Here are all the bits and pieces I’ve meant to write about salsa lately! First, an update: the next Salsa Republic at Manchester’s Chorlton Irish Club will be on Saturday 20 February (NOT 6 Feb) – this is because Lorraine got stuck several extra days in Cuba (poor girl!!) owing to snow at Gatwick causing flight cancellations.

Late last year, just before my phone and internet were cut off and the UK disappeared under a blanket of snow, I recorded a piece about salsa for the BBC World Service, in conversation with Miami Cuban Emilio San Pedro. The studio people mixed in a few good tracks and we had some fun. And a few important points about the spirit of salsa were raised.

It seemed a pity for this to disappear for ever – it’s long gone off the BBC i-player – so here it is as an audio file. I hope you’ll enjoy it, if you didn’t hear it first time around. And please feel free to comment!

Conversation with Emilio San Pedro

Meanwhile, Yanet has -sadly – been voted off BBC’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance’. She had a bad night last Saturday: she looked exhausted and stressed-out from the moment she started and something was clearly wrong. It was bad luck, too, that the dance she had to do was the Lindy Hop – a dance that’s both very difficult and extremely ungainly. No chance to show off her ballet skills or body isolation there: Lindy Hop makes people bounce around like manic toddlers, without grace or dignity. But there was more to it than that.

My guess is that there were other, personal problems in the background. Yanet, unlike other competitors, was thousands of miles from her family. Moreover, there are special problems about being Cuban – layers of difficulty most of us can’t even imagine, economic, social, political. Being an exiled Cuban doesn’t remove the difficulties, it just changes them a bit. But Yanet will remain a star and her teaching will be in more demand than ever. Let’s forget ‘So You…’ and take a look at her as she is, so often, at her best:

Finally, don’t miss the excellent LATIN MUSIC USA series on BBC 4 TV. It’s at 10 pm Fridays and this week – 5 Feb – they are doing the history of SALSA. The trailers showed the Fania All Stars with Hector Lavoe and Celia Cruz so this is going to be legendary stuff. To make it even better, the programme is immediately followed on the same channel with broadcast of a great live salsa band LA EXCELENSIA playing at the Barbican, and after that is a documentary about Celia Cruz herself. At last someone has come up with a TV channel that’s worth watching! As a preview, here’s a nice, funky, atmospheric clip of La Excelencia:

All this TV won’t turn you into a couch potato, because if last week’s similar viewing on the same channel is anything to go by (history of Latin music up to Santana, followed by salsa Paladium orchestra, followed by documentary on Carmen Miranda) you will be dancing around the room all evening. Enjoy!

Mahler’s Second was bound to be a make-or-break point in the unfolding ‘Mahler in Manchester’ project. The Halle and BBC Philharmonic are playing all ten of the symphonies this year to mark the Mahler centenary, and this was the first of the really big ones.

A couple of weeks ago the BBC Philharmonic gave a lovely performance of No. 1, but it didn’t actually fire me up. I found myself wondering whether maybe I’d just heard it too many times. Or is it that it’s a young man’s piece and sadly it doesn’t quite resonate with me as it used to? I’m sure the fault was mine.

On Thursday, though, there were no such doubts. This was a real, transcendent experience, with everything you could look for: clarity, dynamics, amazing textures, lyrical passion. And, incidentally, a capacity audience. The Bridgewater Hall was full and the atmosphere was charged.

The Second has maybe the most electrifying of all Mahler’s openings: an intense vibrating note on all the upper strings that just rivets your attention until the grumbling, growling basses and cellos start to enter and the whole thing begins to gather momentum like some colossal machine or mountain avalanche. Fascinating and terrifying.

And the melodies! Mahler has an unbelievable fertility in generating one gorgeous tune after another. The melodies just seem to flow out of him: eeerie little folksongs, huge chunky rhythmic patterns reminiscent of Brahms or Beethoven, catchy dance tunes, marches, rhapsodic romantic syrup, postmodern hair-raising discord-patterns, you name it. 

And then he collages and interweaves and overlaps all of this to produce amazing drama – changes of mood, gradual revelations, mystical ecstasy, frightening shocks. It’s all there, and the result is a sound-drama (or movie if you like) that has the range of an epic yet keeps you engaged as if he were writing the soundtrack to your most intimate thoughts.

