Rah Amen, Tito Amaya, Peter Salvucci, Martin Houghtaling, Akira Satake, Ras Berhane. Photo by Moe White
by Moe White
By all accounts Asheville is a diverse town, a multicultural city. Its music scene reflects the full range of styles, tastes, interests, and backgrounds that bring an international vitality to our culture. From classical to funk, opera to hip-hop, jazz at the Grove Park Inn to Shindig on the Green, Asheville audiences can savor the sounds they prefer.
Here rock and reggae don’t compete, they complement each other. Broadway musicals play across the street from Kat Williams singing bebop, and Appalachian music at the Hyatt house harmonizes with Womansong at the Unitarian-Universalist church. In Asheville, nothing is too outré, nothing so new or different that it can’t get a hearing and an audience. Rah
Amen has been preaching that message all his adult life, and for more
than two decades he’s been putting it into practice through such events
as the Asheville International Music Extravaganza coming up September
16 at the new Center of Unlimited Possibilities in Westgate Shopping
Center.
The concert, beginning at 7:30 p.m., includes Devin Meyame from
the Ivory Coast, Kuumba, the Dub Addis Reggae Band, the Celtic harpist
Kaleo, Tito Amaya from El Salvador, and Mexican Dance by Xitontekiza.
Tickets are $12 in advance (at Malaprops and Harvest Records) or $15 at
the door. One week later,
Rah Amen will present the Multicultural Avant Garde Music Festival at
the Asheville Arts Center on Merrimon Avenue. The Sept. 23 concert, at
8:30 p.m., features the Abolone Trio and The Cosmik MultiKulti Music
Ensemble, among other groups.
These concerts,
like the October 17 “100 Musicians Improvisation” night at the Grey
Eagle, are designed to gather musicians to perform together, not as
individual stars. “Asheville has lots of soloists; we want
harmonizers,” says Rah Amen. “I’m going to have a big barrel at the
door for musicians to drop their egos in.” Rah Amen grew up
in Greenville, SC, where he began working in a music store as a
teenager. Though he listened to and played “the music of my culture, I
got bored with it – The Temptations, James Brown. I always ventured
over to the international section,” where he discovered the diversity
of other tonalities and styles. After years of
absorbing such sounds as the flute music of Japan (one of the first
non-western albums he listened to, and which he played recently on
WPVM), he met Sun Ra, whose Sun Ra Arkestra introduced him to “higher
forms of music – music as it relates to spirit and spirituality,” as
Rah Amen describes it. “It’s cosmic big band music, like Duke Ellington
and Count Basie but from an astral, black perspective.” The experience
of working with Sun Ra taught the young percussionist to play his own
music with more of a world perspective. “I learned Pyramid-style
stacking, rhythm on top of rhythm. When you’re playing in six-eight
[time signature], you also think of two-four as it relates to
six-eight; you put the emphasis on different beats, the one and three,
then the six and eight. So you have different rhythms going on at the
same time.” Sun Ra also
believed in what Rah Amen calls “collective improvisation – a kind of
free jazz with a large ensemble. You’re dropping time signature and
playing literally outside of time, in a cosmic space. It opens you up
to infinity in terms of music.” That openness
and fluidity makes it easy for Rah Amen to incorporate an infinity of
musical cultures into his own work and the concerts he produces. He has
done so for years in Atlanta, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Seattle,
Austin (where he stayed 12 years and produced numerous international
concerts), and, since 2003, in Asheville. Many of the performers who
will appear Sept. 16 bring a similar cultural diversity to their work. Amira Satake
grew up in Osaka, Japan, but the first music he enjoyed listening to
was Appalachian mountain music. Beginning at eight or nine he started
learning guitar and playing the music of Doc Watson, Ernest Scruggs,
and the Stanley Brothers, as well as such American folk icons as Woody
Guthrie. To a teenager in Japan in the 1960s, their music was as exotic
as that of Bali or Bulgaria. Satake
progressed from guitar to banjo to mandolin, and only then learned the
traditional Japanese shami-sen. But he didn’t consider a career in
music; he became, instead, a professional photographer, successful
enough to save money to travel. In 1980 he arrived in San Francisco,
planning to put together a book of his photos, but he got sidetracked
into another full-time studio photography job. But while visiting a
friend in New York and playing for pleasure in Washington Square Park,
he was asked by someone he met to bring his fiddle and perform – as an
audition, it turned out, for a group of players well known to him for
their traditional music.
