Saturday April 28, 2012
Lafayette, Louisiana
Red Stick Ramblers, ( Louisiana- Swing/Cajun), Scene Malibu Fais Do Do Stage
...with their rambunctious ways, these are the wise guys of the Festival - irreverent, witty, recklessly spontaneous. There's no telling what any of them will say on stage. The RSR''s music has a rollicking sensibility charged with the power of a crawfish boat that's scooped up every musical influence on their prairies - cajun, creole, even swing - and plays it out with their assortment of fiddle, guitars, banjo, drums, bass, and accordion.These guys began playing at LSU in Baton Rouge in the late 1990s. They throw a stick of dynamite into roots and country swing music and draw crowds wherever they play.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnReIxupwOs&list=UUpO59RlFb0TWCXQLKYfisdA&index=2&feature=plcp

Vishten (Prince Edward Island, Magdalen Islands-Traditional Acadian), TV 5 stage Lafayette Stage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FexsC0aeD8
Pastelle LeBlanc on accordion, her sister Emmanuelle LeBlanc on keyboard and Irish hand held drum (Bodhran), and Pascal Miousse on fiddle and guitar, play rural traditional Acadian music, all the way from Prince Edward Island and the Magdalen Islands in way east of Canada. Pastelle and Emmanuelle make a mighty, clattering, pulsing beat by rhythmically pounding their feet on the black trunks at their feet. Influences from France, Ireland, Scotland drive the music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUeR0OZ5QUc

Once again people are on their feet dancing. The dances are jigs that require anything from simple stamping to complicated foot flying footwork in pretty much the same place, not partner dancing, but like Cajun or zydeco can go on for round after infectious round until the fiddler or the dancers are wringing wet with sweat and worries shooed out the door.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0e8EXhFtU
Pascal vigorously bows his fiddle, the more animated the crowd, gets the more feverishly the band plays. No surprise, people figure out some way to express themselves in dance, mothers with kids in their arms, and twenty-somethings who probably got jiggled around in utero as their mother’s danced well into their terms.
Mercy Brothers, ( Louisiana – Gospel/Hillbilly/ Blues), Scene Chevron Heritage Stage
Three guitars, one bass, a big ol' drum kit, and electric keyboard, this is rock 'n roll come to jesus music, maybe the kind that inspired the Holy Rollers. If you want a gospel blues rock 'n roll country band, covering everything from love to perdition, these are your men. Once again, little islands of people are dancing, the sound system is awesome, and I am in heaven.
http://lineup.festivalinternational.com/band/the-mercy-brothers

Khaira Arby (Mali-Desert Blues) at the Scene Malibu Fais Do Do Stage
Once again Lafayete embraces the exotic, the spectator area is packed, am I repeating myself? Lafayette has become a musical tapas town where the idea is to sample music you’ve never heard of. Desert Blues sounds intriguing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtci5CDZr9o
Men and women, as partners or solo, make up movement on the spot - trance, free form, or Martha Grahame with a world music twist. At the end of the show, the lead singer Khaira Arby introduces her band in Malian. We have no trouble imagining what she's saying and applaud when she talks about each of her two guitar players, one bass player, and the man behind a big percussion unit. Her two lead guitar players are whizzes. Her singing is enchanting and match her Malian nickname, "The Nightingale of the North".

Lamajamal (Middle East/US-Gypsy Surf) Scene TV5 Stage
This is the dark horse act of the day. From Vishten to Kaira Arby to Lamajamal one act tops another for sheer exoticism. Imagine the sounds the five of them make with a wild collection of instruments including mandolin, cümbüs (fretless Turkish banjo), drums, our, keyboard, guitar, melodica, accordion, clarinet, sax, flute, dulcimer and percussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPAySRTTt0o&feature=youtu.be
One of the musicians says he’s from the West Bank, that a popular dance there is the circle dance. He asks people to form a circle, hold hands, and connect in energy and friendship. Hey, we may be in Lafayette, but today this could be Istanbul or Ramallah, no problem, friends and strangers dance to the joyous music, if there’s one word I will wear out today it is JOYOUS.
http://lineup.festivalinternational.com/band/lamajamal

Texas Tornadoes at Scene Malibu Fais Do Do stage
"These guys are awesome," a guy tells me, obviously in some kind of rapture, "I've been listening to them for twenty years.The original members Freddy Fender and Doug Sahm died recently but Sahm's son Shawn got the band rolling again. That guy playing the accordion, Flaco Jiménez, he's a legend!" With that he took his friend in his arms and began to dance. So it goes around here. Judging by the crowd, Tex-Music has a big following.

Slavic Soul Party (Balkans/US - Slavic Soul), Scene Malibu, Fais Do Do Stage
This is the greatest kitchen sink band, from one groove to the next they turn on a dime from the middle east to Africa to USA, often mashed altogether, gypsy, soul, funk, with a collection of brass, reed and percussion to pull it off. If you can imagine a New Orleans brass band with saxophone, accordion, trombone playing in a Turkish bazaar somewhere in Havana, you might approximate what these guys sound like. Once again, the crowd cheered them ferociously.

