Visiting a Musical En'Clave

Upbeat Music From Africa's Green Cape

It's been a rather challenging job to find live music to enjoy here this August. Lisbon has very few clubs offering live music, leaning toward DJs at discos instead. However I have managed to learn about some places worth checking out. The En'Clave in Lisbon's Rato district is a restaurant/music club/disco which caters to the city's Cape Verde immigrants and anyone else who just wants to enjoy that tiny african country's Moma music.

I took a couple other americans with me to this tiny hole-in-the-wall where a ring of the buzzer eventually brings a bouncer who opens a tiny door on the door and peers through, surveying the worthiness of all who wish to enter - speakeasy style.

Once inside we descended some stairs into a central dining/kitchen/stage room. I've been in larger living rooms in the US. The place had the unpretentious vibe of a basement room in a church and was filled with oilcloth-covered dining tables and wooden chairs and there was just enough room down the center of the room to function as a dance floor.

On the stage a young Johnny Mathis look-alike was leaning back in a chair and belting out joyously sweet tones in Cape Verdian Creole. He was backed by an enthusiastic trio of musicians and an electronic drum machine. I would never have placed this music as coming from africa. To me it had more in common with south american styles.

The musical highlight of the evening spontaneously occurred when a slight 60ish guitar player stood up to take an extended solo. He began with Elvisesque pelvic thrusts, which propelled him onto the dance floor, and then proceeded to play for at least five minutes with the guitar behind his head; Jimi Hendrix-style.

My friends and I had a thoroughly great time and only left at two in the morning when the band was taking a short break.

Cheers For Now,

Dave

Let The Necessary Speak

What is Essential?

The idea of stripping down an idea to it's essence has had a big impact on me over the past year in terms of how i live in general and how I create music specifically. Famous artist and cultural icon Pablo Picasso said,

"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality."


This theme is very much on my mind as I try to write an album full of songs driven by the idea of continuous personal growth and development and also driven by the music of the guitar. In both the ideas and music I am seeking to transcend the obvious in order to present the basic concepts.

Another abstract painter; Hans Hofmann stated,

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."

It may sound trite, but one of the questions I often ask as I work on LYRE's debut album is, "What if Picasso were writing these lyrics or guitar part? What would he find he could not do without and still present the subject?"

Picasso also said,

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

My goal is to pull off the musical equivalent of transforming a yellow spot into the sun.

Cheers For Now,
Dave

The Most Popular Music In Portugal

Sinatra's Got Nothing On Fado Singers

Portugal's a tiny country of just over 10 million people, so I guess it should come as no surprise that I've never heard of the extremely popular traditional music genre of fado. How popular is it? Well the reigning king of fado is a 40-year-old singer named Camané. Earlier this hear hen he recently released Sempre de Mim, his first album since 2001, and it went straight to the top of the charts being certified gold within three weeks! Fado stars (or fadistas) are the Frank Sinatras and Barbara Steisands of Portugal. Check out the link to learn more about fado and it's origins.

In my quest for fado I went to Café Luso in Lisbon's famous Bairro Alto - a nightlife haven. I arrived around 12:30 and was immediately impressed with the cave-like interior of this tiny club. It couldn't seat more than 70-80 diners and it's fairly typical of fado houses around Lisbon.

The music is very melancholy with the fadistas striving to wring maximum emotion from each syllable. This is a very structured genre similar to classical where the rules are well established. The music itself had heavy Spanish references with moorish overtones. Vocalists are the superstars as with other sung genres and the best fadistas find a way to blend tradition, interpretation, and innovation into a pleasing twist on the time-honored theme.

Fado's not really my cup of tea, but as with all forms of experimentation, I had to experience it to know even that. Tonight my musical tour of Lisbon continues.

More Later,

Dave

Seize The Jacket

Life Lessons In a Mall Dressing Room

Some say that understanding comes to you when you are ready for it. I guess that's one way of looking at it. I prefer to think of understanding and knowledge as a vast sea in which we live. It's around us all the time wether we notice it or not. Yesterday I noticed a bit more.

It all started two days ago at the massive Vasco de Gama mall across the street. I was in a store called Zara looking at jackets. I really like jackets as style definers and I was on the hunt for a new one for fall. Zara had several to choose from and I was having a hard time choosing. In fact this was my second trip to the same store to shop jackets.

Suddenly I saw one I hadn't spotted before. I went to the dressing room, put it on, and it all just sort of came together. I was so inspired by the look that I pulled out a camera and snapped a few frames. (I've never done that before.)

I thought maybe I should buy it right then, but then I wavered thinking what if I found another I liked better elsewhere in the mall. I put it back and left.

