This Thursday evening I got in my new VW GTI…finally into the 21st century in an automotive way…and began a trip through time. Up, up and away from the middle of Manhattan to the edge of America, v.New York State.
Potsdam on the St. Lawrence River.
I was going there to play with truly the greatest Nuyorican/Afro-Cuban-style band that has ever existed, The Mambo Legends. (For those of you who do not know me, I am a NYC jazz + latin/jazz musician who has played on the highest level of those idioms for going on 40 years. This one is the best of the best. The root of the root of the root. Check it out. I ain’t lyin’.)
I left with no small amount of trepidation, because for a very long time that style of music…from Arsenio Rodriquez through the Machito, Tito Rodriquez and Tito Puente bands on the NYC latin side and Dizzy Gillespie/Chano Pozo-influenced music on the latin-jazz side…has been as segregated as say Little Rock, Arkansas in 1947. Having spent some time going to school in Ithaca, NY, I expected the worst. An audience of townies, blindered academics and students trying to somehow surreptitiously live la vida loca second or third-hand while simultaneously surrounded by hordes of Adirondack-bred rednecks that would make Orval Faubus’s boys look like a tea party from Lewis Carroll’s well bred English youth. (Dunno about Faubus? Then learn. Don’t recognize he names of those musicians I mentioned above? Like I said…segregation is a bitch. Especially when culturally enforced.)
Read on.
So…up, up and away from the Big Apple on a dark, wet 6PM Thursday November night. I fought through the rush hour traffic, hit the NY Thruway…one of Nelson Rockefeller’s great gifts to NY, along with the billions required to build the state prison and college systems (Rocky was just trying to make up for his daddy’s depredations in the robber baron years. He missed the mark by quite some, but hey…he tried. AttiCA!!! AttiCA!!!) and burned up past Albany, possibly the most corrupt state capital in the United States…no mean feat…and into the heart of darkness, NY State style.
Where no foreigner dares tread.
North of the Mohawk River.
Look on a map.
Up where men are men and send each other pictures of women fucking horses along with comments like “Steady there, big fella!!!”
Paladino country.
See that town?
Lowville?
Right above “New York?”
Like dat.
My GPS actually took me thorough Lowville that night at about 12AM. Scary country. As I drove into the 30MPH speed limit of Lowville, two big men in deer masks and some other kind of strange costume loomed out of the night on the side of the road. Looking at me real hard. Truly. No hallucination. They were fucking there!!! Hadn’t seen a pedestrian in an hour. Hardly any cars. Just rain and darkness. And then this scene out of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story floated past my passenger side door at 30 MPH.
I didn’t stop to investigate.
Bet on it.
Onward and northward.
Not an open gas station or store.
Nobody home.
Lookin’ my rearview mirror, just in case.
Not even bad country cops lookin’ fer a city boy to fuck over.
No place to piss. Not even room on the side of the road to stop. (And of course…those deer men…)
And then my GPS went haywire.
Next thing I knew I was driving down a dirt road w/my GPS saying “Turn left in 900 yards! Or…right!” Deer staring me down for right of way in the middle of the road. Tarpaper-covered shacks with broken refrigerators in the yard. Attack rabbits. The works. Tobacco Road North.
And…the GPS was right. I eventually came out on another main road and the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful.
Couldn’t find my motel so I asked at another one. A big one…national chain. Went in the front door…it’s almost 2 AM by this time…and there’s the night clerk, drunk out of his mind on the lobby couch. He says “Shoulda ushed us. Downa road a halfa mile. Shhhh…” and passed back out.
Went down the road a half a mile…there’s my hotel. The beginnings of the cultural dissonance that titles this article. A nice little motel, nightstaffed by a quite obviously gay man. In Ithaca 40+ years ago? He’d’a been so deep in the closet he’d be wearing mothballs. No more. Goes out of his way to make sure that my room payment is covered for three days, etc. Nice man.
Passed out myself.
Up earlyish; time to go teach.
Up through the morning fog. The usual upstate NY landscape…small farms, small businesses on the side of the road…and then Potsdam. Clarkson University, then a nice looking little, old-style, prosperous three-block small town/midtown, and then SUNY (State University of NY) Potsdam.
BIG buildings! Lots of them. The music school? Parking for several hundred cars, a big, well cared-for plant. Students everywhere, all friendly, helpful and intelligent.
Now…unfortunately this is not the academic norm in America. I do this sort of thing maybe 6 or more times a year…a residency in some school, teaching what I have learned in NY City. Usually? Over the past 15 years or so? Stiff, paranoid, competitive, defensive students and ditto faculty.
Here?
Nope.
Open on almost every level.
I teach some fairly avant-garde approaches to practicing. They work, too. But in many schools, the initial…and sometimes final…reaction is one of fear.
We’ve been doing it this way for 100+ years. Who are you to try something new???!!!
Like dat.
Here?
Nope.
Same with the workshops given by several world-class latin musicians in the Mambo Legends Band. Everyone open and ready to learn.
Then a short break and a rehearsal with the student jazz band. Usually the worst part of my day. Out of tune; bad time; stiff.
Here?
Nope.
A sheer pleasure.
And still later, a concert with the band. Equally a pleasure.
Then a quick…and extraordinarly good…late supper at a Chinese restaurant. Clean, clear and simple food, a group of Chinese people who seemed to have been in the US for a fairly short time. They spoke limited English and the dialect they spoke among themselves was unlike anything I’ve heard in NY. Again…Ithaca in the late `60s/early `70s? Not happening. Not like that, anyway.
