Peers, Elders and Gentry (Pinoy Style)

In the northern Luzon provinces of the Philippines, spurious remnants of Lakan, Apo and Gat are still applied as honorifics to the local gentry whose bloodlines are traced to affluent native families. It serves well to know what it means to say, Gat Jose Rizal. Or lightheartedly, Apo Danny. (Albeit, Lakan Dula only sounds great for a Pinoy fantasy.)

The vestiges of a pre-Hispanic class of monarchy also still thrive in the Philippine south, where Sultan, Datu and Rajah remain. The titles are a hodge-podge of Arabic, Malay and Indo origins. But those are anachronisms with modern substitutes. These days, the traditional titles evoke bottles of vinegar and spicy delicacies my relatives bring home from provincial trips.

“Mestizos” and vast numbers of  “Chinitos” are classified in a different order, and whether Spanish, American, Chinese or any exotic DNA modified our Indo-Malay genes, we are simply Filipinos now. I’m sitting perhaps on a cultural fence, so to speak, but I do have issues with how people call me. I’ll bet I’m not alone with this rather unspoken thing. Call me, Johnny Alegre, esq.

Ever had a problem within anyone calling you “Sir”? I didn’t until I was unexpectedly knighted by the corporate hosts and addressed as “Sir Johnny” for the rest of my career. It took some getting used to. When I was in the elementary grades, some birthday invitations referred to a boy named Master Juan Alegre. This was something I had to reconcile with stories about Genii and magic carpets. Call me Mister, that’s okay.

It gets more refined with modern womenfolk, who prefer being called Ma’am, an abbreviation of the aristocratic Madame. But English is a far more expansive language with nuances of utterance. A Dame (with the short a) is an exalted title (read, Dame Margot Fonteyn), equivalent to the knightly Sir. But "dame" changes meaning with a long a. Same spelling, two words. Like row, and row, entirely different meanings.

How would you accept to be prefixed as “Mang”? Imagine your favorite Pinoy Rock superstar twenty years hence, “Mang (choose your icon: Pepe, Wally, Ely, Raimund; the stellar list goes on). It’s a traditional Filipino prefix for village elders, but I can't fathom them being that kind of old. Think Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, David Bowie or even Billie Joe Armstrong in geezer mode. Reactions will vary, I much suspect. If I were any one of them, but I'm obviously not, I would be in complete denial. Mang is a migrated word from the Indian caste system, associated with menial workers. You don’t agree? Look it up in Wikipedia! Mang-gagawa, even mang-babatas (humor intended), are occupations taken root where hands were dirtied in the line of duty.

I had a paternal uncle, Don Ramon Alegre (bless his dear departed soul), who was conferred an award by Queen Sofia of Spain a decade ago. “Don” in this case wasn’t a rank of wealth but a rank of honor bestowed. Cards from the Casino Español de Manila address me as “Sr. Don”, in which the dotted abbreviation is a prefix meaning Señor, the Hispanic Mister. This isn’t so bad with the “Sr.”, but I’d think it would be dangerous to be called simply “Don Juan” among the ladies.

How about being called “brod”, which is a Filipino colloquialism for Brother? Most won’t mind. But others will because it dilutes some very viscous neophyte memories. I joined a fraternity in my college days that binds me for life, so I know how it feels. But let's look at “Ka”, a shortening of kapatid (i.e. sibling) that functions as equivalent to colleague or comrade. It’s tricky: “Ka Juaning” sounds satirical if not subversive. I guess it’s the usage and context. We’re actually more accustomed to using “Manong” and “Kuya”, Ilocano and Tagalog words for Big Brother. Or “Lakay”, meaning, elder. So Kuya Eddie becomes a comforting brand to good effect, as it did. And Manong Johnny still sounds okay.

But to each his own. I want my coffee brown (“cortado”) and my eggs poached, if I may digress. Different strokes. Ever heard of “Ser”? It’s just a corruption of “Sir”, a play on the diction. It works wonders on the road when you’re asking for directions or a helping hand (imagine your car stalling, in need of a push). You get maximum cooperation when you beseech, "Ser, maaring maki-suyo?" Don’t laugh now, please, this is earnest stuff.

A rose by any other name is the same, so why prejudice it? As that great sleuth would say in the most menacing of tones, “My name is Bond, James Bond.”

By Johnny Alegre
(Being an unsuccessful attempt at commissioned work.)

Misunderstanding All You See

Subtitle this, "Beatles Lyrics: Helter Skelter In The Sky". (A cautionary note, this article is best for tried-and-true Beatles aficionados. But here goes anyway. Take heed, you've been warned.)

