The Spoleto Buzz

A terrible notion struck me Thursday during a performance by the Carolina Chocolate Drops — that a someone somewhere might look at them and not see a trio of superb musicians reviving a rich yet nearly forgotten slice of musical Americana, but see through race-tinted glasses a trio of country Negroes.

It was made even more terrible by this thought: that their efforts to reclaim an American heritage — the African-American string music of the Piedmont, the various instruments, especially the banjo, and the old-timey ways of dressing up (smocks, hats, suspenders, and bare feet) — might backfire.

To these highly educated and immensely intelligent performers, the musical conventions of the early 20th century are as distant from them personally as ancient Rome. They are in fact not anything like the old-timers they revere. They grew up listening to pop music like everyone else their age. This old-timey music, and the historical knowledge that goes into it, must feel exotic as well as fresh and authentic.

But for those who feel no distance from the past, for those who see old-timey music not as a convention but as a reflection of inner reality, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ attempt to reclaim the past might look like a continuation of the past.

To the enlightened, there’s a difference between acting country (going barefoot to enhance the aesthetic of a performance) and being country (going barefoot because you don’t have any shoes and the presumptions based on race and the history of racism that go with that). To the unenlightened, however, it’s all the same.

Later, we were eating gelato on George Street, killing time before the next show. Next to us was a bunch of white men and women. They appeared to be baby boomers in their late 60s. Half of them had just seen the Drops, but seemed unsure. It was interesting, we heard them say. They emphasized that the musicians were black and they were playing old-time music. They seemed incapable of saying whether they enjoyed it.

I don’t know these people. I don’t know their worldviews. Maybe they’re racist. Maybe not. But who isn’t? It’s an American pathology. I’m not bemoaning a fact of life. I merely bring this up because such ambivalence illustrates how race and racism still play a role in music, even affecting people’s enjoyment of it.

The band itself is conscious of this. During the concert, Dom Flemons explained how the banjo is central to African-American string music. He said plainly and correctly that the instrument is of African descent. As if realizing that such a statement of fact is, to some ears, a statement of opinion — the angry black opinion — he backpedaled, generously, for the sake of any white folks insecure about being white.

“I mean it’s American,” he said. “It just comes from African.”

Later, in the same explanation about the banjo’s origins, Flemons was again sensitive to overly sensitive whites. He explained that obviously (my word) the banjo came to America because of the slave trade. But he didn’t use the s-word.

“It came here on uneasy terms,” he said.

Even so, they didn’t shy away from history.

Rhiannon Giddens, the lovely singer, fiddler, and dancer, introduced a song called “The Genuine Negro Jig.” It was written by Dan Emmett, she said, the man who wrote “Dixie.” She didn’t say that Emmett, who was white, was a pioneer of blackface minstrelsy. Or that he founded the first major traveling minstrel show, which became a standard for hundreds like it.

Giddens did say that Emmett probably learned “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy, from the Snowdens, a family of black musicians who lived down the street from Emmett’s family home in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Because black songwriters during this time didn’t get credit for their work, Giddens said, the Chocolate Drops changed the name of “The Genuine Negro Jig” to “Snowdens’ Jig.”

Two things here: On the one hand, renaming the song pays respect were respect is due. On the other, renaming it does something else, something brilliant, something of Barack Obama-like transcendence, grace, and poetry.

By renaming a song written by a blackface pioneer who had taken credit for writing a nostalgic ode to plantations and, by extension, to slavery, they have reclaimed the past as well as the present. “Dixie” is not just the preserve of whites. It’s the preserve of history, and anyone can stake a claim to that.

And they do. The Carolina Chocolate Drops co-opt the trappings of old-time music — the music, of course, but also the clothes, the mannerisms, and the language. Flemons wore a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, a pork-pie hat, and suspenders. Giddens wore jeans and a flower-patterned smock with no shoes. And Justin Robinson wore a pageboy cap, but also cut-off jeans and rainbow-colored socks.

Flemons gives himself away by using folksy locutions like “this here song” and “what would ya’ll like to hear?” Whatever regional dialect they once had has been lost to a flat accent of the educated and professional class. Then again, Flemons would only be giving himself away if he were trying to be genuinely folksy. He’s not. He’s just using language that’s appropriate for the occasion and for the music.

But what’s appropriate to these young creative minds defies expectation. They are of a new generation of African-American musicians trying to understand what’s happening now and what happened then. They were born long after the Civil Rights Movement. They have no personal memory of Jim Crow. They won’t be contained by their race, but they won’t try to escape it either. They won’t allow others to define who they are, but they won’t alienate others in the bargain. They would have a lot to say to Bamuthi Joseph.

Twice during the performance, Flemons left the stage. When he came back, he did a Michael Jackson-inspired spin before taking his chair. When his banjo went out of tune, he whipped out a tuner, a high-tech move that I’ve never seen done at a folk or otherwise Americana performance. And one of their last songs was a cover of a hit by Blu Cantrell, with Robinson rocking the mic like a beatbox.

“We did this on Lowcountry Live,” Robinson said. “Anyone see that?”

Silence.

“OK.”

Maybe their efforts won’t backfire after all.

Chocolate Drops

I was going to write something snarky about Tim Page, but I won’t. The Spoleto overview critic for the Post and Courier was in the audience tonight at a recital by avant-garde percussionist Gerry Hemingway. The concert started a little after 6 o’clock. Page was out of there by 6:17 p.m.

Perhaps he had another appointment. I don’t know. But his early departure has precedent. He admitted to leaving the American premiere of Monkey: Journey to the West, Spoleto’s buzz-worthy production costing $1.3 million, after 40 minutes, before the story turns to a search for redemption and enlightenment.

