rain and poetry, thunder and music

this past weekend was the third annual calabash festival--an international literary festival with a caribbean focus, founded by a young jamaican writer named colin channer. once again the festival was held in late may at treasure beach in st.elizabeth, jamaica. treasure beach is home to jake's--a funky little resort boasting a number of charming, idiosyncratic cabins on the beach. with its unusual aridity (for jamaica) and savannah-like fauna, bauxite-red earth, and friendly locals, treasure beach is an inviting spot on the southwest coast. in spite of southwest jamaica's relative dearth of water, late may is rainy season across the island, and calabash was well rained-on for the second year in a row. (apparently they got lucky the first time out.) nevertheless, becca and i enjoyed ourselves, whether we were listening to writers reading under a tent, eating and chatting with other festival goers, or just hanging out back at our hotel.

we drove out to st.elizabeth with trevor rhone, who was a reader at last year's calabash and was hoping to catch a better glimpse this year of the stars, which are much more visible from treasure beach than from anywhere near kingston. (alas, this was only possible on friday night.) trevor came to get us at around 3pm on friday afternoon. this past friday was labor day in jamaica. originally started in the early 1970s by then prime minister michael manley, labor day in jamaica is a day-off from work as usual, but not a day off from labor. on the contrary, people are expected to spend the day laboring on projects that benefit their communities. apparently for the first several years, still running on the new fuel of jamaican nationalism, the activity was quite popular. trevor says it has dwindled, however, in the decades since, parallelling a greater pattern of decline in jamaican society. on this friday, the streets were relatively free of traffic and the radio was ebullient (revelling in the nostalgia of mento and ska). it definitely felt like a holiday. and it was for us.

the ride was pleasant. we stopped several times for snacks, taking our time and enjoying some of the myriad views and tastes the island has to offer. we bought roast cashews and ginger cookies on the road, stopped for some goat head soup (trevor) and a calallo patty (me), and then again for jerk chicken. once we hit manchester we appreciated the cool air as we climbed into the hills. we entered bauxite country and red earth spread for miles around us. at one point, a magnificent valley, small hills rolling like water to the distant coast, appeared on our left, lightly shrouded in mist. we wound our way down mountain roads and followed the inconsistent signs. we seemed to gain and then lose kilometers on our destination, and sometimes after driving for several minutes we were greeted by a sign signalling no progress at all. still, we kept on, weaving our way through the breadbasket of the country--past prospect, past alligator pond, past junction. after a while the land flattened out and so did the trees. a strong sea-breeze gave anything over six-feet a decidedly inland slant. the red-stain of bauxite painted roads and houses in deep, rusty hues. farmers sold melons on the side of the road. when we finally got to treasure beach, it was clearly calabash country. signs were everywhere, pointing us along. white people seemed to be everywhere, too--a striking difference from kingston's demographics. (although there were quite a few whites and "brownings," however, i should note--if i am going to say anything about this at all--that the majority of attendees were darker in complexion. still, the percentages were off. this was clearly a chichi event.) we went to find a parking space and, thanks to trevor's fame, we were quickly flagged into the special section, giving us a short walk to the site of the festivities.

overall, the poetry was pretty bad. too much identity politics (how many poems about menstrual cycles do we need?), not enough attention to craft, to eliciting empathy, to engaging performance. there were, of course, wonderful exceptions. carl hancock rux, a new york-based poet, was entrancing as he opened with a poem about the death of his grandmother (written from the perspective of a four-year-old in a style reminiscent of faulker's idiot narrator for the first third of the sound and the fury). we made sure to buy a copy of his book, pagan operetta, before the weekend was over. everton sylvester was another impressive new york-based poet on the bill. sylvester is of jamaican descent and draws effectively on patois proverbs and american vernaculars to reflect on life in brooklyn and beyond (but mostly brooklyn). we picked up his volume of poems, backyard in bed-stuy , and becca finished it the same night. otherwise, the readings were lackluster. often it was hard to tell whether the writing itself was poor or simply the performances. it seems to me that authors should somehow know intuitively how to read their work--where to pause, where to place emphasis. then again, i should not forget what a challenge live performance is. fortunately, i got a chance to remind myself by reciting a couple poems during the weekend's open mic sessions. on the first night i performed america, which was generally well-received, though the crowd had thinned-out by the time i took the stage (which was well after midnight). i got a second chance the next day, throwing safari honeymoon nightmare at a larger crowd, who seemed to enjoy its narrativity--a rare quality in the pieces read at the festival. an impeccable public speaker and performer, trevor had some valuable tips for me. we talked a lot about poetry and performance over the weekend, and trevor promises to offer me more detailed feedback soon. the other feedback i received (which included votes of confidence from a girl of about 12, a guy who called me "lion man," a woman who works out at the same gym as becca and i, and a man who invited me to read at poetry night this week in kingston) was generally positive, if not very specific (and thus helpful).

