Our friends and sometimes houseguests, Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic, are facing an immigration hassle. Says Bruce, “We have no joint bank account, no insurance accounts and no joint children. The authorities therefore suspect that our marriage is a phony ‘Green Card marriage,’ and they would like to have Jasmina deported from the USA.”
Note to the harried couple: send INS our way, we can certainly verify your persistent, more or less blissful marital status…
This caught my eye, and I was wishing I could drop everything and head for the National Museum of African Art.
It’s as rousing as a drum roll, as piquant as a samba, as sexy as Césaria Évora’s voice. It’s about glitter and tears, bawdy jokes and baskets of flowers, miracles and mysteries, money in hand and affairs of the heart. It’s about standing at the edge of the sea at dawn and watching a world re-born. In that world no one walks; everyone dances and swims; everyone, that is, who has taken the plunge into Mami Wata’s realm.
Who is Mami Wata? She is Mother Water, Mother of Fishes, goddess of oceans, rivers and pools, with sources in West and Central Africa and tributaries throughout the African Americas, from Bahia to Brooklyn. Usually shown as a half-woman, half-fish, she slips with ease between incompatible elements: water and air, tradition and modernity, this life and the next.
The Ab Baahrs trio will be in Austin next Friday. [Link] (Thanks to Pedro Moreno for the pointer!)
A highly distinctive voice from the fertile Dutch jazz scene, Ab Baars brings an idiosyncratic creativity into combination with skill and knowledge of his music’s roots. Though his music has been described as “joyfully obstinate”, it has an undeniable and colorful catchy-ness that stems from its stripped essence. As an instrumentalist, Baars has been influenced by (among others) American Jazz greats like Roscoe Mitchell and John Carter (both of whom he has worked with). As a composer/improvisor/band-leader Baars displays all of the musical characteristics that have come to define the Dutch creative music scene: open forms, varied improvisational strategies, wacky use of juxtaposition, and an unwillingness to treat jazz—or any music—as a fixed art form. Ab Baars is an important member of The ICP Orchestra, the defining group of Dutch jazz.
