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From Herbie Mann’s jazz to Solomon and Socalled
BY JOSH KUN
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When jazz flutist Herbie Mann died earlier this month, the New York Times ran an obituary that cast him as a runaway Jew who returned to his roots only three years before his death. Peter Keepnews explained that though Mann was born in Brooklyn as Herbert Jay Solomon, he spent his life elsewhere, melding jazz, blues, and soul with the music of Africa, Latin America, Japan, and the Middle East. It wasn’t until 2000 that he finished recording Eastern European Roots (Lightyear), which featured the traditional music of his Eastern European heritage. "I wanted this to be my musical statement above all the rest," Mann is quoted in the obituary as saying. "I love ‘Memphis Underground.’ I loved the Brazilian music I played. But this is finally me. For the first time I think it’s really me." For Mann, there was apparently no middle ground between his own tradition and the music of the cultures he dedicated his life to. The "real" him could only be one without the other. As Keepnews put it, "After four decades of multicultural exploration, Mr. Mann finally got around to the music of his own Jewish heritage," as if the return had been expected and inevitable, as if Mann’s experiments with what the Times dubbed "exotic cultures" and the traditions of his own past were mutually (and obviously) exclusive. The true self, Keepnews tried to tell us, is the original self; our true identities will be found not in cross-cultural encounters but only in a return to pasts that, we are asked to believe, belong to us and to us alone. Mann’s sentiments stick out in today’s pop landscape, where it’s become increasingly hard to find musicians who cling to a notion of a true cultural self free of any trace of multicultural encounter. More and more, musicians may be joining Mann on a return to tradition, but they take the opposite route: they get traditional by engaging with other cultures. Take HipHopKhasene (Piranha), the debut album from Solomon and Socalled, which offers a musical rendering of a traditional Jewish wedding (from vows to dance-floor celebration) by combining Sophie Solomon’s klezmer violin with Socalled’s breakbeats and samples from cantors and Jewish instructional wedding records. Yiddish vocalist Michael Alpert plays the role of the badchon, the tongue-twisting wedding jester that no old-school Jewish wedding is without (at one point he drops Chassidic chants over bouncing two-step beats); klezmer clarinettist David Krakauer sits in next to heavy-metal guitar blasts, and there’s a guest rapper who goofs as "The Real Slim Litvak." There are moments of traditionalism — the mournful lullaby of "Dobriden," the improvised Turkish taksim "Electro Taxim" — but mostly HipHopKhasene has fun putting tradition into question. Beats skip beneath frailachs and loops of breaking glass get spliced with violin solos. It sounds like DJ Shadow set loose in a Hebrew-school AV room. "The whole concept of the project was to raise a lot of postmodern questions about what is authenticity in music," Solomon told the BBC. Indeed, hip-hop’s culture of sampling and beat collage is the very thing that makes this return to an ancient Jewish ritual possible (and a blast to listen to). HipHopKhasene is proudly and playfully authentic with regard to its subject: the Jewish wedding in the age of hip-hop. The album’s cover collage says it best with its cutouts of four Chassidic men holding the wedding chuppah pasted next to graffiti spray cans, samplers, mixers, and keyboards. The cover of Akwid’s Proyecto Akwid (Univision) uses the same cultures-collide approach, but instead of hip-hop and the hora, it’s hip-hop and Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Sporting shaved heads and football jerseys, Francisco and Sergio Gómez sit on the hood of a Porsche convertible between the two worlds they straddle: the tubas, beer, cacti, and Mexican flags of the state of Michoacán and the palm trees and office buildings of downtown Los Angeles. The Gómez brothers left Michoacán for South Central LA when they were young kids, and their music is LA hip-hop done Mexican-migrant style: clapping g-funk beats and Spanish-language rhymes built on top of the brassy horns of traditional Mexican regional music. They even throw in Juan Gabriel choruses and team up with two of Mexican LA’s most beloved regional icons: Jenni Rivera and Adán Sánchez. Akwid haven’t always known how to fuse their Mexican regional affiliations with the DJ Quik they grew up with in South Central. In their previous incarnation as Juvenile Style, they rapped in English without nodding to the Adán Sánchez tapes they were listening to at home. "When you’re young and you’re growing up in an environment that is totally different than your culture, you find yourself being forced to adapt and assimilate," Sergio Gómez explains in the band’s press bio, "only to later evolve and reunite with your own roots." Like Mann’s Eastern European odyssey, Proyecto is a roots reunion. But Akwid refuse to sacrifice one world for the other. As Mexican immigrants raised in working-class South Central — where banda and hip-hop compete for radio dominance — the "real" Akwid could never be just banda or just hip-hop. They’d have to be both at once.
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