In the final echoes of “Penny Lane”, as Paul McCartney’s voice recedes into the mix, the sound of an imaginary flying saucer descends on the Liverpudlian street. One wonders, what prompted this, a congenial travelogue about “blue suburban skies” and “the shelter in the middle of a roundabout” to whimsy into science fiction? A decade later, John Lennon (in his nom de l'humour, Dr. Winston O’Boogie) claimed in the Walls And Bridges liner notes that he saw a UFO in New York City, in Manhattan of all places. Hardly a subject of levity when the FBI is dredging one’s drug history. Several years between, Ringo Starr in his album, Goodnight Vienna, is attired as Klatuu the Spaceman from the classic science fiction film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. Where does fact begin where poetic fantasy leaves off?

A preponderance of the strange and fantastic populate the Beatles mythos. The account of a “Sea of Green” and a sea of holes (that can hypothetically inundate the famed Albert Hall) from which emerge the Blue Meanies is just a lighter shade of H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. The Magical Mystery Tour bus and the Yellow Submarine were vehicles of imagination, enabling the day tripping Beatles to run for help, in secure places like the “Octopuses Garden in a cave”, where they know they “can’t be found”.

The resurgence of interest in Beatles imagery today is spurred yet again. Check the periodic repackaging and reinvention of the catalog that propelled them all those decades ago to an uninterrupted frenzy of creativity. The Beatles Remasters boxes (separate for stereo and mono) and their matching iTunes digital catalog are eminent triumphs of mystique and brand loyalty, coupled with coffee table books, DVDs and all manner of ephemera. The fans “try some, buy some”, once, twice, thrice, and it’s a long and winding road indeed. This year, there's some fresh excitement again with a Vinyl Box collection.

Decades ago, teenaged sleuths actually spun the Beatles vinyl discs backwards on their turntables, searching for clues and Reverse Speech, that elevated off-microphone artifacts in their recordings to significant levels of meaning. For example, John uttering “cranberry sauce” in Strawberry Fields was misheard as “I buried Paul”, that led to one of the most profitable ruses in commercial music. In another song, “I Am The Walrus”, the song’s introduction is started by a police siren. Ultimately, wearing out the grooves was a fair excuse to acquire a fresh copy for the LP collection. And so it goes. Or so it went. "Sitting in an English garden", "standing in the English rain", strongly reinforced the cachet of Her Majesty’s realm and coffers.

Stream of consciousness (“aleatoric methods", classical musicians say) was a technique vastly utilized by the Beatles. It was a talent that came to the Beatles so naturally, the ability to spontaneously confound and charm the imagination, not simply to entertain but to convert. How else could a musique concrete exercise like “Revolution 9” survive the pop music ethos unless the medium became the message itself? “Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine …” was meaningless until we created our own meaning for it.

How about the silent dog whistle at the tail end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band -- no, we're sure you never heard it. Verify it anyway with your pet’s perked ears or, visually, with a WAV sound editor. Advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic boggles the mind, indeed.

And yet for all the wit and profitability of the Beatles commercial enterprise, “misunderstanding all you see” was an act of looking through a "Glass Onion". Wikipedia describes what Glass Onions are, as “large hand blown glass bottles used aboard sailing ships to hold wine or brandy. For increased stability on rough seas, the bottles were fashioned with a wide-bottom shape to prevent toppling, thus making the bottles look somewhat onion-shaped.”

However, experts say, “the layers of a song that people try to draw meanings from can be compared to the many layers of an onion.” My best advise is to enjoy every facet and layer of it. A procession of characters in search of authors appear through the crystal ball. Sexy Sadie, Eleanor Rigby, Billy Shears and Maxwell Edison join the assemblage of  the Lonely Hearts Club Band, marching along the Pepperland way.

Tragically, some of the identifications turned bizarre in the wrong minds, as one infamous cult leader, Charles Manson, who took his cues for ghastly murders from the song, “Helter Skelter”. He had no information that it simply described a 1906 British amusement park attraction, a slide designed to spiral down a lighthouse. The scarcity of erudition or simply the non-existence of an Internet search engine in that analog age, had created such misunderstanding.

“It isn’t hard to be someone but it all works out”, were dangerous words in the bewildered psyche of a deranged Mark Chapman, him who aggregated John Lennon’s lyrical allusions to warm guns and floating downstream. Songs like “Yer Blues”, a song in which Lennon actually pronounces that he would "wanna die", was the ultimate bedevilment. 

In fact, Lennon narrated the death of the Ego in “Tomorrow Never Knows” as "not dying" but simply surrendering "to the void." Pearls cast to the proverbial swine. “Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.” But who would have bothered for caveats and disclaimers in those ever-so-carefree days? “Ignorance and hate mourn the dead; it is not leaving.” Well, now we know, and we move forward. McCartney sings, “Step on the gas and wipe that tear away.”

Deciphering these passages are a relatively child’s play now. One simply copies and pastes the mysterious word or phrase into the Search Engine box and algorithms do the rest. Try it for yourself; we are no longer lost in Blue Jay Way as we once were.

