02.07.08 kulturnatib

Striking twice

It is generally accepted that lightning does not strike the same place twice. That this does happen is considered to be so rare it becomes either big news or, better, it earns a place is the archives of Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

Recently, I received an email notice of a new YouTube video posting that is leading me to believe rather than not that, even sans Ripley's endorsement, lighting is about to strike twice.

The YouTube video posting was from Winston, a friend and one of the best, most respected drummers in town; a senior musician to whom all the juniors look up.

He is also involved with a local performance art group, XO?. This involvement has considerably widened and deepened his music and has led our paths to cross once again in what is also now, even with distance, a path that is wider, leading to a more interesting horizon, as I have also been and continue to be involved with that same performance art group.

Ours is actually a long story going back to our elementary school days. But the more relevant part of this story has happened not long ago, in the course of our reconnecting, resurfacing our common interest in music and the visual arts.

At this point, another personage must be introduced who shares similar interest as Winston and myself, an important strand in this tapestry and, as happens, also a good friend and comrade in the arts.

Introduce might be a bit presumptuous here. He, of us three, would need the least introduction, if at all. He is a household name: Budoy aka Errol Marabiles.

I have followed Budoy's development as an artist, as a musician. I know that his artistic concerns are rooted in the serious quest for Bisayan identity. With this, I have known the history and understand the choice of the name for their band: Jr. Kilat.

Typical of Budoy's aikido artistry, of using the energy of adversity to propel it towards opportunity, he created this name when his sense of respect for precedence or for his elders would not let him use his originally preferred name; Leon Kilat.

Leon Kilat (Lightning) aka Pantaleon Villegas is, of course, the name of Cebu's own revolutionary hero. It is also the name of a band in the 80's who took the hero's namesake for its own as it sought to establish a music more attuned with the demands of the times against oppression, tyranny, dictatorship and the dominance of the air and ear-waves by the American Top Forty.

So, Budoy had to settle with Jr. Kilat. The rest – with a nationally popular showbiz detour -- is musical history.

Of this history, one song stands out, 'Original Sigbin,' the carrier single of Jr. Kilat's hit inaugural CD. It is also this single, it turns out, that owes as much to appropriation as unique or single-handed creation, a not unheard of event in art, especially music. As the great musical modernist, Igor Stravinsky, once said, “A good composer does not copy, he steals.”

I was happy when this single came out and when it became very popular, Winston said, when talking about Budoy in one of our conversations. I even advised a fellow musician against taking legal action saying that we should just be supportive of the advance Bisayan music is making through this song, he added.

While I agreed with the tack that he took, I didn't quite realize the import of that conversation until I viewed the YouTube posting announcing the reunion of the original Leon Kilat band of which, I now realized, Winston is a founding member.

Close to three decades later, lightning will strike again. Leon Kilat is reuniting and are in the process of recording a CD, with most of the original members.

After years of jamming together whenever their different jobs, schedules and locations allowed them, they have decided that the time is ripe for the younger generation of Bisayan music enthusiasts - Bisrockers and RnBers (Rasta nga Bisaya) – to appreciate the roots of the fruits they are now enjoying.

In what can be more than simple coincidence, Leon Kilat is now recording in the studio, Backyard Projects Studio, that provided and continues to provide Budoy and Jr. Kilat their audio recording technical playground.

Winston hopes that by midyear the CD can be launched with a concert tour that he prays, as only a father can, will bring the whole Leon Kilat family of several generations together.