Speaking of which, I discovered Mahler when I was still at school, on my father’s LP records, and then by luck shared rooms at University with a music student, the conductor Peter Lawson, who was a Mahler fanatic. So I got soaked in the music for a whole year and it went somewhere very deep inside.  And while other kinds of music have set the pace of my life at different times – the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, JJ Cale, Mingus, Parker, Coltrane, Bach, Stravinsky, and for the past few years Salsa in particular, underneath it all Mahler has never gone away. I find myself singing snatches of his music at the oddest moments. It’s like part of my DNA.

Thursday’s performance absolutely lived up to all of this. Markus Stenz took the first movement at a relaxed tempo but he kept it moving with a steady relentless pulse and there wasn’t a slack or dull moment.  The momentum was maintained throughout the symphony and there was a clarity and precision at every point that gave the sense of an orchestra absolutely involved and attentive. The dynamics were interesting too. Stenz, who seemed to be enjoying himself immensely throughout,  brought the harps right up, something I enjoyed because it emphasised one of Mahler’s strangest and most delightful textures.

Susan Gritton (soprano) and Katarina Karneus (mezzo) melted into the heart-stoppingly beautiful lyrics of the last movement with crystalline beauty as well as solid volume. The whole thing was so perfect and felt so natural that the symphony as a whole felt  more like a geological or spiritual phenomenon – two things that aren’t so far apart for Mahler – than a human composition.

The colossal surges of sound and energy in the finale  rolled over us with a huge unanswerable impact.  This was Mahler the visionary, experiencing an apocalyptic resolution – maybe a highly unorthdox Day of Judgment, or maybe all beings finally revealing their Buddha-nature. As he wrote, ‘there are no sinners, no just. None is great, none small. There is no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love illuminates our being.’ I’ll put in a clip of another superb performance – Rattle/CBSO – at the end of this post, so you can get a glimpse of what it’s all about.

I had tears in my eyes at the end – something I don’t recall from previous performances. Half of the audience got to their feet during the applause, and I don’t know why the other half didn’t do the same. I never expect to hear a better performance of the symphony, and I’m grateful to have been present for that one. I don’t want to intensify the competition for tickets, which are going fast or already gone, but if you haven’t yet booked, I would suggest that you think about trying to hear some of the eight symphonies that remain. I couldn’t get to The Song of the Earth on Saturday, sadly, but I’m hoping to hear number 3 on 13 February. I probably won’t bother you with my amateurish comments on it. But if Thursday is any indication, this Mahler season is going to be unforgettable.

During the recent cold weather, whenever I managed to drive anywhere through the snow I was accompanied by a deep, rolling, slightly guttural voice, with an accent you’d have found hard to place. West Country? Irish? North-Eastern?

Actually the accent was Alaskan, and the voice was that of John Haines, former Poet Laureate of Alaska, on a CD someone sent me from the US. I found Haines’s poems riveting, with their dreamlike, slightly surreal images, their subtle rhythms, and their intense focus on the natural environment. Haines, born in 1924, arrived in Alaska as a young man at a time when the government would give you a piece of land if you were prepared to live there.  He built himself a house out of wood and lived as a fur trapper, hunting elk and bear and gaining an unrivalled knowledge of the landscape and ecosystem. He also wrote poems.

Haines uses a short-lined free verse that asks you to consider carefully each image. The poems build, stage by quiet stage, and much of their quality comes from a combination of the stark beauty of their images with the unanswerable finality of the propositions they offer:

The door is open

and the shaggy frost-fog

bounds across the floor

and wraps itself about my feet…

…I feel

its breath deep in my bones.

 

A spirit in it wants

to draw me out past

the whitening hinges

into the cold, enormous rooms

where it lives.

 

Out there a flickering pathway

leads to a snowy grave

where something in me

has always wanted to lie…

Haines also has a remarkable sense of the very ancient history of the region’s peoples, particularly the ancestors of the Inuit and the Native Americans who came into the continent from Asia some forty thousand years ago:

Among the quiet people of the frost,

I remember an Eskimo

walking one evening

on the road to Fairbanks.

 

A lamp full of shadows burned

on the table before us;

and the light came as though from far off

through the yellow skin of a tent…

 

Thousands of years passed.