In 1966, Lennon's son Julian showed to his father a drawing of his classmate, a girl named Lucy O'Donnell, which the boy described as "Lucy, in the sky with diamonds." The title’s acronym, of course, was (as George Harrison later put it) "the notorious Lysergic". And the myth had not perished despite much repeated explanation. What further complicates the story is a 2004 interview of Paul McCartney giving credence that Lennon had truly recounted his hallucinogenic experience through Julian’s nursery school illustration. Is this account simply another of Macca's flippant deeds -- that would have Lennon’s ashes swirling stormily in the netherworlds? Alas, that’s for those two to work out far later, "in the next world and in any world", within them, without them.

By Johnny Alegre

(in the thrall of a well awaited 2012 Beatles Vinyl Box Set)

The Epiphany of HUMANFOLK

In March of 2007, in a hectic two weeks in New York City I was setting up with bassist Ron McClure and drummer Billy Hart for a recording project, I gave myself a brief spell to explore a street known as “The Bowery” in Greenwich Village. The Bowery was just a few dozen steps away from a rented walkup I was occupying along 4th Street in the Village’s east side, and there was a very different kind of record shop I found along the Bowery called The Downtown Music Gallery. Now mind you, the Village has some of the most comprehensive record stores there are, but this particular store was extraordinary for their selection of avant-garde CDs. Name it, whether jazz or rock or post-modern classical or electronic, if it was anything outside the norm, chances are you’d have a better prospect of finding it there.

Truth is, I was not very big on avant-garde, but I’d be wasting my experience of the Bowery if I didn’t delve into this CD paradise. Years before, I’d braced myself to listen to LPs by John Cage (“Prepared Piano”) and Ornette Coleman (“Free Jazz”) and Edgard Varese (“Ionisation”), and even taken them home, all because they were free for the borrowing from the dearly-missed Thomas Jefferson Library of the U.S. Information Service in Araneta Avenue in Quezon City. The abandoned library’s building was years later converted into a funeral home; but that’s another story however symbolic. And further on, I’d had the opportunity to learn in college about tone rows and musique concrete and aleatoric elements, and all that long-haired stuff. I even had watched Karlheinz Stockhausen in Madrid (of all places) and had shaken his hand. But finding a New York shop lined wall-to-wall with Compact Discs of which I only knew, maybe, one percent of the titles was a humbling experience. I gravitated towards the jazz section where I found some comfort recognizing more familiar names such as Sun Ra, and Derek Bailey, and Paul Motian, and even Soft Machine. I had always yearned to own a small collection of albums by avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey, particularly because they were truly very hard to find, and also because his playing represented a good chunk of guitar music that I didn’t understand and wished to comprehend. I readily bought a handful of those, but what amazed me were two of the Bailey CDs I chose which were collaborations of his with a Filipina-American drummer named Susie Ibarra.

Susie Ibarra is one of very few musicians of Philippine origin who have risen to the loftiest levels of recognition in the American and International concert scene. She had performed with artists as diverse as Sean Lennon, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Yo La Tengo, jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, saxophonist John Zorn of Masada, the Indian violin virtuoso Dr. L. Subramaniam, and so forth. I knew about her to some extent because a musician friend of mine, Mikah Azurin, had sought her out on his own and apparently had made acquaintances with her. And so I would hear information from Mikah about Susie’s infrequent trips to the Philippines to learn the kulintang, and a recording she had made called “Electric Kulintang”.

Fast-forward a year later, back in Manila in April of 2008, for an event called “Jazz On The Green”. Some officials in the U.S. Embassy had organized a private event to bring my group, Affinity, to play in their yard for the embassy personnel and the ambassador while the sun set famously on Manila Bay. It was such an attractive concept, and so we went about organizing what was to be a private recital and gesture of goodwill. And in the morning of that gig, I received an unexpected call from Ricky Jalbuena, a jazz aficionado whom I didn’t see very often. He goes, “Hey Johnny, guess who’s in town? Susie Ibarra. Are you playing tonight? I’d like to bring Susie and her husband, Roberto, to see you.” Imagine my mix of shock, delight and nerves. And so I hastily plunged into the diversion of calling those in charge, explaining that I have special guests how ever unexpectedly, and can we please make an exception to accommodate these very exceptional people, and I can email them their credentials immediately to explain everything, and it would be such a great favor, really. It went somewhere along those lines.

