Sexual hygiene on the Mississippi Delta
By Kennedy Poyser January 16, 2009 San Miguel de Allende

Concerts
George Worthmore
Tim Hazel & Ken Bassman
Fri, Jan 23, 5pm

Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
120 pesos 

Fri, Jan 23, after Santa Ana concert
Romanos
Hernández Macías 93

Sat, Jan 24, 7pm
Teatro Ángela Peralta
Mesones 82
80/120/200 pesos

George, this is Kennedy, your email interviewer for the day. We worked on Atención material for your last visit here and I heard you play at El Market Bistro.

Julieta Moreno prepared a career profile, kept short to accommodate all the lurid details you’ll no doubt reveal in this interview. I hope you’ll have some fun with this. Bluesmen have a reputation to uphold.

Kennedy Poyser: Just how dissolute was your 10-year debauch in Johannesburg? What did you do to qualify as poster boy for the Live Fast, Die Young Association?

George Worthmore: Jeez, Kennedy, you’ve been doing your homework. I remember that blog with the “Live fast die young” thing. But I don’t drink or smoke or do any drugs. So there wasn’t any debauching. I have more interesting vices. And I’m already too old to die young. Let’s just say I drive too fast to worry about my cholesterol.

KP: Your Blues Room had a lock on the “Best of Jo’burg” award for 10 years. Where did you find the musicians? South Africa is not the first place I think of for bluesmen.

GW: I bought the Blues Room in 1996 after playing in South Africa three times. I won “Best of Jo’burg” every year because of my format and presentation. It was a venue run in a first world way in what is basically a third world country with a thin first world veneer.

It took them a little while to get used to me but you can’t argue with success. It was called the Blues Room but I presented all types of music. I used the best local talent and also brought in bands from the US, Cuba, the UK and the Middle East. I had a comedy night and a night for bands that were just getting started, besides party bands and South African recording acts. If anyone’s curious about the old Blues Room, there’s a link to the original website on my site www.georgeworthmore.com.  They can also see just what my current show is about.

KP: Did you find the blues there a fusion of American and local styles?

GW: No, not really. The few blues bands there were influenced mostly by third-generation English blues guys rather than, say, Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. It’s just because that’s what they were exposed to.

KP: Obviously you must have found an enthusiastic audience. How would you characterize them?

GW: They’re mostly fans of the guitar or other guitarists. I just love playing guitar for people and I think people enjoy seeing someone who enjoys what they’re doing so much.

KP: Prior to Jo’burg, you played in New York City at Manny’s Car Wash and Dan Lynch’s Blues Bar. How do those venues compare to the Blues Room? Forgive me for going on about this, but I’m from blues-drenched Austin, so I’m always curious about how my favorite music fits in other cities. 

GW: The Blues Room was a better venue, cleaner, bigger, better sound equipment. But of course, blues music will always be better in the land of its origin. We had local pop bands that were excellent. Any of the bands playing African music were just wonderful.

KP: Would you agree there’s too much jazz and not enough blues in San Miguel?

GW: I not familiar enough with the music scene there to answer that so I’ll just accept your observation. But what I would like to say about jazz today is that there’s too much easy listening jazz. I believe that jazz should push the musical envelope and be somewhat subversive. If it’s real jazz, the average person shouldn’t be able to hum the tunes nor want to have a real jazz band play at their daughter’s wedding

KP: This year you’ll play twice on Friday—5pm at Teatro Santa Ana and later at Romanos. Will the two sets be different? Surely you don’t plan to sing raunchier songs at Romanos; you know how delicate sensibilities are here.

GW: The old blues tunes I perform, well, some of them have risqué lyrics. I’m pretty good at reading audiences and I do have alternate PG lyrics for some. Sometimes I just ask the audience if they would be offended if I sang a song about, say, sexual hygiene on the Mississippi Delta in 1935.

KP: Last year you played at a range of venues and this year seems the same—from a restaurant to the Peralta. What do you like about each?

GW: I like the fact that the audiences at the Peralta and Santa Ana come to listen to me play and aren’t talking on their cell phones or chatting while I’m playing the Prelude to the Bach Cello Suites or a Doc Watson piece. I don’t play places where people talk during the performances. 

KP: Your work has many sources. Many of our readers won’t be familiar with rockabilly, or how country blues differ from either blues or country. Can you offer some help? 

GW: I play what is called a “varied genre” show. It’s just good solid guitar playing. It’s really hard to explain how music sounds or put it in a box. I like to say talking about music is like dancing to architecture. Although musical boundaries are always blurry, I think we can say country blues is the blues before electric guitar and the Chicago sound. Pre-CBS Elvis was rockabilly; “Blue Suede Shoes” is a good example of a rockabilly song everybody’s familiar with. Anybody who’s heard the nouveau rockabilly band the Stray Cats has already heard rockabilly. Anyway, I’m not doing much rockabilly nowadays. My current show is all acoustic finger-picking guitar.