Though I do think a critic should give due diligence before leveling an opinion, perhaps Page is right. Why stay if you don’t like something? Why give your attention and time to a performer who is not reciprocating in kind, when a performer is self-indulgent, entitled, or even oblivious to the presence of an audience?

I’m not describing Hemingway. In fact, he’s a nice guy. I met him. He’s smart and earnest and devoted to the adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. But he’s no showman. His recital made that very clear. His powers of observation were such that he began giving an encore as throngs of people were heading for the exit.

I can only guess that Hemingway’s performance tonight was based on some kind of concept, but if you didn’t know what the concept was, you were screwed. It was a concatenation of imaginative sounds. Hemingway performed solo to a recording of sound effects — snaps and crackles and pops similar to the sounds you’d find in any urban landscape. For a long time, the performance had no discernible beat, but eventually there was a pulse. Then it was gone again.

The history of the avant-garde is grounded in the urge to challenge. It didn’t matter what you were rebelling against just as long as there was something to rebel against. This mode of thinking naturally emphasized the value of the art and de-emphasized the value of the audience’s experience. Composers had become the enlightened sages, the audience sanctified disciples following in their wake.

Or something. Anyway, if you liked something, the composer was doing something wrong. During the peak of the avant-garde — during the careers of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt — there was no concern about the audience. Audiences had always been there and would always be there, except when they weren’t anymore. It’s remarkable to imagine composers wondering why no one’s paying attention to them while at the same time their work’s value is measured by how much they can piss people off.

I don’t think Hemingway was trying to piss anyone off, but his recital is of that tradition. Perhaps he was trying to liberate the drummer from the tyranny of meter. Perhaps he was trying to get us to experience the sound from the inside out. Perhaps he was trying to simply demonstrate the possibilities of a virtuoso musician and his instruments. Maybe it was parody of an audience’s rhythmic expectations.

Whatever the case, Hemingway was seriously losing his audience. People were looking around, checking their watches. The woman in front of us took her boredom as an opportunity to brush her hair. I checked the time three different times: once when Tim Page left, again at 6:37 and then again at 6:49 p.m. Many people just left, which irritated me at first. Then I got to thinking.

If the tradition of the avant-garde assumes the participation of the audience, or even goes out of its way to provoke the audience, then what are the obligations of that audience? Naturally, people want to be polite. They also want to get their money’s worth. Beyond that, however, what are your obligations as a ticket-holder if the musician has abandoned what used to be considered his or her obligations: to entertain you, to engage you, to take you someplace strange and exciting.

I’m beginning to think: Not much. Spoleto audiences typically want to appear refined. But they might rediscover the value of being honest, too, and just walking out if something is not to their liking. It’ll be good for audiences, good for the festival, good for composers, and good for the art.

Laurie Anderson performs again tonight at 9 p.m. It’s the last of three Charleston shows for the pioneering performance artist. Last night, her husband Lou Reed showed up for a tune. Perhaps he’ll do it again tonight. At any rate, we saw the show, called Homeland, on Wednesday and like a couple of other performances at this year’s Spoleto Festival, it had the feeling of being a little late in the game.

Taylor Mac and The Burial at Thebes have political overtones. While one makes fun of the absurdities of the past eight Bush years (airport security, etc.), the other underscores the tragic elements of those years (the social and political dangers of nationalism and xenophobia). In neither of these performances, however, is politics essential to what they are. They were an art that has much more to offer.

For instance, Mac, the transgressive, cross-dressing fool, is a master shape-shifter, able to manipulate and charm any kind of audience. Though some of his material has lost its frisson (i.e., jokes about “unattended bags”), he elicited an amazing range of emotions — from mirth to sadness to pity to respect.

On the other hand, Thebes, which was performed by the Nottingham Playhouse, was a spartan and ingenious production that spoke to timeless themes of concern to all of us — death, duty, honor, family, and religion. King Creon himself is an oblique allusion to George Bush, but one could completely ignore that allusion. Creon is a tragic figure that has stood on his own since Sophocles wrote Antigone.

The same can’t be said of Anderson’s Homeland. It depends entirely on politics and current events that aren’t as current as they used to be. It feels stuck in time.

Homeland is perhaps best understood as a spoken-word political satire with songs and music serving as interludes to pithy and didactic musings on war, corporate corruption, terrorism, torture, American consumerism, American imperialism, global warming, bureaucracy, Evangelicals, and on and on.

Some musings were funny. Anderson joked about malpractice insurance, underwear advertising, and about the English language: how you don’t have to memorize the sex of every object in the room. Some of these musings were striking in their imagery: “My eyes are black like nail heads popping out of the wood waiting for the hammer.” But most felt stale, like reading a newspaper from a couple of years ago.

The music simply wasn’t strong enough to overcome the weakness of the message and the cuteness of the poetry. If Anderson had delivered Homeland in 2005 or 2006, it would have felt more powerful, as if she were saying something that badly needed saying. As it is, it’s already been said, many times over, and our collective attention is now elsewhere. Despite its avant-garde antecedents, Homeland, which is Anderson’s first Spoleto gig since 1999, seemed a bit passé.

“Are you young enough to have enjoyed that?” asked an older man outside Memminger Auditorium after the show. He and his friend were baby boomers. The remark implied that Homeland was an outgrowth of a kind of artsy-fartsy fare that the kids like so much these days. But it wasn’t that at all. Homeland sounds to my ears like a product of a creative mind forged in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Anderson attempts to satirize American imperialism by singing a happy song about a young girl joining the armed forces. It’s a kid’s war, Anderson sings, but business is good. “We keep calling them up” is the tuneful refrain. The language suggests that she equates joining the army with the draft. The song feels like yet another attempt by a baby boomer to apply the values of her generation to the problems of mine. Problem is, those values don’t fit. So it’s not just Homeland that seems stuck in time.

Anderson does, too.