The Rain is a Handsome Animal

Tuesday night djembe lessons notwithstanding, the Netherlands isn't really known for its music scene.

That is not to say that it's not a country full of musical people: lots of people sing or play in bands of the amateur and semi-amateur variety.

There are also a surprising number of Black Gospel choirs in Holland.

To the point where Dutch high schools offer black gospel choir as an extracurricular activity, the same way that an American high school might have jazz band.

Intellectually, I know there is absolutely nothing wrong with a bunch of Dutch people singing American Black Gospel music. At a gut level, though, it gets me every time.

I can't help but feel that it's part of a larger, more interesting relationship that the Dutch have with race in general and black people in particular.

I wish I could articulate what that relationship was, exactly, but it's more than a little confounding to interpret or discuss.

It doesn't help that my Dutch vocabulary is really oriented toward things that are slightly more concrete than, say, racial identity and cultural fetishism.

For now, I can only offer my overwhelming feeling that the relationship is...complicated.

Which brings me, of course, to everyone's favorite holiday helper (and/or former slave): Zwarte Piet.

It feels like just last month that the streets were brimming with young people wearing velvety minstrel outfits, feathered caps, and blackface.

But really, time flies when you're having fun!

That carnival of political correctness took place a full year ago, and with the 2010 Sinterklaas holiday less than a month away, the Black Pete paraphernalia is out in full force once again.

Last week, on my bicycle commute from the train station to work, I rode by the City of Zeist's lone movie theater.

I nearly drove headfirst into the gutter when I saw the following movie poster out of the corner of my eye:

This heartwarming family movie called Sinterklaas and the Packages Mystery features a cast of not one but ten different Black Petes.

To get the full effect — and to see the Petes in all of their (vaguely) diverse glory — you really have to watch the trailer. And unlike most of the other dreck I post here, it actually is worth wasting the two minutes of your life.

Or at very least, the one minute and twenty second it takes until they get through all of the Petes.

And, I would add, it's a great opportunity to hear spoken Dutch, if you haven't experienced that particular auditory delight.

Here's the basic plot, in case you want to follow along at home:

One of the Black Petes assures Santa that the hangar where they store all of the presents is full, only to find that someone (namely, an evil villainess with an evil villainess laugh that doesn't require any translation) has taken them all.

Madness, villainy, and a happy ending ensue. And there are a few catchy musical numbers for good measure.

John's reaction to this trailer, which I sprung on him without warning while sitting on the couch on Sunday morning in our pajamas?

"You know, sometimes, I think I'm used to everything here, and then something like this comes along."

This is not to say that Black Pete and Black Gospel choirs made up of Dutch people are in the same category.

As cringe-inducing as it may be to the naked eye, my sense is that the latter are a genuine celebration of African-American music and culture.

You know, in an imitation is the sincerest form of flattery sort of way.

But going back to my original thought about the Netherlands not having a huge music scene...

Even though one doesn't often hear about world-famous Dutch composers or cutting-edge musical groups (or, God help us, Dutch rock stars), we're discovering that there are a number of smaller concert halls in the Netherlands that are surprisingly broad and sophisticated in their musical offerings.

We recently found, for example, that the Toonzaal in Den Bosch offers a huge array of jazz and pretty exciting (at least to us) contemporary classical music — despite a concert hall that only seats about 50 people and its location in a city of only about 130,000.

To me, the Toonzaal is an example of what Europe, in general, gets right: through the glory of generous arts funding and a fondness for art for art's sake, they manage to support an entire season of festivals, concert series and other performances full of not-very-mainstream music.

And on Friday, we went to a Tin Hat concert at a world culture center in Utrecht called RASA.

Like the Toonzaal, RASA is an unassuming building tucked away on a side street.

It's the kind of place that you might miss, if, hypothetically speaking, it was dark and raining on a Friday night in Utrecht, especially if you were in a blissful, mildly catatonic state from an unexpectedly good sushi dinner down the street.

Ecstatic mini-rant alert!

Tin Hat is just amazing. Their work is sort of like the klezmer-flavored love child of Bill Frisell and Joseph Schwanter and Victor Piazzolla.

Just one piece doesn't really cut it, but here's at least a small sample:

They're one of those crazy genre-defying groups that keep coming up with new, brave, scary things. Their latest project, for example, is a series of compositions in which they set the poems of E.E. Cummings to music.

The concert was fantastic, and we were in heaven. Part of the reason for the heaven is that the music was just so damned good.

But we realized that another reason for being in heaven is that — in stark contrast to what happens when we're trying to navigate in a Dutch cultural context — we totally got it.

And by "it", I mean that we got the references to Bill Monroe and Bill Frisell. We got the mix of klezmer and blues guitar. And we got the E.E. Cummings poems.

Not because of any special knowledge on our part, but because those poems are part of our own culture, and we have a sense — more intuitive than intellectual — of who E.E. Cummings was, and how to understand his work, and how those poems affected us when we were younger than we are now.

It might sound a little weird, but we felt sort of proud, too.

As gaudy and embarrassing as American culture can be, there can also be an unmistakable freshness and creativity to it.

As John put it, it's hard not to feel like, "E.E. Cummings is awesome. Go America!"

I'm fairly certain that no one, in the history of human language, has uttered that particular phrase before.

But it really captures the way in which we sometimes experience these weird and largely unexpected flashes of patriotism.

Maybe we should have it printed on a t-shirt.