Ice Cream Taco

Saturday night I returned to the Plaza Mayor for more of Globalquerque!  Again the concert was preceded by Jambo’s reliable curried chicken, and by Santa Fe Brewery’s excellent porter.

I also ate my first ice cream taco.  Which, for the record,  was enormous, a huge chunk of ice cream wrapped in a folded-over waffle.  Nothing to hate here, though it was a little more than I was prepared for.  Still, it fueled some dancing.

Opening the festival was Austria’s Federspiel,a mostly-brass band doing folk tunes from central Europe.  They’re supposed to have a much edgier, more spontaneous approach to their music, but I’m not familiar enough with folk tunes from the area to know what was old and what was innovative.

There was yodeling, but no one was slapped with a fish.

Next up was Israel’s Baladino, which sources their music from all over the Mediterranean, and who seem to incorporate practically every instrument from the region, including PVC pipe.

They were immense fun, so I stayed for their full concert.

I journeyed to the courtyard to see singer/dancer/rapper Supaman, who was dressed in a full fancy-dance powwow costume, as here in the video.  Supaman, you see, enacts the role of the guy who wears a costume while standing up for justice.  Much of his act might best be described as standup, funny but politically aware commentary on the situation of native populations, and which also served to orient an audience unfamiliar with the material.  Added to which we see music and dancing!

Supaman performed alone at the festival, but here in the video he is ably assisted by champion jingle-dress dancer Acosia Red Elk.

Speaking of politically aware, Jill Sobule put on a smart, funny show that engaged not only with politics but with the audience, most of whom I daresay had never heard of her.  (She’s best known for “Supermodel” from the Clueless soundtrack and “I Kissed a Girl,” the title of which was stolen by Katy Perry for a different song.)

One of her songs was about being a teenager and scoring some magic mushrooms at a concert, which she admits dates her adolescence.  “Who today has time for a nine-hour high?”

So I saw a politically-engaged singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar, and thought it a shame that she seemed to be living in the wrong decade.  Plus, she was the only person at the festival who sang in English!  She seemed slightly out of place, if not out of time, but I liked her anyway.

(Fabio, by the way, did not turn up for the concert.)

After that I listened to Anda Union again.  It was pretty much the same show they’d put on the previous night, but this time I had a better seat, and I enjoyed it just as much as I had the first time.

The festival closed with Mokoomba, who hail from the area of Zimbabwe around Victoria Falls.  They sing in Tonga, which marks them as a member of a Zimbabwean minority, and their original treatment of Tongan materials initially alienated many of their own peers.

They seem to have pretty well absorbed every musical trend from West and South Africa (soukous, Cuban and Congolese rumba), plus rap, ska, soul, funk, and maybe a bit of Motown, at least for the choreography.  I can’t find a video that matches the high energy of the live performance that I saw, so this one will have to do.

Globalquerque always ends on a big, noisy dance set, concerning which I always have a certain ambiguity.  By the end of two days of music, I’m generally too tired and footsore to respond as I ought.  Even an ice cream taco wouldn’t have given me enough energy to dance as the music deserved.

So I lingered through the encore, by which time the festival staff were already folding the chairs and carrying them off, and then went off into the cool autumn night, with a dozen hours of great music echoing in my head.