saturday was the rainiest day i have yet to witness in jamaica. during breakfast the clouds began to knit together and by the time we left our hotel for the beach, the rain had started to fall. it continued for the rest of the day, often quite heavily. occasionally i expressed a kind of automatic new england optimism about the weather changing ("maybe it'll clear up"), only to have a seasoned jamaican tell me, "no, mon. it's gonna rain all day." typically, rain in jamaica is a pleasant thing, lightly falling for five to ten minutes in the midafternoon, cooling things down nicely without getting them too wet. but this was a different kind of rain, a relentless, heavy rain. without a doubt, the rain on saturday got everything wet. even so, plenty of people showed up for the readings. they huddled under a large tent to stay relatively dry. the festival continued as planned, up to the evening session on bob marley's lyrics (not the most critical or illuminating session), which ended in a full tent sing-along. the "calabashment"--a concert and dance from midnight to three--never happened, alas, as the rain precluded any attempts to set up a soundsystem and no indoor venue was available to hold such an event. i have a feeling most attendees were feeling pretty waterlogged anyway. we certainly were--as were many people around the island. saturday's rain created serious flood conditions in much of the country, turning city streets into ravines, violently washing away million-dollar bridges, drowning one man, and generally wreaking havoc, especially in areas with perenially poor drainage. on the drive back to kingston, the condition of the roads was palpably worse than on the way over: new potholes appeared where none were, old ones opened up to swallow errant tires, and immense puddles threatened to choke exhaust pipes. for all of this damage and annoyance, however, i have rather enjoyed the rainy season so far. before it began, kingston was getting too hot and too dry. now, after several days with some degree of rain (often heavy rain), it is remarkably cooler in town, the grass is turning green again, and a good deal of kingston's ubiquitous dirt and dust has been temporarily subdued.

incidentally, the first rain storm i experienced this spring was not in kingston or treasure beach but in spalding, a small village in manchester. its sudden appearance proved to be rather serendipitous, announcing itself with a great clap of thunder as i was in the middle of recording sounds produced by spalding primary school students. i traveled out to spalding to conduct an interactive version of my digital music workshop that i've been developing since january (listen to some examples with students in cambridge public schools here). when i do not have the resources at hand (i.e., a computer lab) to allow people to get some hands-on experience with digital music tools, i like to use my laptop and a microphone to gesture at the realm of possibilities, have some fun with a particular group, and make some unique music together. last tuesday i had the pleasure of sitting before a group of 200 fourth graders--definitely the largest group of people i had ever attempted this trick with. (and it can be quite a trick--try cutting several minutes of recording into usable samples before a fidgety group of school kids. it's no cakewalk.) they had just finished an exam and were ready for a break. after folding back the partition-like walls between the four classrooms, the space became a very long auditorium. on my recommendation (relayed through a teacher) a number of them had brought in make-shift instruments, from drums to shakers to cookie tins. with all this noise-making capacity, we walked a thin line between engagement and chaos. i was glad to have some teachers around to help me keep things under control, though i was dismayed, and a bit shocked, by the schools' liberal use of corporal punishment.

first i explained a bit about how i use computers to make music. when speaking to a young audience, i like to try to capture and excite their imaginations. it is my hope that after such a demonstration at least some kids will go home with new notions of music, musicianship (yes, laptops are instruments! and so are zippers, for that matter), and sound itself. i talk about the way that i hear the world. i tell them that i love not just music, but sound more generally, and that i like to imagine the sounds around me as music. i tell them that the computer allows me to make my musical imaginations real. the technology enables me to record any sounds i want and then to loop them, arrange them rhythmically, make them higher or lower in pitch, and add echo and other effects. more than telling them, though, i show them. usually, as examples, i play them tracks i have constructed from swimming pool sounds, or a refrigerator (usually the favorite), or my friends and i eating dinner.

