the hum / By Bob Doran

abstract dissident

Ivan Ives’s Newspeak, plus Blues Traveler and Cheb i Sabbah

(May 28, 2009)  He calls his new album Newspeak, a reference to George Orwell’s 1984 that’s far from accidental. Ivan Ives was born in Russia, son of a dissident artist. “My dad’s still not welcome there,” he told me, calling from L.A. “Even though it’s kind of a democracy now, there’s still a lot of KGB around and they remember him. He’s a painter and was very anti-Communist, anti-what-was-going-on, and was very vocal. He was persecuted in many ways: He was wiretapped. People hid in his walls. He was imprisoned and was going to serve for a long time, but managed to get out and get to Brooklyn.”

That was where Ivan spent his early years, in the hotbed of hip hop, but his music career began in Los Angeles, where his family relocated. “I grew up listening to hip hop and liked rap the best, but went through this phase where I wanted to be in a band, blah, blah, blah. I did the whole rock-band-in-high-school thing until I realized I can’t sing for shit really — that wasn’t my path. From that I transitioned into making hip hop, not just listening.”

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Now 25, Ivan is not exactly a dissident, but you can tell from the articulate raps he crafts that he’s influenced by his father and is firmly anti-what’s-going-on. He’s well aware of Orwellian thoughtcrimes and, in his own way, uses newspeak to address them. “I’m trying to touch on things like that, but indirectly,” he said. “Honestly, I’ve heard a lot of tracks about George Bush this, George Bush that. It’s kind of boring to me. I don’t see any point in going over it again and again. I’m starting to delve slightly into politics with this album, but in kind of an abstract way. Because of what [my dad] went through, fighting the government, he’s always told me to ignore the government and ignore politics because it’s all bullshit anyway.”

Is your interest piqued? You can hear more of what Ivan has to say (much more) when he lays down his raps at the Red Fox Friday night alongside Scarub (of Living Legends) and The Afro Classics.

It started with The Establishment, a blues-rock garage band with harp player/vocalist John Popper, guitarist Chan Kinchla and drummer Brendan Hill that came together in Princeton, N.J. 20-some-odd years ago. Before long they changed the name to the generic Blues Band, then to the slightly more distinctive Blues Traveler. With help from allies like Bill Graham and David Letterman, the band eventually achieved big time fame, recorded a fair number of albums (including the recent North Hollywood Shootout), showed up on movie soundtracks and TV and played a helluva lot of live shows. By the early ′90s, the band had mastered the art of Dead-esque song transition and managed to tap into the then-nascent jamband circuit. They founded the H.O.R.D.E. tour, an anti-Lollapalooza jamfest that included bands like Phish.

Though it all, the live show was the thing. Fans have been trading recordings for ages — the band includes streams of over 600 shows on their website (bluestraveler.net). On that front, B.T. has it down — as noted by Wikipedia, “On their current tour, Blues Traveler sells recordings of that very night’s performance. Fans can pre-purchase a copy of the show until 30 minutes into the performance and then pick up the CD after the show.” That apparently includes the show this Thursday, May 28, at the Arkley Center. As we go to press, tickets are still available.

Elsewhere Thursday, May 28, The Invasions (now just James with a drum machine) return to the Lil’ Red Lion with Portland “psyche/trance/Afrobeat” band, Million Brazilians and Fake Lake, a “crazy sax noise pop” band from Baltimore.

I picked up the CD at a yard sale some time ago; it had no case and no name on the label, but the Arabic-tribal art work showed promise, and it was on Six Degrees, a cool world music purveyor, so I took a chance. When I stuck it in my computer, iTunes told me it was by Cheb i Sabbah, a Berber club DJ originally from Algeria, who pioneered the use of Arabic, African and Asian beats and post-tribal music in his own dancefloor mixes, then found his music remixed by DJs like Loop Guru, Bassnectar and the Transglobal Underground crew. I got to hear him live a while back at an HSU music festival, but the setting was wrong — his music wasn’t right for daytime on the HSU Quad. It’s better suited to a dark club like Nocturnum, which is where he’ll be playing for dancers Saturday nightwith special guest DJ Chlorofill.

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