Sashaying with pearls

Launched last Tuesday, March 31, at The Podium’s second-floor atrium lounge was the CD album “Sound Xcape,” an anthology of jazz music from artists signed up by Candid International and Candid Records Philippines Corp.

Seven international and five Filipino jazz artists offer a 15-track compilation done in partnership with radio station XFM 92.3. It’s billed as a Light ‘N Up Experience, the same theme that enveloped the mini-concert mounted that night. Lasting an hour, it first featured guitarist Aya Yuson leading a trio with Dave Harder on upright bass and Rey Vinzon on drums. They played Aya’s original compositions, going entirely instrumental as well as backing up vocalists Aileen Balon and Myra Ruaro a.k.a. Skarlet, who took over the second half with a big brass band.

The music resounded all over five floors, with a good number of mall-goers attracted to the presentation and joining the guests who were partaking of the live performance as well as the excellent buffet and drinks from co-sponsor Aruba Bar.

London’s jazz superstar Jamie Cullum leads off the album selection as one of three artists represented with a couple of tracks each, the others being Leo Gandelman and Cameron Pierre. The rest of the international artists whose music ranges from lounge jazz to R&B Latino are Stacey Kent, Jim Tomlinson, Monica Vasconcelos & Nois Oferenda, and Alex Wilso..

The three other notable Pinoy jazz purveyors besides Aya and Myra are Isha, Mon David and Mishka Adams. Mon has migrated with family and is now performing in California, while Mishka continues to prime her act in London. All five have released CD albums produced by Candid Philippines. Myra’s last CD was “Powder Room Stories,” while Aya’s was “Angelsong.”

Needless to say, the exciting gamut of jazz music featured in Sound Xcape will be heard regularly over XFM 92.3. It is also available in most music stores.

Here on a week’s visit is Fil-Am lawyer, fiction writer and musician-composer Rodney Dakita Garcia, who’s based in Washington D.C. but who often works the rest of the world as a leader of an R&B band that features his lovely 19-year-old daughter as vocalist and 13-year-old son as a precocious alto saxophone player.

Rodney was last here nearly a year ago when his band played at a Makati hotel bar and also did special concerts at Amorita Resort in Bohol, where his keen eye for unique narrative developments, especially those involving the romantic, led him to file a potential story or two for future crafting.

He first came over as a balikbayan in 2004 to launch his first short story collection at Mag:net on Katipunan Avenue when it was but a gallery-bookstore. The well-attended launch of The Right Place and Other Stories was what gave artist-impresario Rock Drilon the idea to turn his second-floor private studio into a bar that has since been nourishing a whole new generation of performance poets, musicians, filmmakers and stage comedians.

Poet and writer Ed Maranan, now the Palanca Awards’ living record-holder for most number of prizes (across various genres, including children’s literature), helped me host Rodney for dinner and drinks last week at Hacienda off Tiendesitas. The venue was a propitious choice for a get-together with a fellow writer who not only traces his roots to Pasig (his exemplary “Pasig Boy” is a regular staple among the stories I take up in Fiction class), but who also wrote a musicale titled Hacienda for Reme Grefalda’s theater troupe in Maryland.

He was also a contributor (“Chicken Ass on a Stick”) to the excellent anthology A Taste of Home: Pinoy Expats and Food Memories, edited by Edgar B. Maranan and Len S. Maranan-Goldstein, published by Anvil last year.

Here’s an excerpt from that entry:

“Filipino etiquette functions as meaningful ceremony, a mannered ceremonial dance, a thrust and parry, in which the host offers and the guest demurs in order to deflect the appearance of unseemly eagerness. Busog pa ako. Sige na, tapos na ako. Linguistic translation yields: It’s all right. Thank you. I’ve eaten. But culturally decoded it means, I have not eaten; ask me again, be persistent and I’ll finally relent because I’m actually starving and would like nothing less than to gorge myself on all the food displayed on your table.”

Well, that’s exactly what Rodney didn’t do and did, in that order, at Hacienda. He didn’t exactly demur, but did gorge straightaway on the food, especially when he found Ed’s choices of native eel, white adobo, and sinigang sa bayabas with bangus belly all worth second helpings for himself.  

Rodney plans to take his band to London sometime this year. Ed, who worked for our embassy in the Court of St. James for over a decade, promised him the right contacts in the right places. And we both expressed the hope that maybe Rodney and his band might fit right in with the Candid Records stable.

Antoon Postma, the Dutch anthropologist who has lived and worked with the Hanunoo Mangyan of Mindoro for five decades, was speechless and teary-eyed when he was surprised with a reception in his honor to coincide with the opening of Mangyan Heritage Week at the Ayala Museum on March 26.  

In fact, “Bapa” or “Uncle” Antoon was visibly overwhelmed when the Dutch Ambassador, H.E. Robert G. Brinks, announced that the Queen of the Kingdom of the Netherlands had elevated him to knighthood.

Antoon had just come from Malacañang Palace where he joined other award recipients for contributions to Philippine culture and heritage. A most positive double-whammy it was indeed for the man who introduced the Hanunoo’s verse form, the ambahan, to the rest of the world. Kudos once again to Bapa Antoon!

That same night, Alliance Française de Manille had its third successful conduct of its annual “Printemps des poetes” reading featuring mostly Filipino poets. For this year’s theme of laughter, it proved to be a splendid presentation, thanks to the masterful programming of readers, as orchestrated by AF deputy director Mickael Balcon and the AF board vice president Deanna Ongpin Recto.

It was a fine mix of poets spanning several generations, with the welcome participation of young blood: the fast-rising poets Conchitina Cruz, Marc Gaba, Mookie Katigbak, Adam David and Kash Avena, who all joined the April reading for the first time.

Characteristically outstanding were performance poets Vim Nadera, who waded into the audience with a jug of lambanog and had everyone taking a swig as he recited his homespun verses, the ridiculously handsome rock star Lourd de Veyra, the ever-outrageous (in a wickedly funny way) Gelo Suarez who honored his former mentor Ophie Dimalanta by reading her poems as shorn of all vowels, and of course the effervescent Maxine Syjuco with her usual show-stopping signature number.

But everyone was upstaged by the delicately venerable Virginia R. Moreno, who lip-synched through two recorded poems of hers played against a background of schmaltzy music, this while sashaying onstage and twirling a kilometric strand of pearls. Now that was poetry and music and dance as total theatre, utterly Parisienne. 

As the hardly impressionable poet-writer-editor-designer-publisher RayVi Sunico publicly confided long after the event, why, he “still dreams of La Femme Virginia!” No doubt our National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario, also present that evening, is having similar nights of utter fulfillment in bed, positively haunted by the enduring vibrancy of one great sporting and sportive Filipina poet.