Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.
I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.
The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.
Fascinating. I don't think I get it--I'm sure I don't--but you have helped me have a deeper appreciation both historically and in terms of the intricacy. I think people who grow up with this have very different "ears" than the more simple and melodic music that I understand.
Fair warning! If anyone posts a comment about a music topic they like with a couple of youtube video links, it is liable to be front paged! You have been warned!!!
Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.
Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.
Thanks for putting this up, LJ! And thanks for adding the cubanet link, it's great reading.
We were supposed to go hear these fine folks this evening, but their visas were denied or cancelled.
As an aside, this is why we can't have nice things, episode 1,832,782. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_iMIvPHLc
These folks are not at all traditional, more of a Cuban chamber music ensemble, if you will. But rumba is in almost everything Cuban, one way or another. Certainly everything that isn't purely or primarily European in origin. Espirales (the folks in the video) seem to bring an interesting blend of Euro and trad.
I think a way to think about rumba in Cuba is to compare it to blues in the US. Originally a folkloric style rising out of the people of the African diaspora, but working its way into every nook and cranny of American popular and traditional musics.
It is the demotic musical language of Cuba.
Good weekend to you all, and no worries if the videos make you dance around the room a bit. :)
Oh my God, the surprise of seeing your own video explanation, russell! I wish you could have seen my smile of pleasure and delight to see you and hear you sounding as cool, knowledgeable and just plain nice as you do in writing! Thank you! And I have just watched, also with great pleasure, the Rumba en Atares guaguanco video too, what a mood enhancer. I'm going to hold off on watching the rest because I'm pretty flu-ridden, and need to go lie down, but I'm on for it tomorrow.
On the Robert Palmer piece I searched for lj, I definitely did as thorough a search as I could. But on the other hand, I also definitely have limited ability in these kinds of things (as I have proved to myself many times), so somebody else with an NYT sub (or more advanced google-fu) might do better. I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Muchísimas gracias, Russell! I accidentally left the link in at the bottom, as I thought I was going to add to Russell's post, but thought better of it, but will leave it there cause I think it will be of interest
Another article that I remember had me wondering about how this clave thing worked was this
Article Title: The Clave: Tricky Latin Rhythm, Hard to Master
Author: Robert Palmer
Publication: The New York Times
Corrected Date/Section: October 5, 1980, Section D, Page 22
which now seems to have disappeared from the NYT archive (thanks to GftNC for looking!) If anyone else wants to apply their google-fu to finding it, in my memory, it is definitely worth a read. It gives the anecdote of one band having to re-record an entire album because they had reversed the clave. Ouch!
But watching Russell's explanation above, I realized that the clave is not something you can read about and figure out, you actually have to have two things to bang together. I'm slightly closer to understanding it, but since there is not a lot of Latin music jams out here in rural Japan, I'm afraid that like a lot of my other desires, it is going to be an unrequited love,,,
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can't login, I don't think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn't seem to work
Speaking of high-definition scans of old art, has anyone else looked at the varnish crackle in the scan of Rembrandt's Night Watch? Literally, you can look down into the cracks. The resolution is 200 dots per millimeter, or about 5100 dpi. They used a $48,000 Hasselblad 100MP camera and a $6,000 macro lens. The museum doesn't talk about how much the positioning framework cost to build, or how long to write the software that checked the focus on every one of the ~8,500 individual photos that were pieced together to make the final image.
Thank you all for the information and suggestions.
I suppose you could say I'm at least somewhat into this stuff. Since I'm undertaking to produce a scroll which is in that mode, albeit with very different content. I've done such in the past, but I'm seriously out of practice. Like three decades out of practice. So I need all the help I can get.
wj, if you're into this type of thing don't miss out on the Chester Beatty museum and library. Among many other artefacts, they have a lot of ancient books, illustrations and manuscripts. Incidentally, they have an exhibition on "Manuscripts and the Mind" at the moment:
wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the '70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it's a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send 'em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I've been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It's feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
ps You can see every page of the Book of Kells in high res in TCD's Digital Collection - i can't remember where I learnt this years ago, but it might well have been here!
I miss the old cameras. I'm a painter and I used to use photos as a starting point. It just isn't the same trying to use a computer.
Lately I've been doing abstracts based on aerial views of the desert--I use mapquest to find images. I'm trying to get that magical, mysterious feeling of all that raw geology. It's annoying when the screen keeps going black.
Also what an amazing experience to see the Book of Kells!
I love the book of Kells! Did you see the Long Room? It's the platonic ideal...I'm down with a very grim flu, so nothing interesting to report I'm afraid.