KP: What will you do in our fair city when you’re not playing the guitar? I know a notorious biker bar if you want to take up old habits.

GW: I’m there, dude. When are we going?




The ridiculous and the sublime 
By Julieta Moreno

After a great concert series last year with Tony Cox, the master of acoustic finger-style guitar, George Worthmore comes back to his new old flame, San Miguel, striking again with his unique style in three concerts, with top local musicians Tim Hazel and Ken Bassman.

A star in the New York City music scene for 20 years, Worthmore began with a one-year stint as a guitarist with Kinky Friedman. He’s played backup guitar for Bo Diddley, Ben E. King, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Lou Christy and The Platters.

Performing with own his band, The Divebombers, he was joined on stage by such stars as Billy Idol, Paul Schaffer and Rick Derringer.


1n 2007, George sold the Blues Room in South Africa and returned to performing. His show is a tour de force of solo acoustic guitar, from ragtime to blues, with some Bach for serious fans. The songs are interlaced with humorous comments and amusing stories about the songs and his life in music.

Candlelight and costumes
By Michael Pearl

Pro Musica Concert
Songs from Naples
Sat–Sun, Jan 24–25, 5pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
200/150/80 pesos

Pro Musica presents a musical feast of beloved songs from Naples. Two wonderful programs feature a chamber orchestra of seven musicians, the stunning soprano Guadalupe Jiminez and leading tenor Gerardo Reynoso.

The singers will be in period costume as they would have been when these songs were written in the nineteenth century. The orchestra will be in white tie and tails and St. Paul’s Church will be lit by candlelight.

Neapolitan songs were originally written for a male singer but are now widely interpreted by both tenors and sopranos. Typically, the stories are expressed in familiar genres such as a lover’s complaint or a serenade to his beloved. Singles in San Miguel who come along to St. Paul’s may fall under the spell of these love songs. Romance definitely will be in the air!

The songs became world famous when great waves of emigrants from Naples and southern Italy took them abroad, 1880–1920. The first mega-tenor, Enrico Caruso, also popularized them when he took to singing the popular music of his native city as encores at the Metropolitan Opera. Caruso is responsible for operatic tenors now being required to know these songs. 

A previous mayor of Venice did not love these songs. He officially declared that gondoliers plying the city’s canals should stop serenading the tourists with Neapolitan songs!

Two questions may occur to you. One: Why should he care? He cares for reasons of authenticity. Uninformed tourists may feel that it is completely natural to go punting along the Grand Canal while their chauffeur croons about returning to Sorrento, but the mayor knows that’s as authentic as a Mississippi Delta blues singer belting out a New England sea chantey.

Two: Why are Venetian boatmen singing “O sole mio” in the first place? The gondoliers sing these songs because that’s what the tourists want to hear. To them, “O sole mio,” “Funiculì Funiculà” and “Santa Lucia” are Italy. But they’re not, really. They’re Naples.

The St. Paul’s program includes all three of the songs to which the mayor objected. Perhaps the most famous of all is “O sole mio,” written in 1898. The most famous rendering is “It’s Now or Never” by Elvis Presley. He had the lyrics rewritten and the single became his most popular recording ever, selling 25 million copies worldwide.

We also will hear the almost equally famous “Funiculì, Funiculà,” composed in 1880 to commemorate the opening of the first funicular railway going up Mount Vesuvius near Naples. This song, too, passed into popular American culture when, in the 1947 Disney cartoon “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” Goofy and Donald Duck sing a song about food using its melody. In the very first episode of The Flintstones, Fred and Barney Rubble sing it in the Flintstone Flyer on their way home from the opera!


“Santa Lucia” was published as a barcarolla in Naples in 1849, celebrating the picturesque waterfront district, Borgo Santa Lucia. It is a boatman’s invitation to take a turn in his boat, the better to enjoy the cool of the evening. Elvis recorded the song for his 1956 album, Elvis for Everyone.

The passion in these songs is not only for love, but also for celebrating the city, the sun and the sea—or lamenting life’s greatest tragedy: not death, but being far from home.

Back in Venice, the mayor still looks down from his Palazzo and sees gondoliers rowing along the lagoon beneath the cold, grey skies of Venice and praising the glorious sun of Naples—yes, the mayor finally had to give in.