Next day? More teaching, then a concert w/the Mambo Legends. And here is where it gets really interesting. The university has a well-functioning latin big band! I mean…a good one! They open the concert and they truly understand the music. This is so rare outside of New York City that I cannot describe my surprise. Here in upstate New York State? Unheard of!
Then the Mambo Legends Band. Rocked the house. 23 NYC musicians, playing the real thing. People hear it if they live in an urban Caribbean Hispanic society, but up here, about a mile south of Canada? Quel surprise!!!
Then a beautiful, open party in a good Mexican restaurant in Potsdam. A couple of hundred people just hanging, glad to have been brought some hot off the stove, authentic NYC energy.
And here is where I began to understand what is happening up here.
Positive gentrification.
Just like in the cities, only better.
In the cities, the working class is being chased out of town by the more monied classes. They move to the exurbs/suburbs, survive and keep on trying.
Their children?
They are moving to the country. And taking over.
My evidence?
Anecdotal at best. But true almost every damned where in this great country over the last 20 years.
Great home-style Mexican food not only in the west and southwest but all over the middle states.
Great Thai food in Maine.
Great Chinese food almost everywhere.
My 20-ish year-old environmental scientist son’s observation that throughout his college and post-college years, the majority of the best, brightest and hardest-working in the labs have been Central American.
Koreans in successful business almost everywhere.
Town after town in the south…towns once dominated by the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens’ Councils…now essentially African-American-run.
I could go on, but back to my Potsdam trip.
At the after-concert party I met a NYC-bred Dominican woman…late 20s…who is teaching neuroscience at Clarkson after an educational odyssey that covered most of the US; a native Puerto Rican woman who is also on the faculty at Clarkson and any number of non-“minority” students and faculty who were both vitally interested and quite well-versed in the history and lore of Afro-Cuban/Nuyorican music.
Plus…the students who played in the Potsdam latin band? I don’t know how else to say this, but they played in the right accents even though the majority of them were of European lineage and grew up in Long Island/Albany/mid-New York State all-white suburbs.
Wide awake to the “other.” A new thing in white America.
Bet on it.
God bless the web.
More?
Sure.
So I went back to the motel, caught a good night’s sleep and got up ready to drive back to NYC. Taking a better, simpler (no Lowville) route. Potsdam->Plattsburgh->the NY Thruway->Da Bronx. 2 hours of straight line two lane country roads, then the interstate straight to NYC.
Simple, right?
A beautiful country 10AM Sunday morning. All the good Protestant upstate settlers up there in the churches, the others (the “bad guys”) sacked out recovering from their deerhead-wearing, drunken adventures the night before? Big Sky Country. (Northeast version)
Right?
And me on the cruise control, a few miles an hour upside the speed limit, two-lane headed for the Plattsburgh Thruway through the frosty Sunday morning sticks. Up one dale, down another; past shacks and farms, hills and valleys. Half-dreaming, half-driving. 55 MPH, 30 MPH. 55 MPH, 40 MPH. Over and over and over again. Nuthin’ new here…keep movin’, folks.
And then, out of the corner of my eye…what’s that above the pine trees?
Look, look, look….
Hmmm…
WIND MACHINES!!!
Not just one or two or three.
Hundreds!!!
Over several square miles.
Three stories or more high.
Big, otherworldly-looking structures.
The Martians have landed!!!
The 21st Century has taken over Paladino Land!
Spooky.
Cultural dissonance like a motherfucker!!!
More?
Here comes.
So I keep on driving.
Like I always do.
Drive drive drive drive drive…
Round a turn…on a road called The Military Highway, by the way…and here comes a traffic stop.
Two lane highway, easily 15 cops stopping traffic both ways. No traffic to speak of…one car one way, two cars my way. I think…”Can’t be a drunk stop. 11 AM on a Sunday morning. Too early. Stolen car? A heist of some sort? Gonna find out soon enough.”
They pull the car in front of me over for further investigation. I roll down my window. The questions shoot out.
“Are you an American citizen?
“Yup.”
“Where you comin’ from?” (I’m beginning to recognize the accent.)
“Potsdam.”
“Where you goin’? “
“New York.” (I recognize the confusion. I’m already in “New York.”) “New York City. Da Bronx.” (I’ve placed him. NYC Hispanic. Now a deputy sheriff in upstate NY. About 29. How’d he get here? Who knows?)
“Da BRONX!!!???”
Yup.”
“Where you live?”
“230 + B’way.”
“My MAN!!! I used to hang in Marble Hill!!!” Whatchoo doin’ up here?”
Followed by my bona fides…the Mambo Kings concert, 40 years w/Fania, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Willie Colon, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow, etc.
“My main man!!!”
Further followed by a series of exclamations over the seats, the wheels, etc. of my new GTI by the entire corps of deputies. Of which “my man” was w/out a doubt the boss although he was also the only one who had any blood that didn’t originate north of the Pyrenees.
Cultural dissonance?
Like a motherfucker!!!
What I see?
As I said…anecdotal at best?
Evolution continues.
Everywhere.
The worn-out old is supplanted by the upward-striving new.
And the evolution of the life of Life continues despite all of our fears.
Sarah Palin?
Carl Paladino?
They couldn’t tell Tito Puente’s music from their own nightime farts.
Bet on that as well.
Culture tells.
Watch.
It’s all gonna work out alright.
Watch.
Just keep on driving.
As I often say on these leftiness blogs, “I do keep trying.”
We must keep on trying!
Do it!!!
Later…
AG