after this demonstration, i told the students that we were going to make our own song from sounds that we ourselves would produce, either with our bodies and voices or any cool-sounding object in the room. with a mix of enthusiasm and shyness, they offered up all kinds of sounds: tap dancing, various vocal noises (meows, zzzzs, quacks, oohoohs), a hearty shout in the school's name ("SPAL-DING PRI-MAR-Y!"), and plenty of percussion. the serendipitous, sharp clap of thunder was icing on the cake--a quintessential sonic symbol of manchester's rainy climate. after cutting the recorded sounds into about a dozen discrete samples, i quickly assembled them, with the feedback of 200 nine-year-olds, into a school riddim. here it is. we listened to the track together a couple of times. everyone seemed to enjoy it, especially the chants of "SPALDING PRIMARY!" a few students got on the stage and started dancing. others crowded around my laptop to get a look at the action. one young man grabbed the mic and impressively DJ'd several lines over the riddim:

all of this positive bustle, plus many more smiles and laughs, were reward enough for me. but in true jamaican fashion, i was formally thanked for my time ("on behalf of the spalding primary school...") by an articulate young man who also presented me with a parting gift: a painted wooden plaque with a prayer for one's kitchen and, of course, "jamaica" emblazoned at the bottom.

my trip out to spalding primary was facilitated by a woman named francine, a lecturer at mico teacher's college, who also arranged for me to conduct a workshop for students at mico (specifically, for first-years studying to become music teachers--a good group to expose to new ideas and technologies). i met francine while conducting yet another digital music demo--this time for the peace corps, in a small town called porus. in our first couple months here, becca and i ran across and met with various peace corps volunteers. on one's invitation, we traveled out to mandeville in march to help out with the tiling of a community-center floor. perhaps predictably, we never did any tiling. though the volunteers had hoped to learn the basics and do it themselves, the local floor-tiler more or less insisted on doing it himself. we sat at a restaurant and had beers instead. i proposed a toast to the "toughest job i never did." the experience did little to counter the prevailing reputation of the jamaican peace corps as the "beach corps." then again, we weren't exactly at the beach. and, to be honest, it is clear that plenty of volunteers get down and dirty in their assignments. (the two peace corps workers stationed at jake's on treasure beach are a notable exception.) last month, a volunteer asked us to talk about our project and demonstrate our techniques during a day of workshops for peace corps workers and various jamaicans involved in community-building efforts. there i did another demo where we came up with this ditty.

i got yet another opportunity to conduct this kind of demo on friday, may 16, at the university of technology jamaica. this time the audience was a mix of students and adult attendees of the upliftment multi-media technology conference. the conference represented an effort to launch publically a community technology center in white horses, jamaica, which is a short drive east from kingston. i was glad to see such an endeavor (and impressed at corporate sponsorship from def jam, AOL, and KaZaA, among others). but i was also struck by how many similar projects seem to be happening at the same time. i have seen at least two proposals for nearly identical centers in jamaica in the last month or so. one the one hand, this is encouraging news. it seems likely that with so many attempts, some are bound to succeed. on the other hand, it is somewhat unnerving that all of these efforts seem so disconnected from each other. it seems to me that much could be gained from linking them all together in some way, and that without such networking no individual site might ever build up the steam to be a productive place for learning, communicating, and producing media of all sorts. all the same, the more the merrier. i was happy to participate in the conference and gesture to some of the possibilities. at the end of my two-hour digital music session, we ended up with this riddim, which draws on some "found" percussion (shaking a water bottle, tapping a table) and plenty of odd vocal sounds (at least three throat clearings, some hissing, some kissing, and yet another "meow"--a strangely common contribution in these sessions). a sample from someone's cell-phone adds a haunting melodic line, reminiscent of the great jamaican dub musician, augustus pablo. (here's a link to a page where kenneth warren, of the urban league of richmond, VA, has posted some photos and a short video clip that he produced in his digital video workshop. after telling him a bit about the workshop i planned to conduct, ken decided to make his demonstration more of a hands-on illustration. the music in the video is none other than a wayne&wax dancehall track.)

as one final example of this kind of approach to music-making, i recently took my interest in working with vocal samples and merged it with a "game" devised by a friend of mine. my friend, warren shear, has come up with a set of suggested, productive rules for improvisation (mostly of the interpersonal and vocal sort). when done in such a manner, he calls it the best game in life and believes it has a number of positive benefits. i've played this game many times with friends over the years, though we didn't necessarily think of it as such, and i know it can lead to interesting musical combinations, dynamic interpersonal exchanges, and great fun. recently, warren mailed me a cd containing three short pieces he improvised with my brother nick. in an effort to play the game (in my own way) and riff back at them (and use their cool sounds), i sampled these three pieces and recombined the "bites of behavior" to create a little remix i call "got game." you can listen to it on the music forum (see "the game, remixed"), where you can also rate it and other pieces people have contributed lately. let us know what you think. and thanks for listening.