Thailand Story

From about 1985-1989, when I lived in New York, I spent most of my springs and summers hanging out in the international busking scene in Europe.  From Paris and Zurich, I would join various bands forming up to play the summer season on the circuit.  The money was actually quite good back then--good enough to fly to London or Paris 2-3 times a year.

One of my friends, a Dutch one-man band named Thomas van Nes, had relocated to Chiangmai and fallen in love with Thailand and with a young Thai woman.  He later married her and they had two sons, now grown. 

The band I was playing with at the time, the Rhythm Pygmies, bumped into Thomas in Switzerland during the summer of '89, and he urged us to pay him a visit.  The four of us in the band--me, my running buddy Marc from New York on guitar; Gilles,a Canadian bassist; and Christian, a French-Spanish gypsy singer/guitarist; took Thomas up on his invitation just a few days before the Berlin Wall fell in November of '89.

One thing led to another and we started getting gigs in Chiangmai, so we decided to stay indefinitely, or at least for the winter.  In the end, the Rhythm Pygmies celebrated its swan song with a lengthy run in Bangkok's Brown Sugar jazz club in May of 1990, and then we split up more or less permanently with Marc and me staying in Thailand while Gilles and Christian returned to Europe.

Marc and I found ourselves hooked on the Thai people, the food, the culture, and the ease of getting paid gigs in Chiangmai.  Marc later married a Thai citizen, Pik, and eventually they had a daughter, Peppo.

Long story short, Marc and I eventually went our separate ways and I joined a Thai country band, Banjoman and Friends, whose members were mostly from Phrae province.  We enjoyed a very well-paid run at Chiangmai's Mae Ping Hotel, and this led to other gigs including private engagements in Thailand's "Hi-So" scene:  Army and police generals (including a former prime minister and leader of the 1991 coup that ousted Chatichai Choonhaven), aristocracy including the King and Queen, and other various and assorted rich and powerful figures.

This experience--roughly from 1992 through 1998--culminated with several Banjoman recording sessions and CDs and at least one appearance that I recall on national television.  So I was fortunate enough to be hooked up with Thai musicians who were sort of C- or D-list famous.  But these led to other gigs for me with a few A-list people including Ad Carabao and Nga Caravan.

Perhaps most importantly, all this was happening as Thailand was in the midst of an economic boom which ended only with the so-called Asian currency crisis in July 1997. In other words, Thailand in the mid-'90s was the right place and the right time for me.

Along the way I also met a Thai woman, and we ended up together for about three years--no children--and it was from her that I learned the bulk of my Thai language skills.  Meanwhile, my colleagues in the Banjoman group were the ones who introduced me to phlaeng luk-thung and Thai classical music.  Banjoman ultimately disbanded in '98 but since then there have been many imitators in Chiangmai and Bangkok--indeed, probably in every major city in Thailand.

La Antigua: Busker Central in Central America

I haven't written much about buskers or musicians in Central America mainly because there hasn't been anything to write about.  Unlike in Mexico where there is a whole mariachi troubador culture on the streets of its colonial cities, in El Salvador or Honduras you can go many days without seeing someone with a guitar or violin.  When you do encounter street musicians, as you do in Granada, Nicaragua, it's somewhat of a pleasant surprise.  And when I do bump into the occasional street band, as I did in Gracias, Honduras, I always donate something to the cause.

But in Antigua we are in a whole different league.  It helps if you can picture the massive crowds here--not only of weekend trippers from Guatemala City and other parts of the country, but also foreign tourists from Europe and North America, high school and college kids from America, and denizens of the large expatriate Western community who now make Antigua their home.  With crowds like these on a typical Saturday, it can pay very well to play on the street.

This city just reeks of cosmopolitan prosperity with its restaurants, bars, coffee shops, hotels, travel agencies, boutique stores, and regular markets.  In a region where bookstores are oases and second hand English language books sell for $10 or more, there are so many books in English available, and for almost nothing,  that I'm close to hyperventilating as I type this dispatch.  La Antigua definitely has anything you could possibly want, especially for someone like me who has come from a markedly much poorer place such as western Honduras.  If you want McDonald's or Burger King or Subway or almost any kind of pizza you desire, it's all here.

With crowds the way they are and with the sort of conveniences you can find here, maybe that's partly why the local buskers can do so well in this town.  And it seems even foreign travelers can hang their hats for awhile and make a living with a song and a guitar, or--as in the case of "Takeshi"--by painting Japanese calligraphy.

Check out the following website from a young  Japanese guy I just saw on Antigua's streets who had a huge crowd around him:

http://takeshi.henjin.com/

Takeshi sings original songs, plays guitar, and sells his CDs, but his main attraction is he paints your name in katakana/hiragana (Chinese/Japanese script) on a strip of white paper for five quetzales (60 cents).  He has a big sign written in Spanish telling of his voyage around the world which encourages donations, and he wears a baseball cap and t-shirt promoting his website.  Flyers ("take one!") are available so you can look him up on the web. . .and link him to your blog!

