SOUNDTRACK: YASSER TEJEDA & PALOTRÉ-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert Meets SXSW #188 (April 6, 2021).
Every year, NPR Music participates in the SXSW music festival, whether it’s curating a stage or simply attending hundreds of shows at the annual event in Austin, Texas. Last year, the festival was canceled due to the pandemic, but it returned this March as an online festival. We programmed a ‘stage’ of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and presented them on the final day of the festival. Now, we present to you Tiny Desk Meets SXSW: four videos filmed in various locations, all of them full of surprises.
Yasser Tejeda, a New York-based guitarist from the Dominican Republic, started his musical career on the Dominican cuatro (a folkloric guitar-like instrument) and has incorporated guitar stylings that have made him a “go-to guy” for Dominican artists looking for passionate elegance in their sound.
They play three songs in fifteen minutes. And as with much music from this part of the world, the drums (Victor Otoniel Vargas) and percussion (Jonathan “Jblak” Troncoso) are unstoppable.
Yasser Tejeda and his band Palotré begin their set behind a home desk with “Amor Arrayano,” weaving a vaguely Caribbean feel with a killer R&B hook.
“Amor Arrayano” is a smooth love song gently echoing guitars and a smooth grooving bass.
After a brief introduction of his bandmates Tejeda launches into “La Culebra,” the track that caught my attention from their album Kijombo. Palotré is a powerful groove machine behind Tejeda’s virtuosic guitar playing and his playful dance moves.
“La Culebra” (The Snake) opens with percussive rattlesnake sounds from “Jblak.” Kyle Miles plays a bouncy bass while Tejeda plays a cool virtuosic lead. This (mostly) instrumental rocks on in various tempos for the duration of the song.
Tejeda has stated one of the goals of this project is to explore the crossroads between Afro-Dominican musical traditions with anything else that pops onto their radar. Their final song here,”Nuestras Raices,” [Our Roots] has become one of my favorites because I hear the essence of Africa mixed with jazz and maybe a hint of heavy metal, as Tejeda steps on his distortion pedal to kick the band into overdrive with guest tenor saxophonist Mario Castro in tow.
“Nuestras Raices,” opens with a ton of drums and Castro playing the intro melody on the sax. The songs shifts gears to a quiet verse and then Tejeda stomps the distortion pedal for a brief foray into ripping guitar before pulling back for another quiet verse. After some faster sections, the song slows down to a kind of moshing feel with all kinds of wild time changes, jazzy sax and heavy metal chords.
It’s pretty fantastic.
[READ: March 30, 2021] Charlie Thorne and the Lost Island
This is the first book in the Charlie Thorne series. I read the second one last month. I don’t like to read things out of sequence, but it didn’t really impact this story all that much. The only thing that I “knew” was that Charlie escaped at the end of the story. But that’s pretty obvious since there was a second book.
This book was also good for some of the background information I was seeking. Although, it turns out that Gibbs didn’t include a ton of background info on Charlie. We learn just enough to understand how she is the way she is without getting bogged own in details.
The story starts with a Prologue set in Princeton, NJ in 1955. It’s the evening of Einstein’s death and after being given some (unwanted) painkillers, he starts muttering something. By the end of the night the secret service are all over his small house trying to uncover whatever it was he muttered (in German) about.
The book properly starts at CIA Headquarters as Dante Garcia is heading a team. He is insisting that they call in the help of Charlie Thorne, a super-smart 12-year old girl with a potential criminal past. His boss is skeptical but trusts Dante, so she agrees. he also says he wants to work with Milana Moon, one of the best agents in the force.
Cut to a ski slope in Colorado where we are introduced to Charlie and her amazing mathematical mind. She is able to picture the angles and speed she needs to conquer Deadman’s Drop.
The way she does it is pretty cool and it also sets up the first exciting chase. She recognizes Dante and his partner as agents. She doesn’t know why they are here but she knows she needs to evade them. This leads to the first of many exciting chase scenes.