Over the following hours I never did find a jacket I liked better, or even as well as the one at Zara. In fact the more I thought about it and looked at the photos, the more I realized this was the jacket I really wanted. By then it was closing time so first thing the next morning I went back to buy it. I didn't immediately find my size on the rack so I asked a salesman if they had it. He went to the back and came out to say it had been sold that morning and they didn't have anymore in my size. Now I wasn't devastated, it's not that big of a deal, but I was disappointed. And that's when I became aware of a little piece of understanding that has been floating around me all along. And here it is.

Throughout life we are presented with opportunities to have, do, be what we want. These opportunities always come with the price of making a choice. You can have the red or blue balloon, but not both. You can a be a dentist or an artist, but not both. And many times it's the choosing that we find hard and frightening since we're afraid of making the wrong choice. What I realized with the jacket lesson is that just making a choice allows you to move on and experience more life and more choices. Choice A leads down one path and choice B down another. Neither is wrong. Neither is better. The important thing is just to choose.

The salesman said they'd have more jackets in later this week and you can bet when I go back and find my size I'll be taking it home this time without a second thought.

Cheers For Now,

Dave

Living "La Vida Lisbon"

Imparting Some Portuguese and Moroccan Flavor to LYRE's Debut

With the main VIP in my life spending most of the past 4 months in Europe it has become increasingly difficult to maintain the kind of relationship we both seek to have. And since The Babe's planted in Lisbon until who-knows-when I decided to re-enlist the cat sitter, throw 150 pounds worth of clothes, recording gear, and instruments into bags and flight cases, and move tracking and mixing duties to the Tivoli Oriente Hotel in Lisbon.

Travel was pretty uneventful except for the airlines loosing the one bag with all my clothes, toiletries, a MIDI keyboard, and some fairly expensive microphones in it. That pretty much set my schedule back by a day as I scampered around the mall buying enough stuff to get by and trying to remain positive. The case did make it to the hotel this morning with just a broken zipper and all the contents in tact. I can't wait to see what kind of positive thing ends up being attached to this rather negative experience. I did become suddenly aware of and grateful for the fact that this is the first time in a lifetime of travel that I've ever had a bag misplaced. Seems I'm doing way better than the industry average.

With jet lag subsiding I'm turning once again to work on the album. I'll be posting to the LYRE Notes Blog almost daily and giving out links to some new Flickr albums while in Europe. I'll be making the most of this time by getting out to experience as much live Portuguese music as I can. I also plan to do some surfing and make a musician's pilgrimage to Morocco to see what north African tones and rhythms I can soak up.

Cheers for now,

Dave

Power To Your Purpose!

It's all Around You

Flying into Lisbon, Portugal last week I couldn't help but notice a number of huge modern windmills; the kind used to generate electricity. With their towering white profiles they really stood out against the surrounding geography of the area. Later in the week I was making a two-hour long overland trip to the Atlantic coast to try for some surf action. I was barely out of metropolitan Lisbon when I began to notice the huge benevolent giants again; sometimes juxtaposed right next to an antique example of the kind of windmills used in the area for centuries.

Later, at the beach, the surf was rather small by Portuguese standards with waves only 1 to 1.5 meters high. Still, there was awesome power contained in each one. I was reminded of this fact more than once when I was caught off-guard and sent swirling through the surf as if in a giant washing machine. Here was another example of a persistent, consistent force in the universe that contains incalculable power. Some forward thinking companies, like Ocean Power Technologies, are beginning the important first steps toward using the ocean's power to light whole cities.

On the trip back to Lisbon that evening my mind drifted on the subject of power. I thought about how both the winds and oceans are abundant, inexhaustible, and completely ours by right of birth on this planet. It kind of blew my mind and here's why.

If you know me or read this blog then you know that I'm always beating a drum about finding your purpose in life, getting a vision for how to fulfill that purpose, and then setting goals and taking action to make it all happen. One of the many challenges to making all that happen is finding the power to propel it all into reality. Powerful physical and mental energy, powerful relationships, powerful finances. When you really get down to basics everything we need can be broken down to energy and the power it provides. There's a lot more to this subject than I can even skim in this post, but I hope you get this concept: Wind and waves are just two very obvious forms of power available to each one of us. There are many more forms of power and energy that are just as available and free if we are willing to the understanding to use them.

We are each surrounded by a sea of energy; more than we could ever use in our lifetimes. You, me, and everyone else on the planet has all the power we need to take the next step in front of us today to turn our dreams into reality, achie our visions, and fulfill our purpose.

Cheers,

Dave

This Is Your Life. Eat It Up!

A Bite of Portugal

Woke up ready to take a big messy bite out of life. Walked over to the waterfront, rented a bike, and rode as hard as I could until the endorphin rush and pure joy was almost overpowering. Found myself in some barrio in Lisbon with only a scant idea of how I got there and knowing full well that I own my day. I hope everyone of you can find this in your own lives.

Much Love,
Dave