People were camped on the bank

of a river, drying fish

in the sun. Women bent over

stretched hides, scraping

in a kind of furry patience…

 

We were away for a long time.

The footsteps of a man walking alone

on the frozen road from Asia

crunched in the darkness

and were gone.

Besides his very fine Collected Poems, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, Haines has written an autobiography, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, which is essentially a meditation on his many years in this austere, dangerous and immensely beautiful landscape.

Although a few years ago he was a candidate for the US Laureateship, he seems virtually unknown in the UK. The fine CD I was given seems unobtainable. But at least his books can be bought, and should be. His is an authentic voice, of great integrity,  less self-dramatising than Gary Snyder, more thoughtful and muted.  As a hunter (whatever one’s urban discomfort with killing) he had to learn to live not only close to animals but even as one of them: something that gives at times a shamanic quality to his poems. Here he tells how he lured a moose by making the noise of a rival moose rubbing its horns on a tree:

I went to the edge of the wood

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon…

In that poem, ‘Horns’, the moose survives. A companion poem (’A Moose Calling’) is darker and sadder:

Who are you,

calling me in the dusk,

 

O dark shape

with heavy horns?

 

I am neither cow

nor bull -

 

I walk upright

and carry your death

in my hands…

Quietly and without fuss, perhaps disconcertingly so, John Haines is that recently much-trumpted thing: an eco-poet. We should be reading him. He’s made my life deeper and richer. I recommend him.

One of the best-informed, most efficient and most cost-effective relief organisations currently working in Haiti is Medecins Sans Frontieres. If you’re in doubt about how to help, I’d suggest giving to them. The web address is: www.msf.org.uk They speak French, they’ve been there a long time already, and even the BBC News last night attributed some of its information about conditions in Haiti to MSF – which indicates that they know what’s going on.

But while doing what can be done to help, let’s resist the tendency to talk about Haiti as some permanently pathetic crippled nation. Haiti has had a bad press for centuries partly because it was the first country where slaves achieved a successful and lasting rebellion and established an independent nation.

It happened because in 1793 the French Revolutionary government abolished slavery in all French possessions, including Haiti. The black leader Toussaint L’Ouverture established a successful and moderate government which looked like giving the new island state prosperity. Then Napoleon Buonaparte, in a treacherous reversal of policy, decided the island must not become independent of France. He sent an army to conquer Haiti and reimpose slavery. L’Ouverture was captured through an act of treachery (he was invited to talks with the French, who abducted him) and taken to France, where he died in prison.

William Wordsworth wrote an unforgettable poem about him in 1802, not knowing whether L’Ouverture – a hero of liberty – was alive or dead:

TO TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
- William Wordsworth

The French were later defeated and regained their independence. Foreign intervention and foreign debt have been problems ever since, as has internal corruption. But Haiti’s people have been resilient, resourceful and brave.

They have been badly treated, and dismissed by foreign observers, often through racism. Entertaining but sensational and racist books like William Seabrook’s famous The Magic Island led to the identification of Haitian religion, Vodun, with ‘Black Magic’, whereas it is simply West African religion transmuted into Catholic Christian imagery – distinct from, but parallel to, Cuba’s Santeria. (Seabrook is said to have written his book by sitting in a Port-au-Prince bar and taking down everything the local drinkers told him. You can imagine the results.)

Behind the Buddha on my mantelpiece is a Haitian ‘Tree of Life’ sculpture cut from a thin disc of steel. It’s exquisite, as you can see: a beautiful thing and full of life. These metal-cuttings originated with artists who took the tops of old oildrums and shaped the design to make perfect use of the circular steel disc.

In the Dominican Republic I slept for a week beside an exquisite Haitian steel screen showing Vodun deities in a forest: a work of art the medieval scultpors of Europe’s Gothic cathedrals would have appreciated.

Our bedroom is graced by a lovely Haitian Madonna and Child in radiant colours. Let us pray to her and other gods and spirits that Haiti may benefit from the world’s goodwill now and into the future. reafforestation, lighter but stronger buildings, some good roads and better education will be a few of the long term goals but Haiti has a proud history and a rich culture.

They also have some of the Caribbean’s most magnificent traditions of folk art and music.

Right now we’re necessarily hearing a lot about the agonies. But let’s not forget that Haiti also represents, and will represent again, ‘Man’s unconquerable mind’.

