This band is from Otavalo, Ecuador and is playing on a corner by the Cuenca New Cathedral.
Dressed in costume, the musicians play, sing, dance,and pose with a European tourist who wants his wife to take a photo of him playing an Andean pipe. Managers and friends sell band CDs and crafts on the sidewalk in front of the performers as they entertain.
While the group is performing, a policeman asks for the band’s permit papers, stamped and signed.
The bands leader produces their authorization,and, moments later, the cop returns papers to him and walks away, satisfied.
Winay, is energetic, surprisingly contemporary, and draws a crowd.
We all like to be entertained and when these musicians dance they look like feathered dervishes drawing circles on the sidewalk with their toes and bare feet.
The spirit that makes them dance captures us too.
The police man, like all government officials, satisfied with seeing proper paperwork in order, has moved on.
I see him, emotionless, slipping a traffic ticket under the windshield wipers of a nearby delivery van, illegally parked by the flower market.
Laws, after all, are laws.
If we don’t have our laws, aren’t we the same as savages dancing to multiple Gods, under sparkling stars ,on dark windblown mysterious nights?
This evening we are treated by an American jazz musician who has a home in Cuenca. She slips into the Jazz Society club with her instrument in its case, takes a seat and listens to the band, puts her horn together, finds a reed, and joins the boys for the concluding song of the first set.
Musicians don’t have to speak English or Spanish or French or Swahili. Jazz has its own language, history, theory, super stars. If the girls in the audience a few tables away from me would have quit gossiping in the corner while she soloed, I could have heard the music even better.
When music is on fire, you shouldn’t be doing things that put it out.
Quality is quality is quality.
Sue swung the whole room to her way of playing, and, being a gracious lady, was endearing.
Lots of jazz musicians find better living and playing conditions outside the United States where jazz was created.
Jazz has always been an equal opportunity music, but all audiences for it are not created equal.
Cuenca is a World Heritage City.
World Heritage cities possess geographical, cultural, artistic, archeological, and architectural wonders which UNESCO believes are worth protecting.
In Parque Calderone, these photographs were taken between 1890-1930. They are of indigenous Ecuadorian peoples in the Amazon.
Most show the native peoples in their Amazonian lifestyle and Spanish Catholic priests going about the business of conversion. Progress, it seems, moves people away from land and into cities, away from many God’s to one God, puts shoes on their feet, clothes on their back, and time into their consciousness.
The faces are startling. They are stern, piercing, resisting, fierce.
Descendants of these people still live in the jungle. Some drive ATV’s, have cell phones, and check e-mails. They also remember stories of old ways and, at dark, around a fire, gather in ceremonies to celebrate nature and spirits priests hide from.
How do you tell people their Gods are not Gods, without resistance?
Modern art is an oxymoron.
When you go to galleries and see ” modern ” art you are seeing art done by masters whose works have critical interest and investors fretting over value.
Modern Art in this gallery, this month, is Eduardo Sola Franco, an Ecuadorian native, who was not only a painter but a sculptor, stage set designer, illustrator, experimental film maker. He was born in 1915 and passed in the last few years.
This is a retrospective of some of his output, which is voluminous.
His art, like much Central and South American art, is conflicted, political, full of dark colors and religious symbolism. In America, we tend to keep spirits in their place, under the doormat. In South America, there is a rich tradition of giving spirits time in the spotlight.
Franco’s art is tormented but he has been identified as a Modern master of Ecuador, a non-conservative gay man captured in a conservative culture.
The Museum is quiet, free, with nice grounds, clean facilities, and bathrooms.
The art on the walls in this Contemporary Art Gallery is self absorbed,and, for this reason alone, completely of our time.
Plaza Otorongo is a popular meeting place.
It is at the bottom of a huge hill near the Tomebamba river and one way to enter and leave the plaza is ascending or descending a long and steep stairway. Stairs are grouped in sections with five steps and a landing to each section. Going down is hard, but going up, at eight thousand feet above sea level, is stout.
The Plaza has restaurants, lodgings, a yoga and pilates studio, art gallery, and a huge open courtyard. Certain times of day students use these steps as a shortcut to go down to the Plaza and across the river to the University of Cuenca.
This morning a young man exits at the top of the stairs. An old man is going down, the way I came up, moving diagonally down the stairs so he doesn’t pitch forward and fall down.
