[Dixielandjazz] 50th Anniversary of Arhoolie Records

[david richoux]

One of my favorite regional record stores, Downhome Music in El
Cerrito is in the same building as Arhoolie Records - I have run into
Chris Strachwitz at music festivals all over the country - while not
everything they record and publish is OKOM it is mostly MKOM!

Dave Richoux

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14mon4.html?_r=1

Sounds Like America
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Berkeley, Calif.

The party space wasn’t perfect. There were no wandering dogs or
children, no grass or worn linoleum underfoot. Nobody had pushed
benches to the walls to make room for dancing. Nobody was shoeless,
shirtless or visibly intoxicated, though the man of honor did seem
drunk with delight.

It should have been a backyard in the bayou or barrio. But a cozy
theater was still a fine place to celebrate the last 50 years of Chris
Strachwitz’s life.

Mr. Strachwitz is the founder of Arhoolie Records, a little label in
El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, dedicated to America’s roots:
blues, bluegrass, Mexican, Tex-Mex, country, Cajun, zydeco, Hawaiian,
gospel. If it was homegrown and honest Mr. Strachwitz found it,
captured it and shared it.

Mr. Strachwitz, 79, left Germany at 13 and has been discovering
America ever since. Arhoolie’s 50th anniversary celebration this month
went three nights, each one a tribute to his life’s work, but also to
the geniuses who made America an immigration nation.

The lineup told the story:

There was a Mexican-American from San Antonio, singing in Spanish with
a squeezebox, an instrument brought by Germans and Poles to the Rio
Grande borderlands and adapted by Mexicans there with wild abandon.
And a white guitarist from Santa Monica who grew up idolizing old
black bluesmen, playing a song about bagels, and also “Wooly Bully,”
accompanied by a thumping sousaphone and young Mexican-American women
stomping out the beat on a wooden box.

A Mexican-roots band played in the son jarocho style, to the clacking
rhythm of a quijada, a donkey’s jawbone. A bluegrass musician
channeled Bill Monroe. A Cajun guitarist did a riff on Hawaiian
slack-key. An all-women’s string band led the folkie-dokie singalong
“Goodnight Irene,” and ended everything with “I Bid You Goodnight,” a
lullaby from the guitarist Joseph Spence, of the Bahamas.

That was just the first night. Still to come were the jazz combo, the
New Orleans brass band, the blues chanteuse and the long unanticipated
reunion of The Goodtime Washboard 3.

Each night had a melancholy undercurrent. Roots music, uprooted, loses
its essence. American regionalism has died out as strip malls have
buried farms, ranches and dance halls. The fear that the people’s
music is doomed to end life as a PBS special, looped over and over,
was the joke behind “A Mighty Wind” — a good one, because it’s mostly
true.

But not completely. Barbara Dane, a Bay Area blues singer since the
early ’60s, still has pipes of polished brass. Ry Cooder sang a new
song about evil bankers and combined two old ones — “Vigilante Man” by
Woody Guthrie and “Across the Borderline” — adding spy planes and
Dodge Ram trucks, for a fresh commentary on today’s immigration
lunacy.

Mr. Strachwitz, who was due for hip replacement the minute the
anniversary folderol was over, beamed from the edge of the stage,
dancing, waving his cane and giving out hugs. He doesn’t record
anymore, but he’s busy: he has the largest collection of
Mexican-American border recordings anywhere, and is digitizing them
all. The concerts were a fund-raiser to finish the project.

And there’s still tomorrow to look to, thanks, as always, to new
immigrants. It was the Mexicans — the people of the future, Mr. Cooder
calls them — who supplied the most potent doses of immediacy and
urgency. The youngest act by decades, Los Cenzontles, is based in an
arts center in a strip mall in San Pablo, a gritty Bay Area town
troubled by gangs and poverty but also energized by newcomers:
Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Chinese.

The group’s founder, Eugene Rodriguez, invited the audience to come up
from Berkeley to visit, to discover an America still being reborn.