Things to Do in Portland This Week
The British funk band Cymande is on tour for the first time since 1974.
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Most people find the British funk band Cymande indirectly. Before its current reunion tour, which is coming to the Aladdin Theater Sunday, February 23, the band lived for only a short run in the early ’70s. The three albums it produced have lived much longer—as samples in some of the biggest classic hip-hop songs, including from De La Soul, Gang Starr, the Sugarhill Gang, Wu-Tang Clan, and literally dozens of others. I first heard their song “Bra” as a 10-year-old while watching Free Your Mind, a video Transworld Skateboarding magazine put out in 2003.
“We have been left outside,” goes one verse, “looking at passions dying.” Formed in London by bassist Steve Scipio and guitarist Patrick Patterson, the band stretched to include as many as nine members, all from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and sang in silky harmony over racing bongos, a strong horn section, and Scipio’s ever-thumping bass about immigration struggles and racism, though always with a hopeful air. “But it’s alright,” the group repeats on the chorus in “Bra,” “you can still go on.”
Despite touring with Al Green in the US, the band couldn’t find a steady audience in Britain; in a recent interview with The New York Times, Scipio and Patterson said racist audiences forced the group to disband in 1974. Scipio, now 74, and Patterson, now 75, are the only original members playing on the band’s duly named new album, Renascence, its first major release since 1974. They both found alternate careers as lawyers in the Caribbean; Scipio was Anguilla’s attorney general at one point. And the clarity they found outside the music business shows up on the new album. A funky keyboard bobs on a riff to open its first track, “Chasing an Empty Dream.” Bongos follow, then shakers and Scipio’s bass join, solid as 50 years ago.
More Things to Do This Week
movies I’m Still Here
Various times | Cinema 21, $8–11
Brazilian director Walter Salles’s latest film, I’m Still Here, is a political drama set in 1970 Rio de Janeiro. It’s currently up for three Oscars, and stars Fernanda Torres, who’s already won a Golden Globe for her role. Torres plays Eunice, a mother of five whose politician husband is abducted by a military dictatorship. In the face of a brutal occupying force, she insists on providing a life for her children, and some semblance of normalcy. “She is a woman whose life has been ripped to shreds, deciding that she will not be cowed,” Alissa Wilkinson writes in a New York Times review.
books Omar El Akkad
7pm Tue, Feb 25 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
Before moving to Portland and writing two critically adored novels, American War (2017) and What Strange Paradise (2021), El Akkad spent a decade reporting internationally for Canada’s newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail. In his latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad returns to nonfiction, combining his decade of firsthand reporting with his personal experience as an Arab man to refute the stories of equality America tells about itself. “El Akkad draws a bead on America’s romantic image of itself as the defiant rebel, and as a nation that holds equality as a fundamental human right,” Diana Abu-Jaber writes in a recent review for Portland Monthly, “while arguing the US has become the very thing it revolted against: the British Empire.”
music Tyler, The Creator
7:30pm Wed, Feb 26 | Moda Center, $164–295+
Love him or hate him, Tyler, The Creator is one of the most impactful cultural players of America’s past decade. From hanging out with Frank Ocean and Syd in his Odd Future days to the Adult Swim show to the clothing line, he’s continually exploded the concept of what a celebrity is supposed to be. It’s fitting, then, that Chromakopia, his eighth solo record, is all about killing his past personas to make room for his latest vision. Lil Yachty and Paris Texas open this Moda Center show.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- City of Possibility, an exhibit of architectural models tied to a progressive series of panels on local development. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
- The Goonies II, or whatever they decide to call it. (Oregonian)
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