"All these men are consummate musicians, loving music for its own sake, for its variety and the connections between different musical genres."
With Jim
Lauderdale, Barry Campbell, and others, he soon was into the music
scene in the Big Apple, where, as time passed, he played more and more
of his own compositions and produced CDs of music ranging from Balinese
to Flamenco. Ever since, music in all its forms has been the center of
his life. Trinidad-born
guitarist and vocalist Ras Berhane traces his music to his Rastafarian
spirituality. He grew up hearing the sounds of Calypso, Soca (a festive
dance-style Calypso), and, of course, Reggae, and the popularity of
such artists as Bob Marley made it fairly easy for him to get into the
mainstream of public performance. But Berhane
wanted to get away from dogma, both spiritual and musical, and into
“livity” – living your beliefs in your daily life,” he says. It’s also
living his music daily, “performing in as many shows as possible, every
chance I get. Mexican restaurants like Mayan Palace have been
receptive,” he says, and he’s now making his full living from
performing his music. Berhane notes
that Caribbean music draws on many roots, including African sounds
imported by slaves, South and Central American music with its Spanish
origins – itself with a strong Moorish influence – and New
Orleans-style jazz. All have contributed to the tonalities and rhythms
that emerge in Berhane’s playing. That Latin
American influence works in both directions, of course, as Tito Amaya
can testify. Born in El Salvador, he began learning guitar with his
father, a shoemaker who had a trio that played mostly bolero music. But
Amaya grew up as the Salvadoran Civil War was raging, bringing with it
Latin American protest music, and in 1984 he left for Costa Rica, where
for many years he played nothing else. He was, however,
always learning about different styles of Latin American folk music,
from both South and Central America. He studied the charango as well as
flute and pan pipes and the quatro venezolano, a four-string instrument
similar to a ukulele. He learned the traditional sounds of Joropo,
marimba, and the music of the Andes with its pre-Columbian origins. The
different rhythms and styles of Andean music from Ecuador, Chile, and
Peru, the music of the pampas of Argentina and the mountains of
Venezuela and Bolivia, and the Caribbean-influenced music of Central
America are all part of his repertoire. Amaya currently
plays five nights a week at Mayan Palace restaurant on Wall Street,
where his ensemble includes alto saxophonist Peter Salvucci, who’s
lived in Asheville since age 10, and bassist Martin Houghtaling.
Houghtaling grew up with international music in South Florida and
recently earned a Masters Degree in performance, and now he floats
between playing with Amaya’s ensemble, joining jazz performances,
playing mountain music Thursday nights at Mrs. Hyatt’s, and his new
position as a bass player for the Asheville Symphony. All these men
are consummate musicians, loving music for its own sake, for its
variety and the connections between different musical genres. The pan
pipes of the Andes are related to the flutes of East Asia in both their
tonality and style of performance. The ukulele and
the quatro venezolano echo each other, as do the balalaika and lute or
the shami-sen and mandolin. Flute or fiddle, sax or synthesizer, each
instrument bring charms that help fulfill the great human need, in
Congreve’s words, “to soothe the savage breast.” For all music, as Rah
Amen knows, reaches across cultures, continents, and oceans to touch
the part of our soul that longs for connection, creating a cosmic unity
of sound and spirit. Berhane, Amaya, and Kuumba will appear at the Peace On
Earth Peace/With Earth Celebration at 5:30 p.m., September 11, in
Prichard Park. Rah Amen served on the planning committee for the event.
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