But the story wouldn’t work if Charlie isn’t eventually caught. And when they do nab her, Dante explains the proposal. The CIA wants Charlie to help them track down Pandora, a simple formula that Einstein discovered that would make nuclear power within everyone’s reach. Einstein imagined it would be used for good but he knew about human nature, so he hid it hoping the right minds would be able to use it when the time was right.
People have been searching for this formula for 70 years, and someone had a minor breakthrough. They want her to use her genius brain to think like Einstein. She’s initially reluctant but Dante convinces her to do good things with her huge brain. She says she’ll help as long as she gets immunity for anything she may or may not have done. It’s a deal.
Book two had a pretty big body count for a children’s book. I tough Book 1 was going to as well since chapter six opens with a nuclear bomb destroying the island of Cyprus. But that was just the fantasy of the really bad guy. I was pretty impressed with just how racist and evil this bad guy was. And not in a mu ha ha villain way but in a realistic, right-wing, foreigners-are-inhuman-and-are-destroying-everything-we-love sort of way. It made him vey real and sadly very current.
He is part of Das Furii, a small terrorist sect from Eastern Europe. He and his mean are dumb things, but few things are as dangerous as dumb thugs who are angry.
There’s an excruciating scene in Greenland where the CIA jet has to fuel up and Charlie needs information from Dante. Crucial information, it turns out, that helps her know exactly what she’s dealing with. Das Furii are a bunch of dumb thugs, but this information tells her that the person pulling the strings is no dummy. In fact, he knows almost as much as she does as Pandora–and for a little while, he knows more.
The backstory is kind of fun. Charlie was always very smart–so smart that her teachers thought she might be stupid. But when she had her IQ tested (three times) they couldn’t believe how smart she was. Her parents were not smart–they were greedy. And they instantly tried to get her to be on a TV show.
Charlie wouldn’t comply, however, so they got mad at her.
So Charlie used her brain to write an amazing security program. However, she was young and naïve an sent to the biggest tech firm without doing any kind of legal protection. She never heard back from them, but a couple of years later they unveiled her program as their great new online security platform.
It was huge success. Charlie did some calculations and decided that since they didn’t pay her what she was owed, she would just have to grab hit herself. And since she wrote the code, she knew exactly how to do it (and how to humiliate the company at the same time).
She took a lot of money from them–enough that she will love comfortably for the rest of her life. This money has been good for her because it means she can do things without people asking questions about a powerful 12 year old. But it also comes in very handy later in the story when she needs to hire a private jet.
The middle of the book is set in Jerusalem. Einstein helped to found Israel (I didn’t know that) and he donated most of his books to Hebrew University. It is here that one of the secret codes is hidden. And more than a few people know that.
This books is super fun because there are exciting chases, dangerous death defying moments, a lot of gun play and then mind-bending puzzles like this one. (I can’t copy it here or even recreate it but suffice it to say it looks like an exam question from a math class that exists only in your nightmares).
Eventually the Massad, the Israel police, get involved (and they do not give up). I mean, how are you supposed to flee Ben Guiron airport, the most secure airport in the world, when the Mossad are after you and very Israeli tech person is watching the flights?
There’s some double crossing, there’s Charlie driving a Hummer through tiny streets and there’s more double crossing. There’s even a time when the CIA believes that Dante or Milana have turned traitor.
Milana doesn’t have as a big a bond to Charlie as Dante does, but I really liked the friendship these two smart, capable women developed.
The book ends back in America.
I realized after finishing the book that while I never really feared for Charlie’s life (because I knew she survived), some moments were very tense. But I was far more upset about the destruction that our heroes caused. They destroy some serious landmarks in Israel and in America. I have to remind myself it’s just a book, but still, can you imagine having the audacity to destroy national ,landmarks?
This is a wonderful series and I look forward to the next book when it comes out.
Unlike the second book, this one doesn’t tell us what is true about this story. So we don’t know if Pandora was even a thing or if Gibbs made it up entirely. But I did enjoy reading that when Gibbs originally conceived this story his protagonist was an adult male. But with the success he had writing for kids, he made Charlie younger and, since he had written male protagonists already, it was time to make Charlie a girl. Something his deceased wife (what a sad real-life story) truly appreciated.
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