerful voice, singing in Khmer with Asian-tinged ornamentation and long melodic phrasing, is vastly different from what American rock fans are used to, but it arresting nonetheless.

Another band to watch at Globalfest is the Carolina Chocolate Drops. When the three young black musicians take the stage, playing banjo, fiddle and jug, they seem almost comically incongruous. Their twangy, old-time music may bring to mind Southern white rural culture, but they play music created amid the black community from the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.

Blacks brought the banjo to the Americas from Africa, but black minstrel shows introduced the instrument to whites in the early 19th century, and the two communities developed the music in parallel. With the advent of bluegrass, the old styles faded and only recently has a network of black musicians, including the Drops, started to reclaim this overlooked facet of African-American heritage.

Globalfest, on Jan. 21 at Webster Hall in Manhattan, is linked to a national conference of concert bookers, providing them with a look at a dozen bands on three stages. The night usually sells out, so try now at ticketweb.com or call 866-468-7619. Those who go may one day look back and feel some nostalgia themselves.