Another afternoon at UP

Thursday, 14 September 2012

Last night we went back to the University of the Philippines – Diliman for a concert of Philippine music from 1860-1930. This time we took a jeepney up Katipunan from the entrance of Miriam high school, right next to Ateneo. It was much, much easier than walking and our clothes were actually dry when we arrived. We made our way to The Chocolate Kiss café in the Bahay ng Alumni (Alumni House). There was some event going on so there were lots of students around.

We were overwhelmed with all the great-looking choices last week so we already knew what we wanted. I ordered an Indonesian dish with chicken in a peanut sauce. Super delicious. Grace ordered and assortment of smaller dishes, including some fresh lumpia (kind of like steamed eggrolls) and a soup with shrimp dumplings. There are still many more items we’re hoping to try.

On the recommendation of the waiter, we ordered a Sans Rival cake for dessert. This was described as "Crisp meringue-cashew nut wafers layered with fresh buttercream icing and more chopped cashews." When we bit into we discovered that “buttercream icing” actual means “butter.” Despite our time building up a tolerance in Wisconsin, we couldn’t quite handle the “icing.” You can see that we started to scrape some of it off already. The interior of the cake was decent but we were a little put off by the stick of butter coating it. 

The concert was fun and very well done. Since the evening was celebrating salon-style entertainment in late nineteenth century Philippines the stage was set up like the interior of someone’s home, complete with actors dressed in appropriate costumes. The actors/musicians would take turns getting up to perform their pieces while the others would sit on stage chatting, playing cards, dancing, and listening. The program started off with music from the 1860s and went all the way up to the 1930s. There were a few pieces from the 1920s that I was particularly interested in, including some foxtrots by Filipino composer Nicanor Abelardo. 

We met a number of people there, including the chair of the musicology department. He knows one of my professors back in Wisconsin quite well and took us under his wing, basically narrated the event for us, introduced me to a number of scholars (including someone working on the early recording industry in the Philippines) and then even drove us back to the entrance of Ateneo after the show. We walked back through campus to our apartment, a much more pleasurable trip than when we took a taxi through crazy traffic last week.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to finish up a chapter for an edited volume about an African-American musician named Jack Carter who was performing throughout Asia from 1924 to 1928. His first gig in Asia was replacing a drummer at the Manila Hotel in 1924 (here’s an ad for his arrival in The Manila Times from November 1924). 

One of the only photos I’ve been able to find of him comes from an American newspaper in Shanghai newspaper from December 1926. He’s pictured here with two of his stars: trumpeter, singer, and dancer Valaida Snow and pianist Teddy Weatherford. Getting settled into Manila has put me a little behind schedule so we’ll see if I can still make the deadline that’s coming up very quickly.