Just for something completely different, I'm in Dublin, Ireland this week (conference). So I wandered over to Trinity College to check out The Book of Kells Experience.
A nicely done exhibition. I was particularly pleased to be able to see the Book itself. In a darkened room, and only the page it happened to be turned to. But still beautiful. And lots of other stuff from the book and about it. Way cool!
i'm working on a program to automate the application of large collection of image effects i've written over the years (mostly back when i had a software business). i've called the program "Director", as in "movie director" and it's based around the metaphor of shooting a movie.
there's a Script (JSON) which describes the Cast (a list of Actors (an effect) and the name of their roles (nickname, for easier typing)), and some production info (where to get source images, etc). then, there's a list of Scenes. a Scene is a list of Actors and the Actions they take (turn on/off, change a parameter, etc.) at a given frame in the video.
run it and it reads source frames, applies effects, displays them and saves them.
the Script is just text, so it's not very sexy. but, it does work. the application as a whole is very close to being elegant, internally, which pleases me greatly.
Did you go with the iphone 17? For me, the battery is the key driver of a new phone, and the current phone I have is a 13, and my wife and I will probably get a 17 now. I realize that it is not just the battery, chip and phone design makes a huge difference, but it's surprising to me that the models cycle thru without much improvement, so I can't imagine just going up one or 2 model numbers
I'm consistently amazed and annoyed by the distorted photos of photos I see people posting on social media.
They take the photos at angles that make people's heads huge or tiny. They don't crop out whatever's outside the original photo - usually a tablecloth or some such. They seem to be completely unconcerned about glare. The photos are often crooked.
I'm extremely anal about those things when taking photos of photos, so it drives me nuts. I'll sometimes take several photos until I'm satisfied.
I'd like to think of myself as the Stanley Kubrick of taking photos of photos.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
OK, now I gotta check Opeth!
Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.
I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.
Here's Jerry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G0qZsW481g
The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.
"
Fascinating. I don't think I get it--I'm sure I don't--but you have helped me have a deeper appreciation both historically and in terms of the intricacy. I think people who grow up with this have very different "ears" than the more simple and melodic music that I understand.
On “Something Different”
Nous, can you recommend a specific camera for me? Something easy to use.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Fair warning! If anyone posts a comment about a music topic they like with a couple of youtube video links, it is liable to be front paged! You have been warned!!!
"
Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.
Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.
"
Thanks for putting this up, LJ! And thanks for adding the cubanet link, it's great reading.
We were supposed to go hear these fine folks this evening, but their visas were denied or cancelled.
As an aside, this is why we can't have nice things, episode 1,832,782. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_iMIvPHLc
These folks are not at all traditional, more of a Cuban chamber music ensemble, if you will. But rumba is in almost everything Cuban, one way or another. Certainly everything that isn't purely or primarily European in origin. Espirales (the folks in the video) seem to bring an interesting blend of Euro and trad.
I think a way to think about rumba in Cuba is to compare it to blues in the US. Originally a folkloric style rising out of the people of the African diaspora, but working its way into every nook and cranny of American popular and traditional musics.
It is the demotic musical language of Cuba.
Good weekend to you all, and no worries if the videos make you dance around the room a bit. :)
On “Monarchy in the UK”
oops!
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Oh my God, the surprise of seeing your own video explanation, russell! I wish you could have seen my smile of pleasure and delight to see you and hear you sounding as cool, knowledgeable and just plain nice as you do in writing! Thank you! And I have just watched, also with great pleasure, the Rumba en Atares guaguanco video too, what a mood enhancer. I'm going to hold off on watching the rest because I'm pretty flu-ridden, and need to go lie down, but I'm on for it tomorrow.
On the Robert Palmer piece I searched for lj, I definitely did as thorough a search as I could. But on the other hand, I also definitely have limited ability in these kinds of things (as I have proved to myself many times), so somebody else with an NYT sub (or more advanced google-fu) might do better. I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
"
Muchísimas gracias, Russell! I accidentally left the link in at the bottom, as I thought I was going to add to Russell's post, but thought better of it, but will leave it there cause I think it will be of interest
Another article that I remember had me wondering about how this clave thing worked was this
Article Title: The Clave: Tricky Latin Rhythm, Hard to Master
Author: Robert Palmer
Publication: The New York Times
Corrected Date/Section: October 5, 1980, Section D, Page 22
which now seems to have disappeared from the NYT archive (thanks to GftNC for looking!) If anyone else wants to apply their google-fu to finding it, in my memory, it is definitely worth a read. It gives the anecdote of one band having to re-record an entire album because they had reversed the clave. Ouch!
