SOUNDTRACK: RIO MARA-Tiny Desk Concert #906 (October 25, 2019).
Rio Mara sings (and speaks) entirely in Spanish for this Tiny Desk. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy this if you don’t know Spanish. The musical is wonderful–full of percussion and a wonderfully vibrant wooden marimba that feels utterly tropical.
Rio Mira takes its name from a river that separates Ecuador and Colombia and empties into the Pacific Ocean.
For just about fifteen minutes, the members of Rio Mira created a living and very melodic connection to Africa. Set behind a large marimba — and drums that are unique to their corner of the world — the members of the band performed music that is the legacy of enslaved people who were in both Ecuador and Colombia.
Rio Mira’s three songs in this performance are dominated by the marimba and accompanied by drums from both Europe and Africa. “La Pepa de Tangaré” references the culinary joys of life and, like the rest of their set, celebrates life along the river: soft breezes, loving friends, the embrace of Africa and, of course, lots of festejando (partying)!
Karla Kanora sings lead vocals, while Esteban Copete plays the amazing marimba.
Introducing the band (and the instruments) we meet Carlos Loboa on the cununos (a hand drum that looks like a conga). Tito Ponguillo on the bombo hembra (a two headed drum that you wear on a strap), while Sergio Ramírez plays the bombo macho (the “male” version of the two headed drum). Fernando Hurtado plays the shaker and sings.
Benjamín Vanegas sings lead on “Román Román” with a fun and enjoyable style. The chorus is really catchy. The middle has an extended spoken part.
If you’re a little rusty on your college Spanish classes, the extended narration in “Román Román” tells the tale of a village man who has healing powers and challenges death.
For the final song “Mi Buenaventura” Fernando Hurtado sings. It is a fast song with the marimba going wild. I really appreciate how very different each singer’s style is amid all of this fun percussive music.
[READ: March 1, 2020] “Kid Positive”
I really enjoyed Adam Levin’s massive book The Instructions.
This story is the first thing I’ve read by him since that, and while I love his writing style I hated the content of this story.
Each section of the story shows a year in Adam’s childhood with a title to accompany it. Like Shitty Little Tevye, Big Brother, 1980.
In this flashback, we see a young Adam enjoying it when his parents had friends over to dinner. He would crawl through their legs to get to the bathroom and they would joke… Is there a dog in here? On one occasion, he came back from the bathroom singing what he thought was his father’s favorite song “If I Were a Rich Man.” (It wasn’t his favorite song). Adam sang it and the adults all thought it was cute except for his father, who said “Okay.” But he didn’t mean it, it wasn’t okay. Adam climbed back under the table and continued to sing and his father said “he’s acting like an idiot, a real fucking idiot.”
In Puppet, 1981 a puppet that Adam enjoyed watching on TV said “I think therefore I am.” This existential phrase upset Adam and he worried that if the puppet thought he was real, how did he know if anyone was real. Maybe his mother was a puppet too.
The Rabbits, 1982 section is a terrible part about baby bunnies dying.
In Turtle and Sensei, 1984, there;s a story about a dying (probably) turtle and how he wanted to name it Mergatroid. The other part is a bit funnier–about his family going to see a sensei perform a demonstration. His father did not believe it–saying the board was perforated.
Adam told people about this event and then made up that at the end of the demonstration his father went to shake the sensei’s hand but then pulled him close and whispered in his ear. When he let go, the sensei looked afraid.
In The Frost and the Frogs, 1985-86 he talks about throwing his cat. What the hell is wrong with this story. They also kill a snake.
In Hum, 1988, all of the kids push Giles Crowley because when they do he would said “Hum.” So they would shove him to see how many Hums he would say. If they shoved him harder and he stumbled four steps, he would say “Hum um um um.” It’s possible he enjoyed the attention.
Throughout, the narrator says things like
Had you asked me if I thought Giles Crowley had feelings, I would probably have told you that I had feelings because that would have addressed what I would have thought you were secretly trying to get at with your question and I’d have wanted you to know that I was smarter than you.
The story ends with Splash Pad, 2015.
Adam is grown up and married. They are hanging out with friends who have kids at a Splash Pad–a giant fountain for kids to frolic in. The kids have a great time. The pleasure is contagious and Adam realizes that he is positive about kids–he is kid positive.
Adam was so pleased with the way the kids played so nicely that he told his friends that kids now played so much nicer than they did when they were kids. He hoped these good childhood memories would foster
deep with them greater capacities for kindness and decency than the people of our generation possessed and that, down the line, these greater capacities for kindness and decency would grant these kids the strength they’d need to neutralize and overcome what would otherwise be our generation’s malforming influence and eventually turn the whole country, perhaps even the whole world, into a safer and friendlier place.
Are you making fun of our children, they asked.
Its nice to see that a seeming sociopath like that kid actually turned out okay. But I’m still not a fan of this story.
I Just Read About That... 