Forked Tongue

by Revolutionary Snake Ensemble
Wayside Music, Silver Spring, MD, 2009
CD, Cuneiform Rune 269, $15 US
Distributor’s website: http://www.cuneiformrecords.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Besides New Orleans' famous piano music of Tuts Washington, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and more, there's the tradition of the marching band. Caribbean syncopation, a mix of African and Spanish beats, and brass pneumatics suitable for funerals and Mardi Gras. Though Ken Field is from Boston, with his Revolutionary Snake Ensemble he does a good job of conjuring up Louisiana's Crescent City. The "Forked Tongue" CD opens with "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," which carries us to the graveyard, above the daily strife and New Orleans water level. Upon arrival, it then breaks into a second line rave-up on its nostalgic holiday return. I danced away several dead ancestors with this one.

The band plays a melancholy "Down by the Riverside," featuring Gabrielle Agachiko's vocals. After 2005, such a sad song can't be heard without serving as an elegy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and neglectful aftermath. Poignancy is added with tango percussion, where suddenly it evokes not only civil rights (and daily life) struggle in southern US but Argentine activists imprisoned or "disappeared."

"The Large S" has a premier horn band's very cool break, worthy of James Brown's JBs, the Average White Band or New Orleans' Meters. It dissolves in the shimmering bleats and gooey glacial drips of a reassuring tight funk machine. "Chippie" boasts deft horn charts and highly skilled improvisation. We are given Trinidad's "Brown Skin Gal," and Field finds an understated mystery fluttering through "Little Liza Jane". "Que Sera Sera" becomes a stately calypso march at a Brazilian carnival, percolating with that Iko Iko Bo Diddley beat.

The band’s fun, college marching band version of Billy Idol's "White Wedding" was originally performed for a wedding in a family named White. It could be an outro to the commercial on a late night TV talk show. Sultry as a 1950s cop show theme, perhaps it could bookend a police drama featuring a drunken "Billy Idol, P.I." if he slicked back his spiky hair.

They end with a studious, head-nodding math-march, ending abruptly. I first listened to this CD on a cold gray day, and whenever it spins, it brings a smile. Dressed in spangles, dongles and dangles, one imagines (with envy) the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble spicing up technology industry corporate parties in the Boston suburbs.