If you were watching BBC 1’s So You Think You Can Dance last night, you were surely enchanted by Yanet Fuentes’ performance. She and her partner may theoretically have been dancing Ballroom, but every move she made was a lesson in Cuban dance and how to do it right in Salsa.

For me Yanet is a delight in all sorts of other ways. That accent - the rough, husky voice; the wide-eyed and just slightly fierce smile; the ear-piercing squeals when she greets a friend; the frantic little hops and skips when she’s happy – all these are quintessential Cuban female. Looking at her, I see my wonderful Havana dance teacher Geldys Morales looking over her shoulder and shrieking in unison from that top window on the corner of Aguila and Trocadero!

But watching the fluidity, relaxation and control of Yanet’s movements is the real lesson. Her spinning is precise but very relaxed: she’s worked on doing it without tension. Notice also the ’spotting’: she fixes her eyes on a point and returns to it after each spin. But she also avoids that clockwork ‘click’ you often see, when ladies snap the head back into position too pecisely, so it looks mechanical. The spotting isn’t allowed to dominate. The fluidity of her hips is of course typically Cuban but you don’t need to be born with it. Yanet has spent a huge amount of time working on her reggaeton moves and also teaching body isolation. This is something everyone can practise in front of a mirror, and it involves just doing it and doing it and doing it, pushing the joints and muscles a little further every time over the weeks and months, so it aches a little. The next video will show you that salsa isn’t about steps and arm movements, it’s about body isolation : that is, how you move your bits!!!

Yanet’s work also tells us a lot about Cuba. I haven’t studied her biography but she was probably spotted as a potentially great dancer when she was a small child and given free, specialist training and education. This would have included not only modern dance but Russian-tradition classical ballet (you can see this in the fluid, balanced movement of her arms when performing) and also Afro-Cuban sacred Orisha dancing – the dance-moves that express each of the West African-descended Santeria gods and goddesses.

Yanet thus has a whole encyclopedia of dance under her belt. Add the typically bubbly Cuban personality and no wonder she’s doing so well.

She also embodies the paradox of Cuba: the wonderful education system and culture that value the arts so much that even in a poor country they will go all-out to train the artistically talented; and the fact that life in Cuba is so hard, such a daily struggle, that almost everyone wants to leave – and yet having left, will remain fiercely patriotic and convinced that Cuba is the best country in the world.

I don’t normally watch these dance shows on TV. But I’m watching this one for Yanet and I hope you will watch it next week, if you haven’t already. And, of course, VOTE FOR YANET!

Walking around in the snow lately I’ve been struck by the creativity it’s brought out in so many people.

Our road has brought forth a great crop of traditional snowmen complete with carrot noses, scarves and other designer requisites, but the nearby Chorlton Meadows have been colonised by an impressive number of igloos, including one (reinforced with sticks) in the shape of a face with the mouth for entrance. It actually was quite warm inside.

I’m pretty sure we didn’t have any igloos in the last big freeze. Maybe people are now more conscious of alternative building traditions – most people have seen a yurt, and know about eco-houses roofed with turf or built from hay-bales and so on. This must be a good sign.

Humans are going to need to be resourceful as climate change takes a grip, whether it leaves us much hotter or much colder. Here’s to imaginative building!

While we’re all buried in snow, let’s catch up on some of the things I’ve wanted to write about while my internet connection has been down!

 First place definitely goes to ‘Mother Lode’, the magnificent exhibition of landscape paintings by Julian Cooper, currently showing at Brantwood, Ruskin’s house overlooking Coniston Water in Cumbria. No chance of getting there through the snow at present, but I’d very strongly recommend a visit once the roads are clear.

 Julian Cooper is probably Britain’s most original and accomplished landscape painter. His particular interest is in mountains and rock surfaces (naturally enough, since he’s a keen climber), and over recent years he has developed increasingly brilliant and intense techniques for painting the patterns, textures and – if I can put it like this – the meanings of rock, the way it communicates itself to the hand, the eye and the memory.

From open-air painting in the high Andes, he moved on in the 1990s to superb semi-abstract and highly-textured paintings of the Himalayas, often focusing not on the summits and profiles of mountains (which have been endlessly explored by previous artists) but rather on rock and snow faces, their textures, patterning and forms.