Music to My Ears
By John Bills 

Goldberg Variations: Pianist Matthew Bengtson’s Pro Musica concert

A haunting scene in the glorious Anthony Minghella film, The English Patient, shows a young woman wandering about the ruin of an Italian monastery during the last days of World War II. In the midst of the debris she sees a piano, legs broken, fallen down on one side. Picking her way over the rubble she begins to play, the music wistful, melancholy, full of remembrance. It is the aria from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and it is one of the greatest melodies ever put to paper. This past Sunday sanmiguelenses had a rare opportunity to hear Bach’s set of 30 variations on this melody performed live at St. Paul’s Church by the gifted pianist Matthew Bengtson as part of this season of concerts presented by Pro Musica. The sold-out audience clearly knew this was a very special evening and responded with rapt attention throughout its 80-minute duration (the “pin drop” analogy comes quickly to mind). 

The Goldberg Variations, composed by Bach in 1741, represent the height of the Baroque period, utilizing nearly every compositional technique common to the time: Two-Part Invention, Fughetta, French Overture, Trio Sonata, Toccata and free Variation. The work begins with the Aria (a Sarabande, or binary dance, in two equal parts of 16 bars each) and is followed by 30 variations, closing with a restatement of the aria. The variations can be divided into 10 sets, with the third variation in each set arranged as a canon. The first canon repeats at the unison, the second canon repeats at the second, and so forth for nine canons. The last canon might be expected to be a canon on the tenth, but here Bach, in a moment of humor, creates a Quodlibet, a contrapuntal piece often built upon several different melodies, in this case interweaving two folk tunes of the day. The mathematical complexity of the Goldberg Variations is well known and still fascinates musicians after nearly 270 years. The first-time listener may not notice the work’s elegant symmetrical proportions, but will undoubtedly be swept along to the climactic moments toward the end where, with ever-increasing degree, we experience Bach’s stunning technical display of keyboard writing, swift and flamboyant running passages, dazzling hand-crossing movements, trills in inner parts, every splendid tool available to the keyboard virtuoso. 

Bengtson did not disappoint in this regard. He possesses a brilliant technique and the kind of analytical skill to emphasize the architecture of the work, as well as the necessary poetry for the contemplative moments. He presented the variations uncut, performing every repeat. Originally composed for the dual manual harpsichord, I wished here and there that Bengtson had taken more advantage of the piano’s colors and sustaining abilities. For the most part he favored brisk tempi, which once or twice threatened to get away from him, but made for some thrilling moments. I could feel the audience wanting to cheer after the 29th variation, but thankfully they held their enthusiasm until the end, when they gave Bengtson a prolonged and well-earned ovation.

On the previous evening, Bengtson presented a program that couldn’t have been more different or more daunting, and as in the Goldberg program, demanding on the listener as well. Choosing to open with Alexander Scriabin’s Sonata No. 1 in F minor was a challenge, but here the pianist showed a remarkable affinity for this composer’s music. From the tempestuous opening movement, through the second movement’s heart-wrenching sorrow, to the horrifying death march at the end, Bengston was in complete control, playing with power and pathos. Two Poemes, Op. 71, from Scriabin’s late period, showed the evolution of this composer’s style, becoming almost a Russian Debussy, romantically impressionistic and here flavored with the exoticism and eroticism of his symphony, Le Poeme D'Extase. The rollicking and boisterous Canon by Conlon Nancarrow that followed was a rhythmic tour-de-force. The first half closed with three Etudes by Gyorgy Ligeti, the jazzy, Caribbean influenced “perpetual motion” Fanfares, Arc-en-ciel (Rainbo
w), which the pianist described as Bill Evans playing a Chopin Nocturne, and the misleadingly titled Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw). This is not a nostalgic, autumnal piece, but a sustained and anguished cry against the turbulent eighties in Poland, awesomely played here, using every note, every volume level available—thankfully the excellent Pro Musica Steinway was up to the test. 

The concert’s second half was devoted to Polish music featuring Mazurkas in various styles by Karol Szymanowski and Frédéric Chopin, lighter works than those preceding them, but played with elegance and style. The concert ended with Chopin’s rousing Polonaise in F-sharp minor, surely his most militaristic polonaise, played with relentless intensity and huge tone. The audience demanded an encore and was rewarded with another Mazurka, this time by Scriabin, providing a fitting symmetry to an ambitious program.

John Bills sang with the Metropolitan Opera for 26 seasons. A winter resident of San Miguel, he writes about music, film, food and wine.

Live—the music of “The Beatles”

Concert
From Me to You
Aleph—The Beatles
Fri, Jan 23, 8pm
Teatro Ángela Peralta
Mesones 82 
80/100/150 pesos

Once more “The Beatles” present their music in the best forum in San Miguel, through the Mexican group best suited to interpret them, the Liverpool Quartet “Aleph,” who will elevate their majestic interpretations from this golden and unforgettable epoch.

Aleph has performed in the finest locations in the Mexican Republic and represented Mexico in the Beatlefest which occurs at the end of each year in Liverpool, England. Tickets are available in the box office. For more information, email beatlesqro@hotmail.com. 

