Belly of the Whale

A Brief Sketch of the Folklife Music Festival (part 1)
and
What I Should Have Said. (part 2)

1.

From Hungry, Bolgaria, Russia, from east Africa, Equator, Brazil, Japan, Nepal, Lebanon. There, and so many other places. People from all the world over.
The festival is annually held at the Seattle Center, the site of the Space Needle. It is a sprawling complex, not so different from a big university: grassy ampitheatres and lawns, lecture halls and venues—a great circle with a fountain in the middle. But it is more a college campus with a resident carnival. There are also rides: a roller coaster, fastly spinning contraptions and gazebos with games and prizes.
People fill every patch of grass, each bench and ledge and rail. Young couples with two-year olds, old bearded men carrying mandolins, punk kids, robed Africans. Venues and stages spread throughout the complex, large stages for the larger attractions, rooms for Baltic dance instruction. These were all listed in the flyer I picked up at the gate. But what is written about are the two little girls playing violins here, the man in black up on stilts playing the Empire Strikes Back theme on his bagpipe, the barefoot three piece band, all in overalls, playing a black guitar, a washboard, and a washtub bass—and they drew a croud. Each had an open case to collect donations.
Everywhere people carried instruments. People sat and listened to the staged performers, people gathered around the sidewalk shows—all were the same.
The drums were particularly strong. Many great African players. Djembes, dun-beks, congas, talking drums, ashikas—on and on. There was a drum circle around a band that had as many as forty drums. The circle filled with young people, shedding their control and their clothes, losing themselves in the dance that feels like a heart pulsing.
A man from Port Townsend organized a band to set a world record for the largest harmonica band. The former record was eight-hundred. The record was crushed. In a great big grassy field, sixteen-hundred folk from Seattle and the world played “Twinkle, twinkle, little Star, how I wonder where you are.” A stirring moment that. I forgot my harmonica; what a shame.
A teenager from Panama taught me some steps for samba as we listened to a great Brazilian band on the main stage. I taught a Mexican how to dance to bluegrass—which is not a salsa—which was her inclination.
After the last show of the night, we stopped at a hookah bar to relax and take in the experience. We smoked some sort of cherry or apple tobacco out of a tall eastern hookah. At the table next to us sat a merry group of ladies from east Africa. A man would beat on the table like a drum and the women would sing out a song. They could never finish it however. After a minute or so they would break out into laughter and make this chattering noise with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths: “ne ne ne ne”—no, that’s not it. All I can hear now is their laughter. It was so infectious. They went on like this for an hour. I haven’t a clue as to how many various songs those women knew to carry on for so long. I clapped along and enjoyed their merrymaking as much as anything else that day.

What I should have Said

UNFINISHED