Monday, September 24, 2007
Global-ization
After five whirlwind days of world music and sopapillas, we are back from New Mexico. I must admit that I'm just a tad disappointed with the people of Albuquerque. Everyone I've met there has been super-nice, but I can't help but feel that there should be way more support for Globalquerque! than there has been for its first three years. The attendance did go up this year, but the large plaza at the National Hispanic Cultural Center could easily hold twice as many people. I would love to see 3,000 attendees per day at the festival. It's such a remarkable event, it gets oodles of publicity, and it's super-cheap (as little as $25 per day if you buy in advance, which apparently no one does). I mean, the Saturday headliners, Mickey Hart's Global Drum Project, are scheduled to appear at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall this week at $52 a pop. Even if you buy a Globalquerque! ticket at the door, they're only $35, and you get to see ten bands/artists over the course of almost six hours.

Because the majority of G! tickets are purchased on the day of the fest, this year's event could easily have been a disaster. If you read my blog on Thursday, you know about the huge rainstorm that hit Albuquerque the day before the festival. I think all of us who are involved with the event were nervous -- "We have lots of indoor spaces if we need to move anything," Neal promised on the web site. Luckily, Friday dawned warm & sunny, and the weather was perfect for the entire festival. Then on Sunday, as Joe, Neal and I sat in a cafe eating pizza, the skies opened up again and the city was absolutely deluged. We all agreed that we were blessed in regards to the weather. I am sure that if it had rained on Friday or Saturday, most people would simply have opted to stay home and G! would have lost barrels of money.

Perhaps part of the problem is that people think music festivals are arduous -- I know I have avoided events like Lollapalooza and Coachella because of a fear of crowds, porta-potties and $5 bottles of water. However, G! is a super-pleasant event, there's lots of comfy seating (one of the three concert venues is the state of the art Journal Theater auditorium), you can bring in your own agua if you so desire, and there are ample indoor restroom facilities. I do believe that if Neal and his business partner Tom continue to put the fest on every year, it'll grow and prosper as attendees tell their friends about the incredible thing that is going on right there in Albuquerque.

Here are a few of my favorite G! moments:

photo-Hearing Yungchen Lhamo sing -- she performs a cappella, and I can't help but think her soaring voice is what an angel would sound like. Between songs, she spoke in her quiet caress of a voice about her experiences fleeing Tibet, the importance of being kind, or her personal story of 9/11 (she lives in New York, and her son fled his school on foot in an effort to find his mother), frequently punctuating her stories with a wistful "Ya, ya." I think everyone who saw her will remember the experience forever. I got to snap a photo of Yungchen and Mickey Hart (with her camera, so I'm afraid I don't have the pic myself); I considered having my photo taken with Yungchen, but she's so tiny and goddess-like, I feared I would look like a moose standing next to a gazelle. At right, Yungchen does a Q&A about Tibet at Saturday's free day program.

-Senegalese kora master Lankandia Cissoko and balafon player Balla Kouyate -- I'm pretty sure that no one came to Globalquerque! because they're fans of West African harp-lute music, but people went nuts for it, dancing around and sticking dollar bills into Cissoko's kora (which has a convenient hole in it -- great opportunity to make some extra cash!). They even got an encore. Watching Kouyate work the mallets with lightning speed (the balafon is a bit like a xylophone) was amazing.

photo-Native American performer Kevin Locke doing his 28-hoop tribal dance at his evening showcase. The audience could scarcely believe what they were seeing, and applauded his every move. At his Saturday afternoon workshop, Kevin tried to teach several volunteers how to maneuver three hoops -- I don't think anyone quite got the hang of it, but it was fun. After his Saturday night show, I asked Kevin how he managed to do a bit where about 10 of the hoops seemed to be linked together as he danced around with them. He winked and said it was a bit of an optical illusion -- however he did it, it's mind-blowing!

-Another Native American, Shelley Morningsong, wowed the audience when she brought her husband and daughter, dressed in full Native regalia, up to dance as she sang a traditional song. It was too dark for me to get a pic, but I did find one of her husband Fabian, a member of the Zuni tribe, on the web.

Other G! favorites included Latvian folk quartet Ilgi, Moroccan sintir player Hassan Hakmoun, and Colombian singer Marta Gomez. Who knows what corners of the world next year's performers will hail from? I just hope the weather's nice.
posted by 125records @ 11:53 AM  
1 Comments:
  • At 5:45 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Hi Sue,

    Good to see you and Joe at ¡Globalquerque! Just wanted to say that you blog captured a good bit of what ¡G! is all about. Thank you!

    tom

     
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