Reed
College Chapel
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 777-7755
8 pm Friday and Saturday, Dec. 10 and 11
$8-$13
Last night I met all my ancestors together. They came to
my dream to meet me.
They came to my dream to tell me that I had as many ancestors
as I did cells in my body.
--from "Genetic Memories"
Al-Andalus--it's hard to define. Basically, it's
the Arabic and Sephardic name for Andalusia, a province
of Spain. Specifically, it refers to the 700 years between
the 8th and 15th centuries, when Muslims, Christians and
Jews converged on the area and created a cultural hive rich
with the artistic honey of ethnic cross-pollination. In
Arabic cultures today, the word has become synonymous with
an idyllic Eldorado of ethnic acceptance re-imagined through
the sepia-toned veil of memory.
Al-Andalus is also the name of a Portland band of wanderlusting
world musicologists who took the name for all these reasons.
Willamette Week got a linguistics lesson from flamenco
guitarist Julia Banzi, who co-founded the group with her
husband, Tarik.
"The word encompasses a time when things worked," she says.
"It also has a broader meaning of whatever you may be wanting."
The band itself has added its own contemporary definition
to the mix. "We also see Al-Andalus as America now," says
Banzi. "A mix of cultures, not without conflict, but with
all that beauty also."
The same searching complexity defines the group's work,
a musical web that stretches to every corner of the Andalusian
diaspora. Elements of traditional Arabic and Ladino (Sephardic
Jewish) song, trance-inducing Moroccan G'nowa melodies and
Indian classical ragas are all infused with the rhythmic
intensity of Spanish flamenco. The group combines elements
with the quiet assurance of skilled alchemists and comes
up with a mix that's aural gold.
To serve such a fragile folk-music stew with any authenticity
requires global simmering. "We're all from different countries,"
says Banzi, "but most of us have lived a significant portion
of our lives in one other than our own and have all been
dramatically changed by the experience."
You can hear it in the music. Julia, a native of Denver,
only discovered she was Jewish on her father's side when
she was 12 (he was an orphan who stumbled across some ancestral
information). A neighbor gave her the flamenco bug at age
14; she spent a decade in Spain studying the music with
master guitarist Manolo San Lucar. She met Tarik in Madrid
in 1985 while he was playing and studying the oud, an Arabic
stringed precursor to the lute. Tarik's ancestors were driven
from Andalusia in the 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition,
settling across the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco. His
family still holds the key to the house it lost 500 years
ago.
The two formed Al-Andalus when they moved to Portland in
1989 and encountered like-minded ethnic straddlers. Julia
met South Indian vocalist Ranjani Krishnan through teaching.
Krishnan, who spent years in the Middle East, has the honey-smooth
delivery of the best international soul singers, plus the
acrobatic swoops of Indian classical singing. (Banzi jokes
that such vocal purity can only come from Krishnan's years
of vegetarianism.) Peruvian percussionist Martin Zarzar
studies at Boston's Berklee School of Music; fellow percussionist
Hanan Banzi hails from Morocco. Violinist Billy Oskay, also
of the group Nightnoise, is an American who has spent his
career fiddling with his Celtic heritage.
All of these bloodlines converge on the new, aptly titled
Genetic Memories. The melodies for "M'enamori" and
"Marrakesh" are good examples of the group's cleansing of
ethnic stereotypes. Though the first is a 12th century Jewish
tune and the second from Muslim Morocco, they both trace
their roots to Andalusian Spain. "Absence" not only fuses
ethnicity, but technology as well. The text--an Arabic poem
from the Middle Ages about the marriage of art and science--is
"read" by a computer to band backing.
The CD's title piece could serve as the group's theme song.
"It's from an Andalusian poem that says we carry within
our genes memories of past places and people," says Banzi.
"We know genetically we're linked to the whole world, and
musically we as a group can draw on that.
"It's part of the mystery and magic of America to look
back at our roots. Maybe we find them, maybe we don't, maybe
we make them up."
Few, however, make such a grassroots obsession of their
heritage as the members of Al-Andalus. And even if they're
making it up, it still works.
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Willamette Week | originally
published December 8,
1999
|
