How Can I Phrase This Question? Oh, Yeah. Where (the Fuck!) Were You?

I attend Indian (South Asian) music and dance presentations almost always under the same circumstance: the Association of Performing Arts of India (APAI) puts on a show somewhere in Broward.  Sometimes, it's at a restaurant, and dinner is included, and sometimes, it's at an auditorium.  The shows are always classical Indian music, which has nothing to do with classical European or American music.  In fact, I'm going to one of those shows on Sunday, March 16, in the late afternoon.  I love Indian music, and my favorite food is Indian food.  But that's not where I was tonight.

Tonight, I was at my favorite cultural venue in the world: South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center.  (I won't call it the Moss Center any more than I'll call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.  If he wasn't so out to lunch, he would have had a pow-wow, and asked what other bordering countries thought about the Gulf of the Americas.  But he is so out to lunch.  So no.  It's the Gulf of Mexico.  And SMDCAC.)

And tonight's performers were Sunny Jain and the Wild, Wild East.  It's hard to know how to describe this show.  Sunny Jain plays drums.  He mostly plays a western kit, but he plays one Indian drum, too.  And he mixes in some Indian history and his family's history between songs.  He's got an electric guitar player.  This is not a rock and roll sound, like Thermal and a Quarter, which is a wonderful Indian group.  This guitar player somehow gets a strange sound that's tinged with a sitar echo out of his guitar.  It was gorgeous.  The bass player played a five string bass, and he didn't look impressive, but his technique was almost hypnotic.  He wasn't quite as pyrotechnic as Mohini Dey (you can watch her on youtube), but close.  I don't think the woodwind player was South Asian at all.  Tonight, she played alto saxophone and flute.  Eric Fliss, the magician of SMDCAC, told me he'd seen her play soprano saxophone once, too.  She was a very prominent part of this ensemble.  But the paralyzer was the singer.  He didn't speak, so I don't know if he had an accent.  But he was a hell of an Indian singer.  It was a combination of the vocal gymnastics and the hand movements.  Very Indian.  And he was captivating.  He danced, he jumped down from the stage and sang, he somehow jumped back onto the stage, and he was generally untethered to anything.

The style of the music was a combination of some classical echos, something close to rock and roll, and some Bollywood.  And like Bollywood, Sunny Jain sometimes wanted the audience to get out of our seats, sometimes to dance, and once, he asked as many of us as wanted to to come up on the stage, which at least a score of the audience did.

This was very energetic.  It was exhilarating.  It was captivating.

I sat next to a couple who had sat next to me a week or two ago at some other SMDCAC show.  I met up with another couple who are friends of mine (but they don't live up here in BP).  Eric Fliss and his wife, Roberta, were there.  So, being impressed in concert (excuse the pun) was how we spent the intermission.  I also found out from my friends how a GableStage play ended.  It was last week, and it was so painful that I left at intermission.  Apparently, it remained ill-tempered and painful to the end, without resolution.  I'm glad I left.

Anyway, SMDCAC is the place to be.  It's the very best place to be.  The long drive is 100% worth it.  Performers commonly bring things to sell.  I couldn't possibly find any way to use yet another tee shirt, but I did get two souvenir CDs.  If you have a player, and you want to know what this show sounded like, you can borrow them.  But you have to promise on your life I'll get them back in the same condition they were in when you borrowed them.