April 1 2006
Kindled Spirits,
Arrived home yesterday from Australia, direct from the blazing sun to the chilly rain of the Pacific Northwest. My tan is already peeling. The festival ended almost two weeks ago, so I had some time afterwards to visit some rural high schools and perform in the outback. I also got to record new music with an Aussie hiphop crew. Before the trip I searched "adelaide + hiphop" on the ever-popular Myspace website and found a group called "Mindfield", who are one of Adelaide's best new rap groups.
I got them some
tickets to my show and then later we went for drinks and to talk shop. I discovered pretty fast that social
interactions in Australia are generally lubricated by a constant stream of
Cooper's Pale Ale, and the first time I went to the Mindfield studio the
session degenerated into a series of drunken freestyles, not the perfect conditions
for making quality music.
Nevertheless, they gave me some beats to write to, and over the final
week of my stay I wrote and recorded rhymes for three of their unreleased
tracks, the best of which makes this unusual collaboration its subject. You can now listen to an exclusive
sample of the unfinished song "Deps of the Mind" produced by B-Deps
and featuring myself and Biz.
Overall the Australian
experience was one of the best since starting this odyssey. I encountered the Aussie hiphop scene
and found it an amazing talent pool.
The Rap Canterbury Tales ran for three straight weeks at the fringe and
appeared in seven different schools around South Australia, reaching well over
two thousand people. The ABC (the
BBC or CBC of Australia) made a ten-minute special about my show and the whole
"lit-hop" concept, which ran nationally on their Sunday Arts program
last weekend.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/sundayarts/txt/s1599313.htm
South Australia
isn't known as "The Festival State" for nothing. The second weekend of the fringe saw
Australia's largest world music festival come to Adelaide, known as WOMAD, with
thousands of people out in the sunny park dancing to Caribbean steel drum
orchestras and African reggae bands.
Canada was represented on the world music stage by Vancouver's own Scrap
Arts Music,
who played an amazing percussion set using cast-away materials from a steel
yard, and got the Australian audience whipped into a cheering frenzy. London's bhangra master Talvin Singh
played an epic DJ set mixed with vocal tabla to end it all, and I got to talk
to him later about my own attempts to fuse the ancient with the modern
(couldn't get him to give me any beats though).
Circus Oz also
came to the festival and set up their big-top tent in the park, and the show's
main attraction was none other than virtuoso trapezista Ruby Rowat, who is an
old family friend (her mother Nona is the doctor who delivered me). Ruby performed a breath-taking swing
trapeze act, and her circus kin told me later that she is currently the
second-ranked trapeze artist in the world http://www.rubyfly.com/.
Now I'm back in Vancouver for a few short weeks before I embark on my upcoming three-month tour of the UK, including my first trip to Ireland for the Belfast Cathedral Arts Festival. Besides preparing for this trip I now have to proofread and correct the galleys of my (355 page) book so that bound preview copies can go out to reviewers, which will be interesting. I am also organizing my annual "Rap is Poetry" concert for Thursday, April 13th, which will feature Josh Martinez, Emotionz, Ndidi Cascade and Manik 1derful. This will be the third year for the show, and I hope those of you in Vancouver can make it out (details TBA).
Thanks for
staying with me as the story unfolds, and for all your supportive
comments. Until next time,
baba