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein: My Walking Talking Lifetime Achievement Award
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein. Google the name. Ten pages worth of Jeff Kelly Lowenstein later, Google’s still rolling out his name. Impressive.

Let’s see. Award winning reporter for the Chicago Reporter; currently Database and Investigative Editor for the Chicago Tribune’s Spanish language newspaper Hoy (and is becoming fluent in Spanish while he’s at it); the 2007 Racial Justice Fellow at the Institute of Justice and Journalism at USC’s Annnenberg School of Communication; one of a handful of journalists from around the world to be selected in the Climate Change Media Partnership’s first Fellowship Program to send journalists to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban (COP17) in November 2011; contributor to the Huffington Post; awarded a Dennis Hunt Fellowship in 2011; currently president of the Dart Society…I could go on. Run that Google search and see for yourself.
I’ve known him since he was nine years old. And I'm mighty proud of him.
“I want Mr. Tamburello for my fourth grade teacher,” he remembers telling his mom in 1974. Alice Lowenstein was on the board of the Parent Teacher Organization. Jeff was placed in 4T. He was one of the bright spots in a really interesting bunch of kids in my 1974-75 class at the John Pierce School in Brookline, MA.
Jeff (R) interviewing a classmate on the first day of school in 1974
There must be a gene that creates the ability to connect the dots that link human relationships. Jeff is a natural. He made friends with every kid in the class. His style was subtle and steady. Kids respected him, an act that mirrored what they experienced from him. His voice is deeper now but his style hasn’t changed a jot.
He’d stop by to visit me after school from grade 5 through his years at Brookline High School, then during vacations when he returned to the east coast from Stanford (graduated Summa Cum Laude). When Jeff’s mom and dad were involved in a terrible automobile accident after he graduated, his mother nearly died. Fate drew him back to Brookline. Jeff and his brothers Jon and Michael shared home care for their mother’s arduous recovery and rehabilitation. It was a long road. Jeff needed some structure and a sense of familiar territory to hold his days and nights together. He walked over to the Pierce School.
“We are family,” was principal Alvin Fortune’s motto. A big man with a bigger heart, he offered Jeff a job, knowing that Jeff was not only a caretaker for his mother, but needed some TLC himself. Our teaching community embraced him.
After a stint of running our recess program and the less exciting task of shelving books for our two motherly librarians who fed him snacks every day, Jeff asked if he could sit in on my classes, maybe help teach for a couple of hours a day. The smartest thing I ever did was to say yes. The next two years were the most exciting of my 34 year career.
That summa cum laude from Stanford was not just an impressive certificate to hang on the wall. Jeff authored terrific American History lessons, engineered activities that involved every level of student. Kids loved his style. They knew he was present, a huge gift, and that his desire to teach was balanced by his desire to know who they were and what they needed to succeed. He learned to manage a class of ten year olds. Watching him teach was fun.
Jeff added a program to my series of “Life Talks,” which he called “The You Can Do Anything Program” in which he invited artists, musicians, writers – all friends of his – to talk about the paths that led them to their callings.
Talking with him after class about strategies for content delivery, class management, which kids looked involved and which ones needed help, where the lesson would lead tomorrow… those sessions were a gift. They gave me insight into the depth of experience I hadn’t realized I’d absorbed in my first 18 years of teaching. And I learned a lot by watching Jeff work a room with an inclusive style that made every kid feel like he or she was in the game.
Jeff was an astute observer. I asked him to write anecdotal comments about each student and used them when Jeff sat in with me when we met with parents for conferences about their child twice a year. Jeff owns a memory that rivals a purse seine trawler for its capacity to collect (and retain) data. When he spoke about their kids, he included specific examples for everything he wrote.
Twenty-four looks pretty old when you’re nine. My students would examine photos pinned to my bulletin board of Jeff as a fourth grader in 4T, look at him as a grown man, then try to figure out how ancient I must be to have been his teacher in the olden days. It was a gas.
Over the past forty years I’ve known Jeff as a student, mentor, fellow teacher, and, for the past twenty-five years or so, as a friend. I’ve witnessed him embrace challenges through his first career as a middle school teacher and through his evolutions as a reporter. He brings an incandescent energy to the cause of social justice that inspires his colleagues. Honest to goodness, I’ve seen him operate with this vision since he was nine years old.
I call Jeff Kelly Lowenstein my “Walking Talking Lifetime Achievement Award.”
On May 17, I’m heading to New York City to the second annual fund raiser/auction for the Dart Society, an organization of journalists that works to tell stories about trauma and violence with sensitivity and compassion, and that also works to help journalists deal with the impact of doing that work. Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is president of the organization. A perfect match.
Jeff and pt through the years
1974 Jeff learning about Japanese culture with classmates in 4T
1989 Goofing around as The Dynamic Duo during Pierce School's annual "Dress Up Day" ; 2001 recording commentaries for NPR affiliate WFCR-FM in Amherst, MA
B/W classroom photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
May 15, 2012 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (6)
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