You Start All Over Again

Follow your own advice, or else you'll end up like me.

I'm quick to remind others to back-up their data, and yet there I was, caught with my pants down when my MacBook's hard drive fried last week. I still have a terabyte of musical zeros and ones saved on my external, but I lost a full year's worth of as-of-yet unpublished academic research.

In retrospect, I should have followed through with my previous commitment to blog everyday while we recorded the album, but I was frustrated with how un-conclusive my words were at the time. I still wrote everyday, but instead of posting my half-thoughts online, I let them incubate and evolve privately in TextEdit. Then my computer crashed, and now I'm staring at blank page.

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"What happens when you lose everything? /
You just start again / You start all over again"

My name is Canyon Cody. In 2007, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to explore the multicultural roots of the "indigenous" music of Andalucía. My project began with a childhood curiosity about my family's path to California, which I retraced backwards from the US to Cuba and then to Spain. Since immigrants (particularly refugees) tend to travel light, our histories are preserved through the collective memory of intangible patrimonies such as language, cuisine and music. Rice and beans, rhymes and beats connected my past to my present and formed the foundation of my identity as a first generation American. When I begin to think of who I am and who 'we' is, I think of my grandfather's wedding ring tapping the 3:2 son clave rhythm against his coffee mug.

I chose Andalucía in particular because of its dynamic history of immigration. As the point of convergence between Europe, Africa and the New World, the Iberian Peninsula has been considered "home" by a diverse range of cultures over the past few thousand years, which for the sake of my project, I've partitioned in three general periods:

First, I studied musicians' role in the "convivencia" of Christian, Jews and Muslims in Al-Andalus between 711 and 1492. Standing on the shoulder of giants, my project was largely based on previous research by Dwight Reynolds, an Ethnomusicology and Religious Studies professor at UCSB who recently finished a sabbatical year in Granada researching this very topic.

Second, I explored Andalusian music(s) during its period of (relative) isolation, between the "reconquista" in 1492 and Spain's incorporation into the EU in 1986. This period begins with both the expulsion of the Moors and the arrival of gitanos (Spanish gypsies), and eventually leads to the development of flamenco and the re-plantation of Arab-Andalusian music in Algeria and Morocco.

Third, I experimented with the (post)-modern fusion of musical cultures, collaborating with the diverse community of immigrant musicians currently living in Granada to record an sample-based hip-hop album that builds on the rich history of multiculturalism in Andalusía.

... then my computer crashed. Take 2!