the hum / By Bob Doran

Thanks

Reggae at the Mateel, a touch of rock and a Hendrix reverie

(Nov. 22, 2007)  Hey, thanks for picking the paper up on this Thanksgiving weekend, and happy Thanksgiving to you, our readers. Without you — well, I’d probably still be slaving over a hot stove and carving turkey at some local eatery.

As you might guess, the Thanksgiving holiday tends to put a crimp in the local entertainment scene. A fair number of clubs and cafés are closing up shop for the weekend so everyone can feast on the big bird and watch football, and/or eat tofurky and take a healthy walk in the woods, or maybe just hang with the family. But there is still a little bit of action on the music front.

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The Mateel has a show Friday night, the day after turkey day, something they’re calling Give Thanks: A NorCal Reggae Showcase. The “thanks” is partly because the show takes place the day after Thanksgiving, but it’s also a request aimed at those who want to see the Mateel survive the hard times it’s going through.

On Tuesday of this week, after the Journal went to press, the Mateel Community Center held its annual membership meeting. You might remember last year’s annual, a seriously contentious affair that sent shockwaves through the SoHum community and set in motion aftershocks that are rolling to this day. (See “SoHum in Counseling,” Nov. 23, 2006, and reggaeblog.wordpress.com.) The courts are working on divining the meaning of things that were said that night at the Mateel. Without going into detail, we’ll say that fateful meeting marked the beginning of the end to the long, complicated relationship between the Mateel and Carol Bruno of People Productions.

As indicated on the Mateel website, the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting included “a 2006 financial report and current state of the organization summary, hall and event review for ‘06/‘07, and a board of directors’ report…”

It was an eventful year for the Mateel, not a particularly good year. The reports likely made for an interesting meeting. An educated guess on the financial report says the nonprofit is pretty much broke. After decades of dependence on cash generated by Reggae on the River for operating funds, the river has run dry. Forgive me if I skip the details as to how and why this happened. It’s an extremely complicated story and whatever I say would undoubtedly piss someone off.

Let’s just say the Mateel needs money. Thus the need for a series of successful fundraisers, the Friday show among them. As laid out by Justin Crellin, currently the Mateel’s sole paid staff member (although he says he hasn’t even been paying himself), the organization’s year-end plan is ambitious. They say they’d like to pull together $75,000 by the end of December, which, says Justin, should be enough to put a “sustainable staffing model in place,” funding four positions (plus an accountant) with enough left to provide seed money for events in 2008 like the Summer Arts Fest. The Winter Arts Fair is coming up and that should bring in a few bucks, but Justin is banking on the generosity of SoHum reggae fans out in the hills, hoping they’ll come down and come through Friday and use the sliding scale admission to make some sizable donations.

So, what is this NorCal reggae showcase? It’s a collection of Cali bands: Creation, aka Creation Reggae Music Show Band, is up from the S.F. Bay Area with some authentic Virgin Islands/Jamaican-style roots. Tchiya Amet and The Lighthouse Band come from Mendo. You might have heard Tchiya if you went to Reggae in 2001. I met her backstage and learned a bit about her. She came to reggae by a different path from most, grew up in urban Chicago, blues country, but took a different direction when she discovered her Native American roots and reggae music. Lately she’s been pursuing the New Age (yet ancient) practice of acutonics, an Egyptian healing arts akin to acupuncture that involves applying tuning forks to pressure points. Me, I’m wondering about the healing power of a gut-rocking reggae bassline.

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