 He’s now taken this a step further, to paint industrially-worked rockfaces which are literally the interface between man and nature. The Brantwood exhibition shows paintings from two such arenas: Cumbrian slate quarries from the Langdale and Coniston areas, and the Carrara marble quarries – the historic quarries from which Michelangelo took his marble and which are now quarried on a terrifyingly industrial scale.

 

Julian’s paintings are exhilarating and massively impressive. No one has ever painted rock like this before: the huge clefts and portals of vast stained marble surfaces, dwarfing tiny, insect-like industrial plant; the angled, many-coloured slate blocks, with angular light from a cave-mouth dripping over them. Julian’s work can look like realism, but compare it to any photograph and you see a miraculous added depth, an extra dimension of radiant experience. Looking at ‘Sawyers Wood’for example I can feel my own lifetime’s experience of scrambling around in and on such places, somehow embodied and singing out from the canvas.

 

The rock in these pictures speaks to us in its own strange language and asks us what we’re making of it – sensuously, industrially, envrionmentally. It has an ominous and seductive beauty.

This is a whole new take on landscape and if you love the Lakes, or nature, or painting, you should go over to Brantwood as soon as the snow clears and enjoy some of the best landscape painting of our time. Not to mention Brantwood’s excellent restaurant, and the fascinating memorabilia of Ruskin himself, the great Victorian artist, social activist, prophet of climate change and a deep thinker about the interconnections between geology and art.

The exhibition has been arranged in collaboration with Michael Richardson, director of Art Space Gallery, London, who represent Julian Cooper and where the exhibition can be seen during September, 2010. For further details contact mail@artspacegallery.co.uk  or visit www.artspacegallery.co.uk

Hi Everybody, this is just a short and hasty post to say that after a titanic battle with BT and AOL, both of whom made horrendous mistakes that have wrought havoc with my life and work, I am now connected again and hope to be writing regularly.

If you’ve sent in a comment I hope to moderate it in the next day or two and it should appear. I’ll need a day or so for the dust to settle and to clear the wreckage from the site, though. Meanwhile, I hope the snow is causing you more aesethetic pleasure than practical problems.

If you’re one of the many thousands who have been diligently following this blog in its first couple of weeks, you might wonder why it stopped in its tracks around 11 December. Here’s the short version.

On 11 December our daughter moved house. Amanda called BT and asked them to terminate our daughter’s phone line. Instead, the geniuses at BT cut off OUR line.

We spent two weeks fighting to get reconnected. We were bounced between call centres in Scotland, India and Essex. We spent a fortune on mobile phone calls. Sometimes we had to queue for 20 minutes to get an answer. Sometimes we got cut off by BT’s own computers.

Many of the Customer Service people were hugely well-meaning but they admitted that BT’s system simply wouldn’t let them reconnect us. The computers defeated them every time. Two days ago we got a land line again; only we didn’t have our original number, so no one knew where to call us. Today – Christmas Eve – we finally got our old number back. Wonderful.

However, in the meantime the cancellation of our landline had resulted in the loss of our broadband connection. We are told this can’t be reinstated until 3 January at the earliest. Until then, to get on the internet I have to trek to the public library. Even then I can’t upload material. So no pics in this blog until after 3 Jan.

Am I going to complain to BT? You bet. The disruption and inconvenience have been massive and the cost significant. Am I going to leave BT for a different phone company? You bet. Am I going to buy a wifi-enabled laptop? I am.

And in the New Year I’ll be back with – at last – the post about Julian Cooper’s great show of quarry paintings at Brantwood, news of Manchester salsa events, pieces about Alaskan poet John Haines and Ennerdale (Cumbria) poet Tom Rawling and much more. And a link to the spot about Tarot history and divination which I’m broadcasting on the BBC World Service around New Year. Plus the usual wonderful pics. Thanks for your patience! Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Well, I promised to report on the Towering Inferno salsa event at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool yesterday. Oh dear. By 8 pm the freezing fog was so thick that visibility was down to zero in south Manchester, and we heard it was just as bad further north. I didn’t fancy the drive up (nor the drive back down a possibly icy fogbound motorway at 3 a.m.) So we stayed at home. Call me chicken if you like. Though I’d prefer pollo. Well, you win some you lose some. El mani es asi as they say in Caracas.