JumbieRecords

Mobilizing for the Performing Arts

My friend Gerald Cleaver forwarded me an email about a new group organizing in New York City to advocate for better public support of the arts, in particular support for performance space. 

The economy of this city is greatly benefited by its incredibly vibrant artistic culture, and yet there seems to be no consideration in urban planning for providing the bare basic resources necessary to cultivate the next generation of artists. As real estate costs in Manhattan and beyond continue to push the arts further out into the periphery, the issue demands community consideration and action. 

Below is the invitation as I received it...

-David

From: patricia.nparker@earthlink.net

Dear Musicians
We are organizing a musician action group to demand that New York City provide an adequate subsidized performance space in manhattan.  We have other issues as well that If we are organized we might successfully address.

We are having a Town Hall meeting on Tuesday August 21 at

Clemente Soto Velez
107 Suffolk Street
between Delancey and Rivington

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU CAN COME TO EITHER OF THESE MEETINGS
Thank you
William Parker

ARTISTS RISE UP
Creative Music Action (ACMA) is a group of musicians, other artists and their supporters who are joining together as a pressure group to bring awareness about the needs of art in our communities
ACMA is dedicated to the principle that NYC's new music and experimental jazz culture is a unique asset that must not be left to the mercy of market forces. The varied original, creative musics that have been developed in New York and exported all over the world must be supported in New York, the city of their origin.  In order to make that support real and substantial, it is imperative that New York donates a building that is centrally located in Manhattan.  There are other issues that can and will be addressed by this new organization, including pressuring for more adequate coverage in the various medias - that is radio, television and the print media.  For example, JAZZ is a living, developing and evolving, non-commercial Art form that needs intelligent and appropriate coverage.
ACMA recognizes that New York City, historically the international capital for innovative music, is now facing an acute cultural crisis.  The formidable forces wielded by a sky rocketing real estate market have steadily eliminated new music venues from Manhattan, driving out musicians and composers, young and old, famous and unknown, whom all have contributed mightily to the vitality of this great city. ACMA is working with government officials and private sponsors to vigorously reverse this trend.  ACMA is now working with Arts for Art to find an adaquate space to establish a creative music center, centrally located in downtown New York.  but it is cleat that the scope of the music that would be presented in a New Venue would be broader than that of the Vision Festival including a real representation of all of the innovative non-commercial music that New York has to offer.
We Invite all who are interested to come to a Town Hall Meeting to take place at Clemente Soto Velez on Wednesday August 22.
Plan is to put pressure on the City to give AFA and other worthy organizations
buildings and/or spaces in strategic locations for creative music / other arts.

Strategies:
letter writing to publications and gov't officials
petitions
demonstrations / rallys - Where?
Talking and blogging about this EVERYWhere
communicate that musicians are aware of their worth and their rights

COMMITTEES  To
1. How do the arts benefit our community in general and the innovative creative music in particular
2. Identify issues – what is keeping the arts out of the community and what can be done about this
3. Organize events
4. Blog and letter writing
5. Go to meetings with politicians

All About J(umbie)azz

The May issue of All About Jazz-New York features a double-CD review of Imaginary Homeland's "Jump for George" and David Rogers Sextet's "The World Is Not Your Home" whose title track they call "a fusion masterpiece."  Both are available at www.JumbieRecords.com.

David Rogers Sextet The World Is Not Your Home Jumbie Records 2007	Imaginary Homeland Jump For George Jumbie Records 2003

Read the full review here.

CD Review: Imaginary Homeland's "Jump for George" (Jumbie Records)

by Jeff Tamarkin
Published in Global Rhythm Magazine, September 2004

Reprinted in Jumbie Journal,  October 2004 Issue

On paper it looks like a gimmick: a band in search of the commonalities between American jazz, West African percussion and Appalachian string band music--with a pinch of Cuban son. In practice, it's anything but a joke: Imaginary Homeland's Jump For George not only works but makes the connections seem obvious.

Imaginary Homeland is a quartet founded by worldly saxophonist David Rogers. Mark Stone provides the myriad percussive colorations, Marlene Rice the snazzy violin and Matt Pavolka the freewheeling acoustic bass. Rogers comes to the music, which sways easily from tightly composed to liberally improvised, confident with knowledge and experience.

Although born in Missouri, he spent part of his childhood living in Southeast Asia and put in time in New York as well, absorbing the city's cultural overload, particularly jazz. Rogers lived in Ghana during part of his college years, then returned for two years to study the talking drum with master drummer Dolsi-naa Abubakari Lunna, as well as the Ghanaian xylophone and one-stringed fiddle. Rogers formed Imaginary Homeland, as well as the Jumbie label-set up to promote music rooted in world traditions-upon his return to the U.S.

