Dispatch from Rome and Paris

There's much to compress so I'll need to do this scrapbook style. For many weeks, it has been Rome. For 48 hours, it was Paris. Visiting them in sequence rustled up the past itineraries of two uncles who played a large part in my intellectual upbringing: Calvert Casey and Severo Sarduy. Casey's Rome is Havana with its peeling walls and too many reminders and erotic dark corners. A place that absorbed his stutter as yet another anomoly, a place to rest his falling apart body. Casey's Rome is a city for being alone, locked in an August apartment with a lover, a solitary Cuban in antiquity's surround. Sarduy's Paris is bookstores reserved for Franco-Japanese literaria, a different baroque, Tel Quel. Sarduy's Paris was a place to find and adopt a crew. He found, among others, Roland Barthes and Francois Wahl. It made him draw and make prints, to think through the other surrealism. It was a place to be Cuban with other non--Cubans.


In the Paris of now, I saw fine cashmere sweaters with weaved in portraits of Che for 600 Euros. And traces of the past and present vogue négre too comfortable with the spectacle and trademark they made and make with the body of the other. Both did much to encapsulate an easy multiculturalism that made me feel more affectively delinquent than usual. I wanted to be vulgar, use the wrong fork. Reject butter and their food. Litter. Harbor music from Putamayo tendencies. My mouth wouldn't form their words.

But, as many have felt and sung, Paris is a Brown city. It is a place where I got to use two words I've rehearsed enough to say out loud and proud: Pho and Mango. Both were enjoyed at the island oasis Dong Phát, 10 rue Malar. And later, in a dirty bar, I heard AC/DC's Hells Bells before Habib Koité before Grace Slick needing somebody to love. I had a warm conversation about Marseilles football with a cab driver whose open-door policy extended to my ice cream. There were opportunities to make other multicultural connections (the messy and irresponsible kind): like that long roaming charge phone call to CBB after having made a ridiculous left off of Rue Descartes onto the Rue de Ecole and past the Square Michel Foucault.

This is all a scene-setting preface for what I really want to talk about. Since the too recent, too early passing of the great Barbara Johnson, I've made an oath to be more forthcoming about fan letters. More on this soon. She deserves a careful and time-consuming obituary.

...

I went to Paris for 48 hours because of Cuba Linda, the album universe made possible by the Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. I cannot yet share all of why this work has been the most transformative portal I've had the privilege of going through. This will happen when my book goes live. For now, by transformative, I mean a sustained, body-rocking philosophical reckoning that has gone down in a mostly alone space, under headphones, for several years. This monk-like relationship to the album was a necessary gateway; time was needed to get out the salt, to do the homework. And yet the album has not indulged stasis or isolation. Cuba Linda has made me talk to people and (thanks to a research fund) go places. It has made me seek out relationships with its intimate informal fan collective. It was the writer Armando Suárez Cobián who introduced me to the album over a Brooklyn summer. Other hearings of note include a formative car ride in Miami with Raul Fernandez en route to interview Juanito Marquez; and seeing Reginald Jackson get it during a talk I gave in New Haven. My relationships with them and many others have been forever made more affectionate by the shared fact of Cuba Linda.

I've also had the dream (deferred then fulfilled) of meeting some of the kind folks who actually made the thing. There was a chapter inspiring conversation with Yosvany Terry, (right) one of Cuba's righteous young musical emissaries who calls Harlem home. I've even had reason to make contact in the U.K., the base of music critic John Child, who was kind enough to send me a copy of a recorded interview he conducted with Rodriguez in 1990. Hearing Rodriguez's voice, in perfect Cuban Newyorkese, gave me an urgency to follow other ephemeral leads.

Which brought me to Paris.

I went to Paris to meet Miké Charroppin (left), a painter who has kept descarga alive between Cuba and France and long nurtured the jazz furrow in that city. She was called early by Cuban music via old 78s of the Orquesta Aragon. Born in Bordeaux, to a Martinican mother, she later became the runaway child running wild and moved to Paris to study art in 1968. Her vita is too humbling to address in this small space, but take this entry: she brought Conga de Los Hoyos to Paris for the first time in the early 1990s. It was Charroppin who was behind the concept of Cuba Linda. She wrote the liner notes and arranged two of its most stunning tracks, "Merceditas (Ya Me Voy)" and "Para Francia Flores (Y Para Cuba Tambíen)." She did all kinds of undocumented work. She was also Rodriguez's wife. When you talk to her you get the sense of a historic collaborative relationship (the stuff of storybooks).

I met Ms. Charroppin as I met Montmartre for the first time. being in that ground was long past due. I've lived with Montmartre in the sonic distance whether through the writings of Langston Hughes, the repertoire of Rita Montaner, and Graciela's anecdotes. It was a beautiful introduction. When you walk with Miké around the neighborhood--it feels less quartier, more barrio. She's got the kind of animas that makes you nostalgic for that 1980s generation of working artists in New York.

After Mr. Rodriguez passed away in 2005, Charroppin went through years of live recordings to put together Oye Afra, a lump-in-the-throat album homage (buy it from itunes). Also see this lovely and heartfelt review of the album by Maya Roy.


Charroppin's gift at assembly does not only extend to the songs she arranged, but for the making connections between like-souled people. The good vibes didn't stop there.


Back in Rome. As I turned the corner to his house, he was out front trimming the Bougainvillea. From Paris, Charroppin made my introduction to Roberto "Mamey" Evangelisti, another musical intimate in the Rodriguez buena gente orbit. One of those rare non-Cubans who is actually Cuban. Evangelisti is a Roman born and based percussionist whose childhood obsession with (and isolation from) the congas meant that as he taught himself to play, he also had to learn how to build an instrument to play on. To get that sound he could hear in recording but had no physically present models for. He was called to it by hands that didn't want the distancing of drumsticks, by the stuff that Armando Peraza did for Santana. I learned about his training with too many Cuban greats to mention and was shown footage of Rodriguez and Cuba Linda in the live. Evangelisti is an heir--actual, sonic, soulic--of Tata Güines . As such Evangelisti's is vecchia scuola elegance. His tender structuring held up many of Rodriguez's songs in the live, and continues to do so in recording. Hear him on the virtual whole of Oye Afra (see above) and especially, Alfredo Rodriguez y Los Acerekó Cuban Jazz.

Critics too often deserve their sullied reputation because so many have used the bodies and words of others to advance their own. And yet many remain generous. Charroppin and Evangelisti reminded me that the experience of interviewing musicians can echo that album that changes your life. Gracias. Merci. Grazie.




Tonight I light my last antizanzara spirale. That smell now means summer.

More from the other side,
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