Sometimes arts grants come in the way of a good real business.
Article originally published in Counter Arts on Medium on July 3, 2023.
Summer is underway in Bucharest, and many people are away on vacation at this time of the year. For those of us suffering the heat here, there are various festivals, including one called Theater under the Moon (Teatru sub lună/TSL), held this year on the terrace of Promenada Mall.
TSL is a very nice festival, albeit a little old-fashioned. For three weekends in a row there’ll be a concert each evening, followed by a theater play. There’s also a corner where you can see some photographs and a few paintings. I wish there were more of them.
Between the acts, there’s stand-up comedy and improv theater, all very welcome, even though I didn’t quite jive with the comedian on Friday.
I did, however, really like the bands, on both occasions I was there (Friday and Sunday). The Friday show was with a recent cover band called Ritmo del Soul.
Oh, there were also mimes, a nice addition as well.
It’s a shortcoming of this festival that I can’t easily find the names of the Ritmo del Soul band members. The website says “four very talented young people.” I saw only three of them on the stage, and the band leader, a good vocalist with a nice alto timbre, certainly mentioned only the three of them in her remarks. I would have liked to know their names, since I appreciated their performance.
Since I mentioned shortcomings, let me briefly say that there’s something wrong with some of the good festivals here in Bucharest, in that they offer good-quality entertainment but fail to attract an audience. To put it this way, I don’t exactly know why they’re not exactly interested in doing that. Yesterday, the festival’s founder and organizer, Bogdan Gagu, was saying that it doesn’t really matter, that what matters is that we’re all friends there (and, indeed, most of the crowd was crew, family, and friends of the artists) and that the show will pick up more of an audience as it goes.
He may be right, but looking at the Facebook posts for TSL, I don’t see much of a social media engagement, despite the tireless photographers on the scene. The first night there were almost more professional photographers than paying customers. I’m talking about seven people on each side.
I suspect what happens is that these festivals — there are others, but I won’t name them here — get financial support from European grants and the Romanian Ministry of Culture (in fact I know some do), and then, having enough to pay their artists and make a small profit, they become disinterested in putting more of an effort to attract a real audience. It may even be that the cost of promotion may outweigh the revenue from tickets (within certain audience numbers), so they do away with promotion altogether (aside from Facebook, their website, and their presence on the sites of ticket vendors).
But I also wanted to talk about the band Storytellers. They are much better known than Ritmo del Soul and so I have the names of the band members: Marcian Petrescu (vocals, harmonica, lyricist, storyteller) and Mihai Tacoi (acoustic guitar, voice).
During the show, which I relished, the band tackled various famous pieces from the American folk and blues repertoire, as well as at least one song (I arrived late) set to the lyrics written by a Romanian poet.
Marcian was very engaging. He shared little stories, such as one about how people in a tram didn’t know who Carlos Santana was and how he told them Santana had played at Woodstock, only to find out that those supposedly clueless people knew about 1969 Woodstock. (Apparently he talks to people in random places, this Marcian.)
Marcian Petrescu wields a wicked harmonica — and is proud of it too. He commented that he didn’t like Bob Dylan’s style on the harmonica (or his voice), which is a bold statement. He does, however, love Bob Dylan’s poetry — not lyrics, but poetry, of course. As he says, folk music is music set to poetry. And Bob Dylan didn’t gain a Nobel Prize for nothing. But then even old folk ballads that seem easier on the mind, such as some of those sung by Joan Baez, can be crushing poetry.
So we listened to “All Along the Watchtower” and learned (myself included) that this was not a song by Jimi Hendrix but one by the very same Bob Dylan, and how Hendrix and Dylan valued each other’s work.
What else we learned? Well, the lyrics to “Study War No More,” a song by Pete Seeger. I don’t know what Seeger referred to exactly, but, if we go by the lyrics, I imagine the “study” in there (which I had to look up to be sure about) referred to laying down arms and back away from learning how to be a soldier. These days, however, a song like this can also be about learning about war on TV. It’s important but it can be soul-battering. What to do, then? I have no idea. We have to be aware of wars, but maybe just enough to figure out what we can do to help. Besides that, studying war can be quite a spanner in the works, if I’m to go on discussions with some of my peers who recently graduated from judging — rather than opining on — relationships to thinking they know all about wars as well.
Back to Storytellers, I learned, or relearned, a song called “Help Me (Can’t Do It All by Myself)” by John Mayall, who, Marcian said, is probably 100 by now. Well, he’s not 100 but only (almost) 90. I had favored other blues singers back in the day when I listened to a lot of blues, and now, going back to read about John Mayall after relearning that he played with Eric Clapton and Peter Green, among many others, I realize I should have really paid more attention to this musician.
I also felt poignantly the fact that many Black blues makers don’t have certain birth dates and burial places. They were here one day and gone tomorrow in more than one sense. Their path through the world is more about hearsay and the memories of the people who caught them in one dive or two, as compared to more recent bands whom we can document in painstaking detail — in poignant details that, along with the music, bring their life journey and facts about their music back so vividly for other generations to enjoy. So many blues makers didn’t have that.
Even Muddy Waters, of whom we know much more, has a birth year that’s debatable, from 1913 to 1914 and 1915. Of course, many blues singers wanted to seem older when they were young, as Marcian pointed out, something that’s not particular to entertainers but also to sports. After the change of regime in Romania in December 1989, the world learned that gymnasts such as Daniela Silivaș and Ekaterina Szabó participated in the 1988 Seoul Olympics and 1982 Los Angeles Olympics, respectively, with faked papers, making them fifteen instead of fourteen at the time of those competitions.
Back to Storytellers, we listened to a song by Tom Waits, “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” and, surprise, surprise, I got to see Tom Waits live for the first time in my life on YouTube. Tom Waits was a fixture in an old relationship of mine, some years before YouTube. Seeing Tom Waits now feels like a veil has been lifted from my eyes: I can connect the face and performance style with the voice. As Marcian said, with that voice of his that’s, he suggested (I forget how he put it exactly), difficult to listen to, you wonder how come Tom Waits was so successful — but seeing the videos I understand why. I’m watching now Tom Waits at Rockpalast in Germany in 1977 and finally understand why my old boyfriend was so crazy about him.
There’s more to be said about the concert, but I’ll stop here to urge all of you to go see concerts live. I looked at videos from yesterday’s concert as I wrote this piece and only part of the mood and rhythm shone through. As is to be expected, but sometimes we (I) forget.
And then there’s the musical education. You never know what you may learn — or what you may remember.
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Thank you for reading!
To a happier, healthier life,
Mira
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