Street art reminds you that urban problems won’t disappear. Drugs, crime, deteriorating infrastructure, broken promises and broken dreams don’t go because we don’t like to see them. Street art is the safety cap on the tea kettle. If it is humming, you have to take a closer look at the fire.
Cuenca, for all it’s Old World charm, has New World pain..
Cities, like rivers, always have dangerous cross currents.
Cartegena, Columbia is a spirit place even if I hate its heat, humidity, street vendors, and dirty streets.
There are spirits in that Old City behind huge locked doors, in notches cut into stone walls that held big guns aimed at pirate ships coming for treasure. Spirits sit on the steps of the Museo of the Inquisition where great battles for souls played out in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds.
Cuenca is also a spirit place. On any day, even if you take the same route you did yesterday, there are surprises.
There are troubled clouds that mass over the New Cathedral like demons trying to break down iron doors. There are muscled figures out of science fiction movies, chained to a balcony, who look down at you with a scowl. There is a mixture of old world and new world, and, turning any corner, you can not be sure what might spill in front of you, whether you are ready to catch it, or not.
Paper figures hang on a wire fence by the Rio Tomebamba and are so fragile they are twisted and torn by forces outside their control.
Some say we are paper too, holding tightly to our conventions, with all our strength, so we are not blown into the river and drowned.
Forces for good, and evil, are always blowing us here and there with big gusts of their breath, like we are small sailboats on a big ocean..
By the New Cathedral, on a cloudy afternoon, these performers stand motionless.
Then, they move and beckon to a little girl to pose for a photo with them with her mom. After the photo, they blow them a parting kiss and return to their rigid pose. They work for tips, depending on generosity to fill the bowl on the ground at their feet.
What is unseen is that this little girl, twice earlier, walked to the bowl, bent down to take a ten dollar bill until her mother called her back.
I should have left coins.
Temptation, especially for kids, is never far away, and succumbing is all too human.
Ecuador has a new changing young generation.
A still small number of its children have adopted the music, talk, style of other big city children around the world. There is graffiti in Cuenca. You see some tattoos, some ear piercings and dyed hair, torn levi’s with holes in them, a liking to turn raucous rap way way up.
At a Gazebo in Parque Calderone, where adult protesters recently yelled against government tyranny, these kids are peacefully practicing dance moves. Each individual on the stage has his own routine, his own steps, his own personality.
Ecuador is a country where you watch young people taking the arm of mom or grand mom as they walk down a bumpy sidewalk. It is a country where older men, and women, still wear traditional attire of their village, bright skirts, black hats, braided hair, stoic looks.
This new generation moves us into new times with a few bumps and grinds..
There are, however, worse things these kids could be doing than dancing in the park on a Monday night.
If only all generational change were this easy.
On Wednesday thru Saturday nights, from 6:30-10:00 pm, on the 2nd floor of La Vina Restaurant, at Luis Cordero 5-101 y Juan Jaramillo, the Jazz Society of Ecuador holds forth.
The group this evening is piano, drums, bass, and a tenor saxophonist who play mainstream jazz.
Having a restaurant downstairs, I can’t not take photos for Leigh
She is an artist, and artists like to see visions on walls as well as canvas. Both floors of this establishment are awash with art and it seems like a bohemian French cafe where crazy impressionist painters sipped absinthe and shattered old school standards,
The songs the band plays were written fifty years ago, or longer – ” Stella by Starlight “, ” Summertime, ” ” Night in Tunisia, ” ” Love Walked In. ”
They are played with reverence but played tonight with more rhythmic twists and subtle harmonic modulations than when they were new kids on the block. This is music I listened to while peers swooned over Elvis, Bo Didley, and Little Richard.
I never figured to hear live jazz in Cuenca, Ecuador.
The art on the walls is icing on the cake.
We aren’t talking Dr. Suess, but my Hat and Map belong in one of his books.
I don’t like maps because they are a pain to carry, unfold, find north without a compass. The streets on the map are hard to read and intersections look like rat’s nests. In the middle of a big city, a map, however, often helps get you where you want to go when people, you ask for directions, don’t speak the only language you speak.
A hat and a map also make good traveling company.
They don’t talk back, question decisions, or get tired.
As a traveler, looking at maps, spinning globes, surfing the net, talking to people who have been places, is part of what I do.
Dr. Suess understands how the world and people work, even if he writes for kids, and every cat, I know without asking a Doctor, needs a map and a hat.
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