I can report that the kids loved this guy, and their (mostly) affluent local parents were fascinated by him.  Of course I was pretty fascinated too.

When I think back now to my experiences in France and Switzerland of the 1980s,  I regret that the CD was barely invented then, that there was no such thing as a "world wide web", and that it didn't seem economically feasible to busk one's way around Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, or any other so-called "third world" area.

Now it looks as if maybe "third world areas" are among the only interesting--and lucrative--places left to go as an itinerant troubador in this increasingly homogenized, globalized world.

Why Not Travel With Fiddle in Central America?

Now that I've arrived in a place that's crying out for some good oldtime fiddle music, it seems the ideal time to address the issue of travel with musical instruments, or in my case, why I haven't traveled with my violin on these recent trips to Central America.

Since we were kids in a growing "Suzuki violin family" I had always traveled with my instrument, whether to Disney World or on other family road trips, but especially to Grandma and Grandpa's.  Our parents felt it was important for us to play impromptu concerts for our relatives and friends, but we also had a fairly strict rule in our family:     we had to practice every day, even on family vacations, as Shinich Suzuki always urged Suzuki families to do.

As a young adult my fiddle became both my "passport and bank account" as I used my musical skills to earn money for travel, eventually becoming a globetrotting busker in 1980s Western Europe and 1990s Southeast and Northeast Asia.

 My instrument and the music I played weren't only a means of earning a living, but also served as a great way to meet people of all stripes--especially other musicans and other buskers who traveled along the same routes that I did.  This was a great advantage to me in my globetrotting as well as in life in general.  My fiddle has taken me inside many situations which never could have happened without the very fact that I was a working musician, and mostly outside my home element in the United States.

These are some of the reasons I have always traveled with my instrument.  But now that I've become a teacher, it's been possible for me to join a world of the ordinary tourist.  I think of it as a type of "accidental tourism," to qoute from the novel and movie of that title, because in doing so I felt way outside of my usual element.

When I first started traveling in Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a couple trips to Mexico, I continued to take my instrument along even if I didn't use it very much.  Colonial cities such as Guanajuato or San Luis Potosi were made for the itinerant musician, but I didn't do any busking there, preferring instead to hear Mexican groups in the streets and plazas of those cities.

When I returned to Thailand for visits in 2005 and 2006 I continued to bring the instrument because many of my friends there are musicians and it was always possible to sit in and jam with them while they worked.  And on my 2007 visit part of my purpose there was to record some 22 fiddle tunes which I did with a couple collaborators on guitar.

So why not travel with the instrument now?  Really it comes down to a couple logistical issues, starting with post-9/11 hassles and airline baggage restrictions.  For a time in the mid-2000s musicians all over America were complaining that the airlines were, in some cases, forcing them to check their instruments in the cargo hold.  Though that era seems thankfully to have passed, more recently the airlines have become very strict about the size and number of carry on bags they allow, and they charge about $25 for each bag over that they require you to check in.

Secondly, my first two trips to Central America in 2008 and 2009 were only two weeks in length.  Because of some uncertainty regarding the difficulties of bus travel in the region, and since I anticipated that I wouldn't use my instrument very much--if at all--  I decided then to leave the violin home and travel only with a small backpack and a day bag.  This turned out to be the most convenient way to get around, but especially on the airlines and on some of the notorious "chicken" buses (they just keep packing them in like Colonel Sanders) in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and neighboring countries.  I have to admit that questions of security also weighed heavily in my mind:  would I lose my instrument to forgetfulness (a life-long nightmare of mine)?  Even worse, would I lose it to theft?  It didn't seem to be worth the risk for trips of such short duration.  Yet I also must admit that I felt very strange traveling without my fiddle on those two occasions.

What about this trip now, which is seven weeks long?  Well, I'm still dealing with the issues outlined above, but a major difference now is I'm taking a lot more time with this journey, so now the question has reasserted itself.  And with my arrival in Perquin, it seems a shame that I won't be able to get to know the villagers and their children by offering up some fine impromptu fiddle music for their entertainment and enjoyment.  Music has always been a cross cultural way to break the ice and form some connection with strangers.  And that I'm not doing so on this trip is indeed a bit disconcerting for me.

This question certainly will pop up again whenever I decided to take more than a week or two in a given region.  I would like to find a way to travel again with a backpack, a day bag, and an instrument, but for the moment I'm glad I don't have to worry about an expensive violin, and how I'm going to transport it safely on the next crowded, rattletrap of a bus I board.