But watching Russell's explanation above, I realized that the clave is not something you can read about and figure out, you actually have to have two things to bang together. I'm slightly closer to understanding it, but since there is not a lot of Latin music jams out here in rural Japan, I'm afraid that like a lot of my other desires, it is going to be an unrequited love,,,
On “Something Different”
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can't login, I don't think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn't seem to work
And so, I am sad. :(
Thank you!
"
Speaking of high-definition scans of old art, has anyone else looked at the varnish crackle in the scan of Rembrandt's Night Watch? Literally, you can look down into the cracks. The resolution is 200 dots per millimeter, or about 5100 dpi. They used a $48,000 Hasselblad 100MP camera and a $6,000 macro lens. The museum doesn't talk about how much the positioning framework cost to build, or how long to write the software that checked the focus on every one of the ~8,500 individual photos that were pieced together to make the final image.
"
Thank you all for the information and suggestions.
I suppose you could say I'm at least somewhat into this stuff. Since I'm undertaking to produce a scroll which is in that mode, albeit with very different content. I've done such in the past, but I'm seriously out of practice. Like three decades out of practice. So I need all the help I can get.
"
there's an amazing animated movie about the Book Of Kells.very cool.
"
wj, if you're into this type of thing don't miss out on the Chester Beatty museum and library. Among many other artefacts, they have a lot of ancient books, illustrations and manuscripts. Incidentally, they have an exhibition on "Manuscripts and the Mind" at the moment:
https://chesterbeatty.ie/exhibitions/manuscripts-and-the-mind/
"
wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the '70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it's a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send 'em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I've been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It's feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
Fun times.
"
ps You can see every page of the Book of Kells in high res in TCD's Digital Collection - i can't remember where I learnt this years ago, but it might well have been here!
"
I miss the old cameras. I'm a painter and I used to use photos as a starting point. It just isn't the same trying to use a computer.
Lately I've been doing abstracts based on aerial views of the desert--I use mapquest to find images. I'm trying to get that magical, mysterious feeling of all that raw geology. It's annoying when the screen keeps going black.
Also what an amazing experience to see the Book of Kells!
"
I love the book of Kells! Did you see the Long Room? It's the platonic ideal...I'm down with a very grim flu, so nothing interesting to report I'm afraid.
"
Just for something completely different, I'm in Dublin, Ireland this week (conference). So I wandered over to Trinity College to check out The Book of Kells Experience.
A nicely done exhibition. I was particularly pleased to be able to see the Book itself. In a darkened room, and only the page it happened to be turned to. But still beautiful. And lots of other stuff from the book and about it. Way cool!
"
i'm working on a program to automate the application of large collection of image effects i've written over the years (mostly back when i had a software business). i've called the program "Director", as in "movie director" and it's based around the metaphor of shooting a movie.
there's a Script (JSON) which describes the Cast (a list of Actors (an effect) and the name of their roles (nickname, for easier typing)), and some production info (where to get source images, etc). then, there's a list of Scenes. a Scene is a list of Actors and the Actions they take (turn on/off, change a parameter, etc.) at a given frame in the video.
run it and it reads source frames, applies effects, displays them and saves them.
the Script is just text, so it's not very sexy. but, it does work. the application as a whole is very close to being elegant, internally, which pleases me greatly.
i plan to use it to create videos for songs.
now i just need to write some songs.
"
Yes, the base iPhone 17.
"
Did you go with the iphone 17? For me, the battery is the key driver of a new phone, and the current phone I have is a 13, and my wife and I will probably get a 17 now. I realize that it is not just the battery, chip and phone design makes a huge difference, but it's surprising to me that the models cycle thru without much improvement, so I can't imagine just going up one or 2 model numbers
"
Other people must be doing interesting and/or useful things beyond politics.
I've been cleaning black mold out of the basement. Big fun!!
:(
Also, went to a two-day reiki class over the weekend, which was actually kind of profound. And fun. Profound fun.
Looking forward to getting the basement wrapped up so I can get back to the vibes.
On “Monarchy in the UK”
Well, not always by a long shot.
I stand corrected!
On “Something Different”
I'm consistently amazed and annoyed by the distorted photos of photos I see people posting on social media.
They take the photos at angles that make people's heads huge or tiny. They don't crop out whatever's outside the original photo - usually a tablecloth or some such. They seem to be completely unconcerned about glare. The photos are often crooked.
I'm extremely anal about those things when taking photos of photos, so it drives me nuts. I'll sometimes take several photos until I'm satisfied.
I'd like to think of myself as the Stanley Kubrick of taking photos of photos.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.