Start the Day

Shamelessly lifted from social media, this cartoon reads (in Spanish):

HOW TO START THE DAY IN PEACE / ENOUGH COFFEE / GOOD MUSIC

It is fitting for both of the Geography Second-Year Seminars I offer at BSU (mainly as Honors courses). The nature of our SYS requirement is that if you take The Planet Sings you cannot take The Secret Life of Coffee. 

And vice-versa. Every student takes one FYS and one SYS course (unless waived by prior credits), but nobody can take more than one. Even a dean's "magic wand"cannot make that happen -- we've tried.

But fear not, SYS students! If you take my coffee class (or any of my classes) there will be some music. And if you take my music class (or any of my classes) there will be some coffee. Bastante coffee, in fact, and quite good coffee.

Lagniappe

 Colleagues and former students are always welcome to stop by class for a cuppa. It is always served with the music at the beginning of class. 

Cesária Évora

Over the past week or so, I have been pleased to participate in various aspects of our region's celebration of the 50th anniversary of Cape Verde's independence from Portugal. Amidst these varied festivities, I decided to reshare this photograph I took during our 2024 travel course on the islands of Fogo and Santiago. 

Public art in São Felipe celebrating Fogo and its music
as well as Cesária and morna

I was enchanted by this mural because it celebrates the island on which it is found, the music that is an essential part of that island's identity as well as Cape Verdean music much more broadly -- in the person of Cesária and morna -- one of several major genres of music in Cape Verde. (Note: these links are to English and Portuguese portions of the virtual museum of Cape Verde and its music, which my colleagues are curating in three languages. Please spend some time exploring, whether you speak English, Portuguese, or Kriolu.)

A few days ago, I posted another image of Cesária, this one taken during a recent tour of the new headquarters cultural center of the Cape Verdean Association in New Bedford. We were there when the group was showing progress at this facility to Prime Minister Correia, who was in the region to celebrate the anniversary with the South Coast diaspora community. 

A friend asked who this woman was, as she had just seen her image on somebody's shirt in Market Basket. I answered:

"That's Cesaria Évora. Best known for her rendition of the morna song Sodade. I had only been at Bridgewater a few years when a student brought me a CD of her music. I had been playing a lot of music in my Latin America class. 'I think you'll like this,' he said. That was my introduction."

I realized that I had left the phrase "my introduction" ambiguous, but I did not know exactly how tobe more specific. I wish I had kept up with that student so that I can tell him how much his gift of the Voz D'Amor  (Voice of Love) CD has been.

As a geographer who was new to the region, I had already been curious about this country with at least two names (Cape Verde and Cabo Verde) and a half-dozen common pronunciations. Standard maps and atlases had been of little help, because its identity as a country was still relatively recent. Also, it is not a cape, but rather an archipelago. Some sources include a cape in Senegal as part of the country, which it clearly is not. This CD helped push me to learn more, to pay more attention to the community around me, and to start making connections. Eventually this led to a travel course in 2006, many efforst to organize another, and ultimately a return in 2024. 

The CD was also my introduction to the language of Kriolu or Cape Verdean Creole. As of this writing, I cannot speak it, but I did study it for a semester and I know all the words to Cesária's signature song Sodade -- and to understand the deep meaning of that song. I am starting to understand the language when I hear it spoken. 

Lagniappe

To those reading this in 2025: please take the time to visit one or both of the temporary exhibits at the New Bedford Whaling Museum that were installed as part of the celebration. 

Mumbai Breakdancing

The Moth is a storytelling project that began in the village of Woods Hole (Falmouth, Cape Cod) and is now a global project that helps people to tell and share first-hand stories about their lives. The January 28 episode of The Moth Radio Hour features several fascinating stories, including B-Boys of Bombay, in which Jittesh Jaggi explains the first-ever fusion of hip-hop and Bollywood. 

