Crossing all the Boundaries: NovaMenco and "When the Dead Come Alive"

One of my favorite holidays is now Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. Growing up, I always knew this day as Halloween, but of course I never understood the significance of the ancient tradition. Halloween to my young self was a fantastical time when I dressed up in a costume and walked the streets, ringing doorbells and hoping that I would get free candy. It wasn't until I began living in areas with a significant number of Hispanic people that I began to understand the full significance of the holiday. And as a kid, how could I know the ancient antecedents of the holiday. My parents didn't know, and nobody I knew had that type of historical knowledge.

What appeals to me know about Halloween, and Day of the Dead, is the idea that for a brief period the lines between worlds blur and even disappear. In the Gaelic/Celtic tradition, as the days wind down to the end of the harvest, the boundaries between worlds grows weaker until, for a day, faeries can cross over into our world. Lest you think that faeries are small, good sprites, in Celtic mythology they take on a bit more of a complex character, and have been known to steal children and take them back to the faerie world. At this time, spirits and demons could also walk the earth, interacting with living people and causing havoc on occasion.

What I love about Dia de los Muertos is that it puts a more positive spin on this idea of spirits roaming the earth. In some ways, it seems that the theme of this particular holiday is that the spirits are lost because they have crossed back into our world. The spirits are those of our loved ones passed away, and instead of fearing them, we can lay guideposts for them to come to join us in a meal and see once again their precious possessions and family. Many families put together altars, called ofrendas, and sprinkle them with marigolds which are believed to be brightly visible to spirits from the other world and beacons to them. The ofrendas contain offerings of food and those objects that were important to the spirits when they were alive.

In Albuquerque, a very nice parade takes place in the South Valley. Named the Marigold Parade, participants march painted as skeletons, their faces painted as grinning death masks called calaveras. It is a reminder that death and life are very intertwined...after all we will spend most of the universe's existence in death. The parade ends at a community center which is filled with ofrendas that deliver social messages. I've seen those ofrendas take on environmental messages (death of the earth), commemorate people important in Albuquerque's and the South Valley's history, and one year a very moving and tragic one commemorating the newly discovered but previously forgotten victims of a unknown serial killer who murdered a number of Albuquerque women over many years and buried them in shallow graves on the mesa to the city's west.

Megan and I celebrate Day of the Dead on the KUNM Global Music Show during our first Monday of November by playing global songs referencing death, spirits, and Dia de Los Muertos or its equivalent in other cultures. We first happened upon NovaMenco's tune When the Dead Come Alive for one of those shows. NovaMenco is a family of musicians based in San Diego. Started in 1995, they mix jazz and Mediterranean-style music, and even more currently funk, rumba and classical music with flamenco, creating a modern, innovative take on traditional flamenco styles. They have performed in some of the heavyweight jazz festivals around the world, including the Newport Jazz Festival. I don't know why, but flamenco music like this in a minor key always reminded me in some way of a macabre dance, and I even sometimes think that actual flamenco dancing with its twirling and stomping and sexual suggestiveness somehow encompassed all of life and death, so it was fun to find a song that even referenced death in the title. You can almost picture, listening to When the Dead Come Alive from their 1998 album Flight to Paradise, the dead rising up again to dance in our reality in glad abandon on a late October evening until the curtain draws over them and conceals their world for another year.