Leaving Mendoza

November 23, 12:47 PM

Instead of scoring the nice bus (see two entries back) for the trip back to Buenos Aires and ultimately home, the organizers decided to go with Stops Every Thirty Yards For Long Periods of Time Autobus Company. We’re currently in the midst of a crowded, boring sixteen hour deathmarch. What can you do on a sixteen hour bus ride? Some of us have reading material, but some of us can’t read in vehicles thanks to motion sickness. Still others of us are just too godawfully tired to concentrate, having woken up at five AM after being out until about one. Some of us sleep, while others of us just sit and wait for that numb bus stupor to take hold, with all the wall-eyed staring out the window at a landscape that largely resembles Ohio once you get east of the Sierras. Stale, re-circulated air and trainloads of boredom: that’s our life today, all the long, long horrible day.

At least Mendoza was fun. Surprisingly, none of our three concerts got cancelled and we played every night we were there. The first two were in Mendoza’s Central Park in what amounted to a natural amphitheater, and the third was in an unnatural indoor theater. Both turned out to be very nice venues. We continued alternating our sets with those of the Danes. We also got to know them a little during the interminable waiting around. These Danes fall roughly into two categories: younger and older. The younger ones are a six piece outfit called Mames Babaganoush, mostly acoustic but also somewhat rock-oriented. Their names are Christian, Christian but goes by Bo, Andreas, Emil, Nikolai and Lukas, Bo’s brother. They’re almost all in their twenties, mostly thin and tall and with a penchant for the skinny ties. For these reasons, plus the fact that two of them are brothers, they remind me of The Lounge Lizards.
The elder Danes, Ann Magrit and Henrik, are the Klezmer Duo. Henrik is very soft-spoken but seems warm and Ann Magrit is very outgoing and enthusiastic. Between them they play accordion, vocals, soprano sax and hammer dulcimer (not cymbalon).

(Meanwhile, our driver has been turning the air-conditioning on and off at random intervals. I’ve read about this as a torture technique: you introduce unpredictability and a chaotic lack of routine in order to disorient your captive, thereby speeding along the process of breaking him and getting your information. Our CIA has trained these Argentine bus drivers well. )

The Klezmer Duo does all traditional acoustic music and provides a good counterpoint to what the young Danes and Yid Vicious do.

(Oh look, we’re stopping again!)

(Oh, and someone just noticed that the AC on this bus is leaking, just like on the first bus!)

They’re all witty and fun to be around (the Danes) and speak better English than everyone in our dumb country. Ever since I saw Hamlet, I’ve assumed that people from Denmark are gloomy, morose, Oedipal, and suicidal. I don’t know these Danes THAT well, but I’m guessing they’re not carrying that much baggage. Themost stereotypically Scandinavian tendency of theirs that I’ve observed is their clean playing, as clean and smooth as their scrubbed Nordic faces. This again provides a good counterpoint to Yid Vicious, who, as the kids were saying twenty years ago, “keeps it reals”.

(We’re making another stop. So far all the bus stations in the towns we’ve stopped in have been way way off the highway, which means more slow driving and the wheels of time grinding to an excruciating halt before we’ve even actually stopped. This stop turns out to be for twenty minutes. WE GET TO GET OFF THE BUS, or the “suckbus”, as we’ve been calling it. We’ll hang around in the bus station for a few minutes, buy some chips and beverages, try and breathe some oxygenated air, check out the bathrooms (the bathroom on the bus, by the way, isn’t too bad; it’s a little like an airplane bathroom), stand around next to the bus, finally decide we might as well just get back on the damn bus, world without end.)

The whole “clean playing” issue brings up an aspect of this particular festival that some of us at The Vicious Traveler find compelling. Domestic Yid Vicious has had several discussions over the years vis a vis the stylistic characteristics of klezmer. We’ve been told on several occasions that we play too “clean”, too precise, that we should “dirty up” our playing to, once again, keep it reals. How hard do we want to work to replicate the traditional styles? CAN we replicate the traditional style, and if so why should we? If you’ve spent your whole life learning to play with precision and then you one day make a conscious decision to unlearn what you’ve learned, isn’t it just an ingenuous grab at achieving someone’s (almost never YOUR) idea of authenticity?

(During the twenty minute or so break, Suckbus has gotten a little steamy. Members of the TVT team passed a few minutes sweating and discussing past long bus trips. One of us once took thirty hours getting from Boston to Wisconsin via the Greyhound. Others of us spent a sweltering fourteen hours at a stretch riding around Southern Asia. Every traveler has his stories.)

We’ve had some contact over the last couple of years with several of the East Coast KlezKamp people. The KlezKamp krowd are the most influential proponents of Yiddish music in the US today, maybe in the world. A couple of them are world-class musicians, a few of them influential stylists, one or two of them strident polemicists. They’re a fairly diverse lot, but they largely adhere to the principal of folk music as a marker of cultural identity and the preservation of that identity. What this boils down to in practice is that the folk musician, in this case the klezmer, can’t just play the music any way she feels like it. Like classical music, klezmer was set down by the masters for posterity and to not emulate the masters as exactingly as possible means that you’re disrespecting the tradition and trucking in charlatanry of the worst kind.

To my knowledge, nobody has ever openly accused Yid Vicious of being charlatans. We HAVE been told (BTW, did you know that central Argentina is very very flat? Like Bonneville Salt Flats flat, but with vegetation.) by some of the afore-mentioned KlezKamp people that we’re too clean. We have tons of respect for the musicianship and judgement of these particular KlezKamp people, but some among us marveled at the ramifications of this verdict. Here we were, about ten highly trained musicians, discussing style and the manner in which stylistic purity can be achieved, which largely entails adhering to the given style faithfully without the blandishment of your past training.

But how do you unlearn what you’ve worked so hard to learn? Isn’t that a kind of affectation? Like earlier, when we pointed out how reals Yid Vicious prefers to keeps it? And if you can’t add what you know to a given genre, doesn’t that just mean that that genre is sterile and pretty much dead?