Landfillharmonic

Even though a Paraguayan professor had a big influence on my in graduate school, I am pretty certain that Landfillharmonic is the only film I have seen that was set mainly in Paraguay. It is also one of the very best films I have seen about music and about teaching. 

I wrote about this film and its importance in my own teaching and scholarship in Musica: Paraguay, a 2022 post that I wrote for my "main" blog about a year before I started thinking about the Planet Sings. It turns out that the collaboration in that film is an exquisite example of world music as we are using the term in this course. 

Lagniappe

That professor I mentioned was Dr. Diego Abente, who taught the only course on Latin America that I took while working on my master's degree at Miami of Ohio. I later completed my doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies at Arizona, benefitting greatly from the insights I gained during that one course with Dr. Abente. The short version was that I was arguing for a rather simplistic approach to a complex political ecology situation. He challenged what was essentially transactional thinking on my part, pushing me to dig more deeply into essential context. He went on to serve in Paraguay's government before becoming Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliot School at George Washington University.

R.I.P. Dan Storper

 

It was from a mutual online friend that I learned about the passing of a World Music pioneer Dan Storper, and through that news I learned a bit about his life and how he came to found the Putumayo World Music label. The company Facebook page posted this remembrance: 

We are sad to share that Dan Storper, the beloved founder of Putumayo, passed away on the morning of May 22, two days after his 74th birthday. Dan had been battling pancreatic cancer for some time and was with his close family in New Orleans when his song came to an end.

Dan shared his passion for music and cultural diversity with the world and we believe he helped make it a better place. He touched the lives of so many people and those who knew him will remember him as a good soul with a kind heart, a positive spirit and a great sense of humor. He will be deeply missed.

His friend spoke of how he had first launched Putumayo clothing with a partner in Maine because of their shared love of textiles and travel. It was apparently an amazing store, but after she passed, he let go of that business and started the music label. 

Elsewhere on this blog, I make much of the role of David Byrne in launching world music, even as he came ultimately to accept some important critiques of it. But through Putumayo, Dan Storper was equally important in connecting people around the world through their music. 

It was in 2007 that I learned this while walking through a shopping mall in Managua, Nicaragua. I had already been collecting some of the label's CDs, most of which featured an array of artists from a given country at that time. Later, each anthology would include contributions across borders with a shared theme or musical style. 

What I noticed in the mall that day, however, was that at least for middle-class shoppers, the label was bringing music of the developing world to listeners in the developing world itself. In this way, Storper played a role in making the planet sing!

The World of Elisapie

North of North is a delightful CBC-produced comedy based in a fictional indigenous community of northern Canada. It centers Inuk culture, including food, music, clothing and sports. The music was mostly unfamiliar to us and did not really draw my attention until the seventh episode of the first season (insert optimism that CBC is working on another season). 

Near the end of the episode, a melody that had been in the background grew a bit stronger and then we realized it was familiar. We were hearing the lilting strains of Stevie Nicks, but in the voice of Inuk singer Elisapie. This of course, sent me to the interwebs to learn more. 

First: was this really a cover of the Fleetwood Mac song Dreams? Yes, it was. 

Second: how and why? I'll let her explain, in this wonderful 10-minute interview on the CBC program The National. 

Elisapie tells her story -- including Blondie's reaction to her work -- in a bit more detail in a longer interview on the ATPN program Face to Face. 

And now, some of her music. Please treat yourself to her first NPR Tiny Desk concert. She and her band look like some kind of jazz ensemble, but they do some extraordinary things with these ordinary instruments. 

Following that, I suggest her album Inuktitut, named for the language in which she covers ten English-language songs that will be familiar to many in the UK and North America. I created a playlist on Spotify that begins with all ten tracks and then continues with the original versions. I thought first about presenting them in a back-and-forth fashion, but I decided not to interupt the flow of her album that way. Listeners can, of course, move around this list as they see fit.

