Travel Possibility

One of the great things about music and performance festivals is they can introduce you to a bunch of new acts. You can pick the ones you like, and follow them to wherever they might be playing next. One of the best things about festivals in New York City is that the chances of the groups coming back to the city are always very good.

Last year’s New York Gypsy Festival had that effect on a lot of people. Seder Ilhan and Mehmet Dede, the festival producers, have a long list of acts playing Gypsy music that they’ve introduced to the people of the city, and this festival is a kind of golden nugget version of what they do. Balkan Beat Box and Gogol Bordello have worked with them, to great effect, too, helping to move the notions of folklore off the table so that the Dionysian-trance effects of the violin in the music could enter the bloodstreams of the crowds. That’s changed the nature of the way we hear the music.

The funny part about it all is that these variations of the music are sometimes read as a gimmick, and really it’s not a gimmick, but the roots. No one from that side of the river has ever been able to gauge music’s pulse properly, anyway, and so it stands today in a new light, and a new dawn.

The show last year brought some familiar faces from the scene to town, with musicians like the excellent Rhythm of Rajasthan. But it also brought Little Cow to town again, and that’s sparked a lot of attention. This is a band from Budapest, also doing a mix of folk tradition with contemporary dada, and suddenly, we see we are at the crest of a wave.

There are more than enough reasons to visit the city. With the restaurants and five star new york hotels , any time of year is the perfect time. With this music in the background, however, there’s more reason than ever, and something in the pulse of India is getting into the mechanisms here, making the clocks tick a split second too fast.

It’s perhaps a little unreasonable to think of Patti Smith as a pop iconoclast, but that’s a title that often follows her wherever she goes. Better titles might be along the lines that recognize her contributions to straight-up rock and roll, and punk, as well as the logical heiress to the legacy of the symbolist poets that inform so much of her work and world-view. Whatever she might be, she is also part of the fabric of New York City.

Even though she’s from Detroit, and returned there famously, in what struck many as a sudden retreat from catching a very hot rising star, her imprints are all over the urban landscape. This comes very clear, and painted in poignant and elegant ways, with the release of her new book, Just Kids . It’s an event that’s caught the attention of many rock and roll historiographers, not to mention the likes of the New York Public Library.

The writings here remind the world of her early days in the city, when she lived at the Chelsea with Robert Mapplethorpe , when the rent was cheap, and bohemia was waiting for its next reinvention. The two of them reinvented it boldly, madly, and deeply, inflecting it with their own inner visions that fluctuated between turmoil and ecstasy. She was striking then, as much as now, causing an aging Salvador Dali to remark that she looked like a crow, another label that stuck.

Labels do follow her, but she somehow manages to throw them all off with an unusual grace and introversion, suggesting that the soul of a poet never gets older, and never burns out. Her early years here with the controversial and brilliant photographer remind that even the most audacious artists have insecurities, and moments when falling seems immanent. Those visiting the city, seeing it from New York luxury hotels , can still find traces of the younger Patti Smith here. In part, this is because the story is still unfolding, and the footprints are as fresh as they ever were.