Some words about Susie’s husband, Roberto Juan Rodriguez, whose Cuban-Jewish family had sought exile in the United States after fleeing communist Cuba at the onset of the Castro regime. Roberto’s trumpeter father had joined the orchestra led by the great Cuban bassist, Israel “Cachao” Lopez in Miami, Florida. Roberto found himself apprenticing as a drummer for them and many other Cuban and Cuban-Jewish ensembles. He took note that a number of leading Latin pianists and trumpeters of the ‘60s and ‘70s had been Jewish. Moving to New York, he played with Paul Simon, Julio Iglesias, the Miami Sound Machine, Joe Jackson, Lester Bowie, Randy Brecker, Paquito D’Rivera, Dave Liebman, and Phoebe Snow. I learned about all of this much later, way after having met the guy, and getting to know Roberto was so normal and unassuming. He considered the Philippines to be the home of the greatest dessert ever, halo-halo. He had visited Manila several times already and he would extol the virtues of this incomparable dessert.

Suffice that I played at “Jazz On The Green” like there was no tomorrow. In the aftermath, over biscuits and juice, Susie Ibarra, Roberto and I exchanged telephone numbers, and so it all began as some means of contact to exchange our albums; and possibly we will have a “merienda” one of these days? The couple had a huge itinerary, which included trips to meet various ethnic music instructors in different parts of the country, and an invitational concert at the Philippine Women’s University, but we found ways to meet up during lulls. Once or twice by then, the idea of a musical collaboration occurred and it gradually became more real as the days went by.

But let’s slip now into a parallel reality. In the same April of 2008, the legendary female guitarist June Millington was on a visit to Manila for a women’s rights advocacy, and by chance she had an event of some sort organized for her in Mag:net Katipunan, right on the very night of my gig. Rock Drilon of Mag:net gave me a heads up about it on the morning itself, which was kind of becoming a pattern in those days. But I was excited. The Philippine-American June Millington, whom Guitar Player Magazine described as “the hottest female guitar player in the country”, founded the trailblazing rock group, Fanny, with her sister, bassist Jean Millington, which recorded five albums for Warner Brothers' Reprise Records, including Mother's Pride, produced by Todd Rundgren. In 1971 Fanny also served as session players and did arrangements for Barbra Streisand's self-titled album, and had recorded for Keith Moon and David Bowie. June didn’t have a band with her at Mag:net but it was so natural, and perhaps expected of me, to invite her on stage to jam with us.

Cynthia Alexander was in the crowd with her friends at Mag:net, and there was much clamor, and she too jammed with June Millington. On my way home at the end of the night, as June Millington was still signing autographs away, I mentioned to Cynthia about Susie Ibarra also being in town, and that she and Roberto were here to study Philippine music, and maybe, just maybe, we might record. It was such serendipity, as both Cynthia and I agreed that it would be great for us to get together and create new music. Well, of course, everyone here knows Cynthia as the effervescent singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist of “Comet’s Tail” and “Rippingyarns”; but it is perhaps less known that Cynthia is a terrific bass player. In another time when she went by the maiden name of “Cynthia Ayala”, she had won a Best Bass Player award in a Tokyo festival. And so I had a bassist for the project, if ever. And she could sing, and play a bunch of other things.

Malek Lopez had just returned from Berlin, Köln and Kuala Lumpur with his electronica duo, Rubber Inc. With his partner Noel de Brackinghe, he had collaborated, and recorded an album, with the Teichman Bros from Germany. Noel was the engineer for two albums I made for Candid Records in a studio that they co-owned; and now Malek and I were exploring the idea of recording some collaborative tracks, but we didn’t quite know yet just how. He’s an excellent sound designer, and he went to his gigs with his other group, Drip, lugging a laptop. When I mentioned that Susie Ibarra, Roberto Rodriguez, Cynthia Alexander and I would possibly go to a recording studio, Malek was keen on the concept right away. And so to Tagaytay to write songs quickly, I went; and afterwards to a studio booth to create demos in the days following; and then to hole up at home to write the charts with a piano and guitar in hand. And frequently, we were on our cell phones. But this was only all possible if what we played together were music all of us had a commonality with and wanted to do; and it felt like a proverbial “golden number” to realize. The pressure eased up a bit after Susie messaged me from Boracay that the music was good to go. And with some more serendipity, Cynthia had a chance to socialize with Susie and Roberto at a party (hosted by Mishka Adams’ mother, Agnes Arellano) and thus it all became comfortable.

Just a few days before Susie’s and Roberto’s return to New York in late-June of 2008, the five of us converged in Shinji Tanaka’s studio to interpret, improvise on, and record a suite of compositions, collectively entitled “Humanfolk”. Shinji’s sizeable Sound Creation facility suddenly appeared cramped, as his studio floor was littered with our instruments of all manner. Drums, cymbals, brass and wooden kulintang, bamboo buzzers and rain sticks, acoustic and electric guitars, the grand piano fixture, tambourine, and assorted world percussion such as shakers, clappers, guiro and kalimba. It was possible for anyone among the five of us to pick up any instrument and play it credibly. And so Humanfolk happened, indeed, on a very special day that collected the stuff of dreams.

By Johnny Alegre

(Originally written for Rogue Magazine, May 2009)