As she mentions in the interviews, there is also an official video for each of the tracks on Inuktitut -- for example, the tundra transect set to Sinnatuumait (Dreams). Find all of the videos on her Inuktituk playlist on YouTube. Each offers a very different vision of life in the far north. 

For more, keep exploring at ELISAPIE.COM!

More Tracks

After playing my Inuktikut playlist in the car this morning, Spotify went to Ikiaqqik, a vaguely familiar song by Riit. Searching for that title (and eschewing various offers to search for Ikea instead), I found "Riit Reimagines Pop" on the Rising Indigenous Voices Radio (RIVR) blog, and learned that it is an English-to-Inuktikut cover that was featured in the same series, in this case based on a Dua Lipa song, Levitating (which itself is closing in on one billion YouTube views). 

I also learned that Netflix has done us the service of putting 47 songs from North of North on a single Spotify playlist, about 2.5 hours long.

Lagniappe

The "we" above is my spouse and I. Pamela is an observant librarian and Cindy Lauper fan. She noticed two things about North of North that I did not. 

The first is that she recognized the melody of "Time After Time" in the second episode. It is on Elisapie's album of covers. 

The second is that one of the characters is an elder named Elisapee, played by the Iñupiaq actress, activist, and language teacher Nutaaq Simmonds. The spelling is only slightly different from that used by the singer. 

Arlo's Moment

When playing Dustbowl Ballads by Woodie Guthrie for environmental geography students, I would sometimes ask which students had heard of him. The number who had was small when I began teaching was small and is now near zero. I would begin explaining who. he was by saying he was "Arlo's dad" until I realized that Arlo (who is the age of my dad) is not so well known himself anymore. One exception: a former BSU student has Arlo as a first name because her parents (roughly my age) were such big fans.

But I digress. This is a post about Arlo and his most favorite song, Alice's Restaurant. (sometimes called "Alice's Restaurant and Massacree"). I assumed that he was still well known because anybody who is roughly my age remembers hearing this on hard-rock radio stations every Thanksgiving day. It is not played much on other days because it is 18 minutes long. It is also not played much on hard-rock stations because it is a folk song. 

But like Don McLean's 9-minute ballad American Pie, it is a long-format song that most people in the United States of a certain age can sing almost from memory. Why this is, I don't exactly know, but both songs do speak to an historic moment, and in a way that people are able to appreciate regardless of their political leanings. 

It is played on Thanksgiving Day because it tells the true story (with some embellishments) of young Arlo's arrest for littering on Thanksgiving Day 1965. There is more to the story, of course. Listen carefully to figure out how this became a protest song.

I might not have thought to play this for the Planet Sings class, except for a poignant coincidence. The song is (in part about Arlo's good friend Alice Brock, who died just a couple of days before Thanksgiving this year. His thoughts on her passing are presented at the end of this post. It is from him his production company's page. The photo shows him with Alice and their mutual friend Rick, who was part of the 1965 hijinks. They are shown on the steps of the church building that Alice and her husband were living in at the time, which now serves as the headquarters of the Guthrie Center. 

I cannot help but mention two small connections. First, in 2019 (the year we did not realize how lucky we were for all the things we got to do), he and his daughter Sarah performed at the Zeiterion Theater in New Bedford as part of a 50th-anniversary tour of the 1967 song. Among other things, we learned about the movie version of the song. It is not an excellent movie, but it is pretty interesting, especially since the arresting officer plays himself in the film. After the show, we were lucky enough to say hello to Arlo as he stepped from the stage door to his tour bus, before the crowed had found him there.

Second, it was on our anniversary in May of this year that we found ourselves in Stockbridge at the Main Street Cafe, which is located in the general store that served as a summertime extension of the original restaurant. The restaurant itself is "around the back" in a place now known as Teresa's Café, which seems to have closed during the pandemic. Alice's memory is still honored, however, as shown in this photo I grabbed after a wonderful brunch around the front. 

"You can get anything you want"
RIP Alice Brock

I have confirmed that this a half-mile from the nearest railroad track.