Where Fricot Becomes Gumbo
Food is migratory — so is Music — both metamorphize when they enter another culture & become part of that culture. Fricot becomes Gumbo. Music is very similar. You just can’t tell what is going to happen to a culture’s music when it migrates, wanders around, and mingles with influences from other places – or when it doesn’t .
Take Acadian music, from Eastern Canada – some of which will be wandering South, to Louisville, later this month, when the Acadian group Vishten (from PEI & the Magdalen Islands) arrives to play traditional music of Eastern Canada at the Paul W. Ogle Center – Saturday, March 13th .
As I mentioned before, the prototype of this music is a la Natalie MacMaster (Highland Scotch-influenced Cape Breton fiddling) – but since the region’s music has coalesced into an amalgam of Scotch, Irish, & Acadian influences, one or another of those elements might jump out at you more, depending on what part of Eastern Canada the musicians are from.
Vishten is a little heavier on the Acadian influences since all of the foursome are Acadian.
And for those who are not aware of what Acadians are — here is a synopsis from someone who knows little, doesn’t check facts (so feel free to correct), & reads nothing: Acadians were French peasant farmers who emigrated to Eastern Canada in the 1700s (possibly earlier), but are not to be confused with the settlers who emigrated to Québec (different part of France, lower on the social totem pole, etc.) who became known as ‘French Canadians.’ The former (the Acadians) were infamously expelled (forced from their homes, separated from their families, amid much suffering – weeping & wailing) by the English, who wanted to make places like Nova Scotia wholly Anglophone – a sort of ethnic-cleansing move, with tea. (If I’m wrong about anything here, please look it up on Wikipedia and email me.)
Many of the displaced Acadians famously wound up in New Orleans & other parts of Louisiana (gathered up & shipped out from places like Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia) – where, via a corruption of the name ‘Acadian,’ they eventually ended up as ‘Cajuns’ — and fricot most likely ended up as gumbo. (Others of them ended up in the Northeast, in States like Maine, Massachusetts & Connecticut.) This often-overlooked travesty of North American history may be familiar to you from exposure in jr. high school English to the Longwinded Longfellow poem ‘Evangeline.’
(Remember – ?
‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,. . .’
–Wait, you were asleep; so was I.)
And on . . . and on . . . and on. (And on.) In this, kind of, ‘monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe,’ only before it really gets inflated and going.
Eh, bien! Quelle à difference? Fricot, the simple stew of chicken & vegetables, from the forests primeval of the Maritime Provinces, becomes the explosive spicy gumbo in Louisiana. And, who knows what the origin of the dish in rural France?
Eastern Canadian/Acadian music can be thought of as kind of ARcadian — you know, as in ‘Arcady’ – those simple, shepherd, pastoral people from ancient Italy who never updated, staying in one large, forested spot while everyone else in the ancient world was migrating & moving around – and so preserved their a(r)boriginal character, until they finally got stylishly mythic and passed into legend. The Acadians in the Maritimes have also stayed the same, culturally, since arriving, while the ones expelled were forced to change –- so, ironically, even this piece of Cajun music recorded some 70-80 years back seems more exciting, haunting, & grabbing to me than the traditional Acadian of Vishten:
Cajun Vol: 1 — Abbeville Breakdown 1929-39
(& the next following track as well, as well as tracks 6 & 9);
vs.:
and;
(Fiddling should sound tempting, sinful, & exciting; not sounding like the world’s most boring castration). If it isn’t, I tend to imagine a happy, little ARcadian happily playing his ARcordion & gallivanting on the Îles de la Madeleine.
In case you want to have a look at Longfellow’s monument to the Acadians (or get a good case of eye-strain), here is: –
On the other hand, if you would rather canoe form the tip of the St. Lawrence River to the Gulf of the Mississippi than read Longfellow, I don’t blame you – so I’ll tell you what happened to Little Ar-phan Ann — , um, Evangeline – in the end: It was precisely the opposite of what happened to the rest of the Acadians, who got hotter and hotter and HOTTER as they moved South – blown about by the Amenoi – some of them becoming, in time, faster-than-wind jockeys at Churchill Downs — with others, their music shading over from Louisiana into Appalachian sound as it reached ‘ArKadian’ musicians in Arkansas, or intermingling with yodelers, bluesmen, country singers, Tin-Pan Alley, most likely jazzmen no less, over toward Texas & Memphis – you can trace its ‘travel’ and development if you want to check out some Cajun-influenced music from those directions.
But back to Evangeline: she lost track of her amour sincère & wandered around, all over North America, and spent all the rest of Longfellow’s 10 or 11 Cantos looking and looking and looking for Gabriel until she found him, after both had gotten too old and ugly for it to matter, just a minute before he died. (Mr. Longfellow, . . . and the point being …?)
It seems to me our Evangeline — old, ossified, & stuck in the same obsessive mind-frame — blowing Gabriel’s horn (or wishing she was) — is something like Acadian music in Eastern Canada and the people who stayed there — they’ve tried to be sure that their music never changed. But what the removal and travel, albeit coerced, have done for Cajun-Acadian music has been phenomenal.
But seriously, just like in the Longfellow poem, there is an undeniable fascination to Acadian culture in terms of both its music and cuisine. (Maybe for the same reason fricot seems more exotic than gumbo because who has had fricot & how can you get some?) I would love to see a feature film or HBO miniseries on the Acadian miseries and explusion to New Orleans. For people who missed MacMaster & want to see more, but something slightly different from Eastern Canada, they should check out Vishten.
Also, Paul W. Ogle Cultural & Community Center (part of Indiana University SE in New Albany) is a great place to catch International Acts, especially as part of their Global Village series.
Here are some other international music opportunities for this month:
Celtic Crossroads (Bomhard Theater, Saturday, March 13th ) – This is a band from Gallway in Ireland. Don’t know if there is anything new here or not; it just looks like typical Irish music to me. I don’t get this at all – that Irish music can often seem (to my ear, anyway) to be typical. Because, since so many people, in so many different places, have Irish ancestry, Irish music must be some of the ‘best-traveled’ music in the world. (In fact, so many people have Irish ancestry, I am convinced that one day, an anthropologist in Ireland will unexpectedly discover the world’s oldest humanoid bones — & this shocking, revolutionary discovery will confirm what I’ve always suspected — that the oldest human came from Ireland & made his/her way to Africa & the rest of the world from there. Making Ireland, in all its famous green stuff, and its oddly unchanging music, another one of those musical Gardens of Eden.)
Here are samples:
(This piece is their most ARcadian I could find.)
(This piece is their most orgasmic I could find.)
Here’s something, just a few days away — Rodrigo y Gabriela (Brown Theatre — Sunday, March 7th): a Méxican guitar duo (nothing ARcadian about them despite moving to & living in Ireland) that play beautiful, fast-paced instrumentals. Synchopate. But the joy of this duo is not just listening to them, but also watching them perform. There is a rush in watching people who are passionately loving what they do as they’re doing it — people who get lost & into the moment of what they are doing — & we experience their passion & joy as they perform. I just got one of the last good seats! — hurry – or their show will be sold out.
This blog’s gotten as long-winded as Longfellow – so –
Alright, enough of that.