Opera and Other Tangos 
By Carolina Vidal

Concert
Rodrigo Garciarroyo
Sat, Jan 17, 7pm
Teatro Ángela Peralta
Mesones 82
100/250/350 pesos

Tenor Rodrigo Garciarroyo appeared last April and November in a series of concerts organized by Ópera de San Miguel. He has some surprises to enchant the audience in his next concert here, but we must wait until Saturday to find out which pieces he has chosen especially for us. Mario Alberto Hernández is the pianist; Charles Oppenheim, bass; and Enrique Angeles, baritone. Tickets are available at the Peralta box office.

Biblioteca Concerts

Biblioteca Pública
Reloj 50A

Antonio Cabrero Mendoza
Wed, Jan 21, 7:30pm
Sala Quetzal
100 pesos



Sergio Basurto
Thu, Jan 22, 7:30pm
Sala Quetzal
150 pesos



Javier Estrada
Fri, Jan 16, 7pm
Fri, Jan 23, 7pm
Sala Quetzal
100 pesos



Junta Flamenca
Anís and Yerbabuena 
Sat, Jan 24, 5pm
Teatro Santa Ana
200 pesos

Xavier Hernández & Liliana Gutiérrez
Sun, Jan 25, 2:30pm
Teatro Santa Ana
80 pesos

These outstanding concerts are part of the Biblioteca Pública’s cultural program. Tickets are available at the theater box office. For concerts at 7pm or after, enter through the Café Santa Ana entrance at Reloj 50A. Seating is limited for Sala Quetzal events. 

Piano concert

Pianist Antonio Cabrero has a flair for combining his classical training with traditional jazz and his own exotic inspirations. He delighted San Miguel audiences twice this December. Cabrero is known throughout Mexico as a symphony conductor, but his piano concerts have assumed new relevance in recent years, due to his passion for improvising over jazz standards and music from Spain, Mexico and India.

Part of the program is a Gershwin medley. Then he takes to the flamenco music of Spain and Manuel de Falla, then back to Mexico with Huapango by Pablo Moncayo.

Folklore harp and flamenco guitar
By Gaby Servin

Sergio Basurto’s interpretation of folklore rhythms will transport us on a magical tour around Latin America. “Cascada” is a polka inspired by the sound of water falling from the multiple cascades in Paraguay.

The Venezuelan joropo “Concierto de la Llanura” is the informal national anthem of Venezuela. In Cuba, “La Paloma” and “La Comparsa” remind us that Havana is a port and its sailors broadcast songs of sad poetry all over Latin America and Spain. The rhythms of sones jarochos explode from the Mexican state of Veracruz. All these rhythms interpreted on the folklore harp will be combined on the guitar with the original rhythms of Spanish flamenco from which they derive.




Gypsy music night

Guitarist Javier Estrada sings and plays noche de fiesta gitana, the enchanting music from the south. His light touch across the strings and the melodies of the gypsies set an intimate mood.

Passion in red and black
By Lourdes Garcia

Angela “la Yerbabuena” and Maridel García “Triana” have pursued the golden age of flamenco since they were little girls. This golden age developed at the end of the nineteenth century in the music cafés called “Café Cantantes,” where flamenco grew to its accomplished form.

Dance, cante and guitar constitute the magic triangle where flamenco art grows and fascinates us with its brio and enchantment.

This time, Anís and Yerbabuena bring to Teatro Santa Ana their Soleá and Alegrías, their Cante por Fandangos and a traditional song “Romance pascual de los pelegrinitos” shaped by the form of the Guajira, a cante called de ida y vuelta because it goes (ida) from Spain to America and returns (vuelta) from the island of Cuba to the Spanish peninsula with new airs and new charm.


Dancer Alfredo Enríquez brings his very personal Soleá por bulerías, and the Cuban-flamenco guitar of Josué Tacoronte helps Anís and Yerbabuena to reach the golden age of flamenco with his nostalgic Moorish notes for Recuerdos de la Alhambra, all within a program full of the red and black passion of flamenco.





“Latin Soul” Winter Concert 

Tenor Xavier Hernández and pianist Liliana Gutiérrez perform in the Sunday Matinee Concert Series in a unique presentation January 25. Hernández, who also is a skilled flautist and his wife Liliana are a remarkable pair of musicians who direct the Children’s Choir “Kantaré” at the Biblioteca Pública along with the community choir “Voces Unidas” and the St. Paul’s Church Choir.

These groups present several concerts throughout the year and their Christmas concert is now a holiday tradition in San Miguel.Their program will feature Latin American themes with pieces by Astor Piazolla, Manuel M. Ponce, María Grever and others. Last year’s concerts were a stunning success.

.