Stereotypes

Many, many years ago, I received a funny email about the personality of each musician in an orchestra. I look for it in Google and voilà! The text is in Portuguese, I'll translate some of it soon.

Meeting the young musicians of the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra of the Manhattan School of Music, I ended up recalling the text and I started to notice the personality of each one relating it wich their instruments.

I still don’t know if all of them fit to the stereotypes… So I decided to do a game: look to the pictures at right the column and try to figure out which instrument those young musicians play.

Let’s play!

La Ensaladera

"Afro-Cuban Jazz was born out of a cultural melting pot that is synonymous with the New York City experience", wrote maestro Bobby Sanabria in his Clave Chronicles.

Coincidence or not, one of the first stories I found making this film was the composing of “La Ensaladera”, a ballad turned into mambo composed and arranged by Takao Heisho.

Talking about the piece, Bobby told me a delicious story: Takao, this amazing musician that came from Japan to the U.S. looking for jazz, used to eat in a restaurant. In this place, there was a girl that made salads. So he composed this song to la ensaladera, the girl that make salads.

Seduced by this romantic story, I interviewed Takao. When I asked him about the inspiration for “La Ensaladera”: surprise! There was no girl in the story!

“La Ensaladera” is a metaphor for NYC. It means salad bowl. For Takao, the city and more specifically his jazz experience in the city could be compared to a salad bowl where you put a lot of different ingredients together to make one thing.

The teacher wrote melting pot. The student said salad bowl. The convergence between both metaphors is clear.

But they have an important difference.  In the melting pot, you put some different ingredients together, heat them, make them dissolve and then merge as a new and homogeny thing. Es algo que suena muy latino: la mescla, el mestizaje. In the salad bowl, you put tomato, cucumber, lettuce, onion, mushroom, nuts, berries even pasta and a sauce. Everything is in the same pot, they are together making a new thing: the salad. But they are still themselves. The tomato is a tomato and you can identify it. The cucumber also.  And so on.  

As Brazilian, I wish NYC was a melting pot. Estoy acostumbrada y me gusta la mescla. Pero lo que veo en la ciudad es la ensalada. Maybe in the 1930’s, when Mario Bauzá and his brother-in-law, Francisco “Machito” Grillo formed an orchestra combining the harmonic sophistication of a jazz orchestra percussion of AfroCuban rhythms, the city was more open to fusion in music and between people. But we are in 2013, and I have to agree with Takao. NYC is a salad bowl.

Takao Heisho