03.13.08 kulturnatib

Wishful thinking

Were you at the Guitar Festival at the Outpost Restaurant last November? Well, that makes two or more of us who where not there, if your were not. Although in some sense I consider myself to have been there since, as an Outpost regular and a friend of the organizers of that very laudable project, I was in some ways privy to the preparations.

But there is being there and being really there. Too bad that a week before the event, my number was up. I had to leave. I had to content myself with reports from friends after the event that were unanimous in saying how enjoyable the three-night festival was for both the audience and performers, especially for guest and festival star guitarist, Sammy Asuncion of Pinikpikan/Spy.

For a first time and a first ever event organized with barely minutes to spare, this was a rousing success despite the inevitable glitches, this time, a rather major one; a power outage. Fortunately this happened towards the end of the last night, the night that, incidentally, Asuncion was in the spotlight.

Still the consensus was that it was an event worthy of a repeat annually into perpetuity. I cannot agree more. I had always thought that something like this has a more legitimate claim to becoming a festival or at least becoming an annual event than the many and growing number of Sinulog copycats based on fanciful or invented histories or contrived traditions.

But why after so many months am I belatedly scratching this itch?

Celso Machado, that's why. Over the weekend, he played his specially infectious brand of Brazilian music at a local cultural center. This venue is among the centers in the city that have facilities for concerts, workshops, exhibits and other cultural activities or events which are located near or, mostly, in the same building with the bibliotheque, the public library.

It appears that among these centers there is a big push, this year, for featuring musicians and other artistic groups or individuals from a variety of cultural or national backgrounds. Among them is Machado, who, I have to admit, I do not know from Adam despite having a just-your-next-door neighbor name.

To those in the know about Canadian music, however, he is familiar, having been nominated twice for a Juno award, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys, in the global music category and as he has been based in British Columbia, in the far west, for some time now.

I was tempted, earlier there, to say Brazilian guitar music but that would be calling a mountain a molehill. Machado is a mountain of a musician. The guitar is, indeed, his instrument. He is a virtuoso with the guitar. At the same time, I have never seen a guitar manhandled so badly yet still made to play very interestingly beautiful music.

In one piece, in between a flurry of speedy and serially strumming with all of his right hand fingers, fan like, he was turning the tuning knob of the one of the strings, which made for a very strange playing or at least tuning – while playing! -- technique. He then proceeded to pull the now very loose sixth, base string across the other strings for a musical effect that was simply astounding. All the more because it still somehow managed to remain melodic!

This was just with the guitar. With other instruments, most of them percussive, he was simply a wizard but none more than with his own body and voice that produced or reproduced sound that you could swear to have heard with another instrument if only you could remember what it was called. The tabla, jembi, marimba and others?

Then, not only that, he also shared this wizardry. He distributed instruments to the audience and with just a few examples of how they were played he had the small, intimate room with about a hundred people erupting into an unlikely tropical, rainforest Amazonian jungle in a thunderstorm while outside a real snowstorm was silently raging.

I could not help thinking while enjoying this musical spectacle how, while in pidgin Tagalog machado might be too much, this Machado will not be too much at all but will, for sure, be more than enough for an event like the Cebu Guitar Festival.

I wish.