(Jumbie is also, says Rogers, "linking back to the traditions our artists draw on, by sponsoring a new music festival in rural Ghana, and raising money to preserve the 800-year-old Sossa Balla, the historic xylophone of African emperor Sundiata.")

The synthesis of jazz and world music is nothing new, of course, but Imaginary Homeland, by granting equal love to both, smears the lines seamlessly and unconscientiously. Rogers' pieces could only have been conjured via one thoroughly invested in the multiple traditions being considered-think Coltrane's relationship to Indian music and its spiritual birthplace as a reference point.

Rogers is an inventive and charismatic saxist, and as a bandleader he's savvy enough to make optimal use of what he's got: that's not a mere violin Rice is sawing in the opening track, "Kanawha Girl"; it's bona fide crazy-ass African hillbilly fiddle. When Rogers and Stone duel it out on lunndogo talking drums in their "Travelogue," you might as well be in the heart of an alternative African universe's own Bonnaroo jam-band land. "The World Is Not Your Home," the epic, 12-minute album-closer, is both showpiece and statement of purpose, a humble, much-needed reminder that we're only visiting this unlikely existence.

Copyright 2004, Global Rhythm

Hear the CD:
Listen to the new CD
"Jump for George" by Imaginary Homeland       

CD Review: Dallam-Dougou’s New Destiny (Jumbie Records)

by John Reed
Published in The Brooklyn Rail, June 2004

Reprinted in Jumbie Journal, August 2004 Issue

In 2003, Raul Rothblatt, a Brooklyn-based composer active in musical theater, Hungarian folk, and world music, made a pilgrimage to see the Sosso Bala, an eight-hundred-year-old xylophone that once belonged to Sundiata, the greatest emperor in West African history. Part musician, part cultural ambassador, Rothblatt, along with Guinean Abou Sylla and five other Westerners, traveled to eastern Guinea, not far from Mali, to pay homage to this holy grail of a xylophone.

The result was the formation of the band Dallam-Dougou: dallam meaning "melody" in Hungarian, and dougou meaning "land" in numerous West African languages. With wit and vibrancy and the occasional tumult, Rothblatt, the group’s founder and primary composer, has brought the entirety of his classical, jazz, and Hungarian training to the chronicle, demonstrating how music can bring solidarity to people from vastly different cultures. The nine tracks on the group’s debut release explore genres ranging from a Moroccan/Susu invitation to party ("Oy Yoy Yoy") to a Gypsy/Turkish/West African dance tune ("Mahala a la Mandingo"), to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, recast with the addition of a West African flute. Rothblatt’s melodies are buttery and rhythmic. The sense of the live performance remains paramount in all of Rothblatt’s recordings, and listeners will revel in his soufflés of musical experience. The title track, "New Destiny," features the highly regarded vocalist Malian Abdoulaye Diabate, who, in traditional manner—exquisite yet pounding—recounts and improvises upon the experience of a Western band of musicians in Africa.

Throughout, Rothblatt pays homage to the West African master musicians known as Griot. (Diabate and Sylla are both Griots.) Much like Europe’s Goliards, Griots are musicians, poets, and historians of the Mande peoples, who extend from Senegal to Niger. For eight centuries in the town of Niagassola, the Kouyate family—Griots descending from the personal praise-singer of emperor Sundiata—have preserved and performed on the venerable Sossa Bala xylophone. (A portion of the proceeds of New Destiny go to the Kouyate family and to Niagassola, which has only three water pumps for several hundred people.)

Jumbie Records, which produced and launched New Destiny, was founded by Rothblatt along with composers David Rogers and Mark Stone. The label is dedicated to creative new music based in world traditions, and to the power of music as a global force for positive change. "World music used to be only about distinct local traditions," says Rogers, "but today it is evolving into a musical melting pot. Jumbie Records is committed to supporting musicians who are innovating and combining the world’s musical traditions in meaningful new ways."

Rothblatt, who himself plays instruments as varied as the cello, bass, Javanese gender (a type of xylophone), Transylvanian utogardon (percussive cello), and African nenyeru (one-stringed fiddle), adds, "I have these guys from very different backgrounds, and there’s a lot of conflict. It’s not utopia right off, but the freeness, the looseness that we need to bring to the whole shebang is what makes for good music. You can hear it."

Copyright 2003, The Brooklyn Rail

Hear the CD
Listen to the new CD
"New Destiny" by Dallam-Dougou