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week of 1/7/04 | ||
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Over
Yonder Jamboree The Great Gordo’s Guide to Music in Asheville By Jay Hardwig Dirk Powell Thursday, Jan. 8, Grey Eagle
When Son de Cuba’s name first started popping up in The Smoky
Mountain News, they were playing for free at the public library.
(That may sound like a joke, but it’s not: a May 2000 profile
by the estimable Hunter Pope ran in advance of a performance at
the Haywood County library.) Nowadays, Waynesville’s own Little
Cuban Band That Could is headlining weekend shows at the Orange
Peel. Not bad for a troupe that has a 12-year-old on timbales (that
would be Nick Marquez, and yes, the kid plays with clave). Of course,
Son de Cuba is about more than young kids on the sticks: it’s
an authentic sound, a growing buzz, a labor of love. Frontman Joe
Lapaz left Cuba when he was 4; his wife Alina Marquez left when
she was 1; the two met at the University of Miami, got married,
and spent spells as musicians in New Hampshire and back in Miami
before moving to Haywood County in 1997. According to local legend
— OK. OK, Hunter’s feature — the idea for a local
son band was hatched when Alina heard The Buena Vista Social Club
playing during a stop for coffee at Turnabouts. A few years later,
Son de Cuba was playing the stacks; a few years after that, the
Orange Peel. Next stop: Carnegie Hall?
° Vida Blue, Orange Peel, 1/7
1. 1915. Muddy Waters is born.
“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life:
music and cats.” |
I
know what you’re thinking, and it’s just not true. It’s
not true that every other week I’m writing about some whiz-bang
multi-instrumentalist blending traditional Appalachian music with
sounds farther flung. It’s every third week, tops. Besides,
this week’s entrant has a bit of contemporary Hollywood cachet:
he’s in “Cold Mountain.” He was on the set, on the
soundtrack (“Ruby with Red Eyes that Sparkle”), and even
on-screen at one point, playing the fife. (Gordo wants to know:
does this make him a fifist? A fifian? A fiffilator?) And while
that celluloid cred may have landed him a name-check on the hippest
online entertainment sites, Powell’s pedigree stretches back
much farther. Consider what he’s already got in the can. For
starters, two solo albums on Rounder and one on the way (If I Go
Ten Thousand Miles and Hand Me Down already out, and Time Again
on the way). He was a major player on 1999’s Songs From the
Mountain, the pre-Miramax musical outing inspired by the novel Cold
Mountain. He was a founding member of the Cajun band Balfa Toujours:
he’s recorded five albums with that group and is married to
the front Cajun, Christine Balfa. He’s worked on movie soundtracks
ranging from “The Brothers McMullen” to Spike Lee’s
“Bamboozled” to “From the Holler to the Hood,”
a multimedia presentation that examines the tensions between white
guards and black inmates in maximum-security prisons around Appalachia.
He’s appeared as a guest on dozens of albums, ranging from
Geno Delafose to Danny Barnes. He fiddled for Riverdance. He was
playing baroque harpsichord at age 10 — a bit before he picked
up the guitar, fiddle, banjo and squeezebox. He recorded a series
of “Learn the Cajun Accordion” videos. He once recorded
a song with Jewel. He may well grow good tomatoes, or have a secret
recipe for Pine Bark Stew up his sleeve. The point is, Dirk Powell
does what he does well, and what he does most is play music.