10 Nov
Only a few days are left for the second installment of the “Is America part of the World?” show at the Bell House with the magnificent Rupa & April Fishes and the lively Nation Beat on Fri, Nov 13. Buy your tickets here and see what we have in store for you:
23 Sep
Hot off the press!!! We continue our “Is America Part of the World?” series with Part Deux in November. Musical nomads Rupa & The April Fishes will join Nation Beat as we celebrate the American heritage from San Francisco to New York in Brooklyn at the Bell House.
Rupa & The April Fishes will be traveling to NY behind their new album “este mundo,” due out on Cumbancha on Oct. 27. The San Francisco-based musical agitators are specialists in crossing borders and building bridges, and on “este mundo” they effortlessly mix elements of Gypsy swing, Colombian cumbia, French chanson and Indian ragas to create a sound Time Out has called “global agit-pop.” Brooklyn based Nation Beat plays American music from both the North and South. They are rhythm gatherers, harvesting the fruit of 500 years of cultural cross-breeding from northeastern Brazil to the deep American South often breaking out into massive carnival parties at their live shows. Banning Eyre from Afropop Worldwide calls them “a revelation…the most original and alluring fusion band I’ve heard in years.”
Friday, November 13, 2009
8pm
Is America Part of the World? – Part 2 with
Rupa & The April Fishes
Nation Beat
at The Bell House
149 7th Avenue
Brooklyn NY 11215
718.643.6510
www.thebellhouseny.com
$15 tickets at ticketweb.com
21+ w/ ID
13 Jul
A BIG thank you to all the artists, friends and those in attendance who turned the launch party of “Is America Part of the World?” into a colorful outdoor event at the BKLYN Yard last Saturday. Hundreds of people of all ages including kids filled the grounds throughout the day dancing to Brazilian and Indian beats, playing, chilling out in the yard and getting down to the impromptu jam session at the grand finale. We’ll be rolling out a video documentary about the first event shortly, followed by details of the second installment later this Fall. Here are the pictures from the event (click on the images to see more).
11 Jul
Advance online sales are over, but more tickets will be available at the door.
See you at the BKLYN Yard today. Doors 2pm, we go until 9pm. Bring friends & family – it’s going to be in the upper 70s with the sun smiling.
3 Jul
Want to surprise a friend whose birthday is coming up with a free ticket? Attending the “Is America part of the World?” event with a large group? You can now buy 3 tickets online in advance, and you will get the 4th one for free!
Tickets now available at www.brownpapertickets.com
(Please note: This promo is only valid with advance orders, it is not available at the door. This promo cannot be coupled with different orders. Your ticket order has to be in denominations of 3, i.e. 3, 6, 9 tickets. One free ticket for every 3 tickets)
2 Jul
Article published in the Brooklyn Courier-Life
By Meredith Deliso
A couple of years ago, Nation Beat, a Brooklyn-based band inspired by Brazilian music, were invited to play at a world music festival. When the organizers asked them not to play any of their English-language songs, the reason why was: it’s a world music festival.
“Our response was, well isn’t America a part of the world?” remembers Scott Kettner, the percussionist for and founder of the band. “It was a big controversy. They finally folded and let us play what we play.”
16 Jun
“In my experience, the use of the term world music is a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant to one’s own life. It’s a way of relegating this “thing” into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant; they are, by definition, not like us.” It groups everything and anything that isn’t “us” into “them.” – David Byrne 1999 article for the New York Times.
David Byrne hates world music and I do too. He hits the nail on the head in his article written 10 years ago, and yet our industry still continues to generalize the cultures and the people who make music outside of the USA by grouping them into a generic term to separate “them” from “us”. Even worse, the industry discriminates against US based artists who adopt music from foreign cultures as a main influence in their own music. They justify their prejudices by calling the music “unauthentic”. What is authentic anyway?
Ten years after Byrne’s article the digital download culture has exploded and the world has exponentially become much smaller. There are millions of artists who live in the US (either born here or immigrated here) who make music that is not sung in one language but two or three (maybe even four…let us know if you find them). Since there’s no genre or box to group these artists in they’re simply ignored and marginalized by the industry. And what happens to a band based in the US who has Brazilian and American musicians and sing in English and Portuguese? When they get invited to perform at a world music festival they’re asked to “please don’t sing the songs in English, especially the American country songs because this is a world music festival”. That’s what happened to my group Nation Beat last summer.
I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to perform alongside one of my musical mentors Cyro Baptista for about 3 years. He always told audiences that “I don’t play Brazilian music, I play music from the world. I am not a Brazilian citizen, I am a citizen of the world”. Cyro was challenging people to think outside of the box. This made sense to me immediately. Cyro embodies the contemporary musician who can channel every sound he’s ever heard into his own music. He has traveled the world, downloaded a billion songs from the Internet and has digested it, internalized it and made it his own. The Brazilian term for this is Anthropofagia, a popular notion among Brazilians that the formation of Brazilian identity resulted from “the constant interaction between diverse cultures, each of which consumed the other until a single, all-encompassing culture was created.” The same exact thing happened here in the US, we call it the Blues.
So what is world music? Most people say it’s music that’s not sung in English or made in the USA. Then, what do you call Cajun music, Mardis Gras Indian chants sung in Creole or Tex-Mex music sung in Spanish? Literally, the term world music means music made in the world. Isn’t America Part of The World?
by Scott Kettner (band leader Nation Beat)
4 Jun
You can now buy limited $10 advance tickets until June 15 for the Is America part of the world? event via brownpapertickets.com. $15 tickets will be available after June 15.
