The tango is a dance that originated in Argentina. It is also the name of the latest album by SONiA & disappear fear and represents their “dance with the world.”
Featuring 13 songs sung in Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and English, Tango has a very different aural feel from smoky-voiced, Baltimore-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Sonia Rutstein’s previous recordings, both solo and with disappear fear. Its Latin and Middle Eastern rhythms and instrumentation — featuring the indigenous sounds of djembes, tin whistles, violins and acoustic guitars — punctuate and lend new textures to her impassioned music. Included are several songs whose folk-rock melodies will be familiar to those who have come to know and love SONiA’s music over the past 20 years.
“Fans that I have around the world have learned my songs in English,” said SONiA, during a wide-ranging phone interview this week. “I thought it would be nice to do them in their languages.” Lyrics in all four languages appear in a 24-page booklet that accompanies the CD. SONiA named the album Tango because “it is the only word that is the same in all four languages,” she noted.
Seeking to Bring the World Closer Together Through Music
“We think in languages. It very much carves out our world for us,” says SONiA, who claims she is trying, “in a small way, to bring the world closer together” through her music. She noted her dismay to learn that only six out of 1,000 U.S. employees engaged in diplomatic work with Iraq today speak Arabic.
“Arabic and Hebrew are around 6,000 years old. They’re very different languages. So you can understand why they get misunderstood,” said SONiA, who has sought to bridge the cultures. “Maybe if John Lennon was making an album in 2007, he might be singing in Arabic too, and for the same reasons,” opined the socially conscious, dreadlocked troubadour and unabashed progressive, who wears her heart and her politics on her sleeve as she makes her own impassioned pleas for peace. “I like to think that I’m walking in his footsteps, both musically and, even more so, with his idea of peace and his visions of the world.”
SONiA & disappear fear launch a 40-city North American tour to promote Tango on September 29, with a concert before a hometown crowd at the Gordon Center in Owings Mills, Maryland, near Baltimore. SONiA and her musical partner, Laura Cerulli, will travel to venues from Baltimore to Vancouver, down to Los Angeles, and back across the U.S. “in a trusty van that already has more than 290,000 miles on it,” according to SONiA. Shortly after their last U.S. tour date on December 30, the two head to Australia for a couple of months and may also tour New Zealand and Singapore.
“Were going to be bringing a 77-key piano-keyboard with us on this tour,” SONiA noted. “The tone is nice, and it doesn’t weigh 1,000 pounds. The technology has made it possible for me to schlep it around.”
Tango opens with a Spanish rendition of “Sexual Telepathy,” a love song that has been a staple of disappear fear’s live shows for years and appears, in English, on several of SONiA and disappear fear’s previous releases. “It is just a hot, fun song that I’ve always wanted to do in Spanish,” said SONiA. “It just turns people on. I think it was just a nice way to start off the CD.”
SONiA, 48, says she’s always loved Latin music, and she has included one or two songs with a Latin feel and occasional verses in Spanish on her previous albums. She initially had considered doing a CD entirely in Spanish. But that changed following an inspiring trip to the Middle East last summer, during which SONiA spent time in both “miklats” (bomb shelters) in Israel and Palestinian villages and camps. Seven of Tango’s tracks are sung in Spanish; three are in Hebrew, and three are in Arabic and English.
Middle East Peace is on SONiA’s Mind
“My experience last summer, while in Northern Israel and the West Bank, was the big thing that shaped the making of this CD,” SONiA acknowledged. “The world is in major conflict, with all eyes focused on the Middle East,” she continued. “I wanted to share my experience of being in a war armed with a guitar, rather than a rocket launcher,” said the artist who has been using her heartfelt, poignant and often politically pointed music, at least in part, to press for peace and equality. “Music speaks from the heart, and that is where peace lives,” she asserts.
“In the United States, we’re engaged in a war on terror. Terror is an idea. You can’t shoot an idea down with guns,” maintains SONiA. “If you react to terror with guns, then the terrorists have won the war. But if you react to terror with guitars, then you are creating peace — and that’s the only way to eliminate terror.”
A congregant of Congregation Beit Tikvah in Baltimore, SONiA acknowledges her belief in Israel as the Jewish state. However, she believes “there is room for a Palestinian state and for a Jewish state. Land is land, and peace is most important. To kill to have access to certain sites is not what was ordained. I think what was ordained is peace. I believe there should be two states… and respect above all.”
As Beit Tikvah’s Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton (a former opera singer and cantor, whose voice can be heard on Tango), told the Baltimore Jewish Times recently, “She [SONiA] is calling upon us to pay attention to how we are in the world and how we should walk this earth.” A writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer has suggested that “Sonia Rutstein has the potential to have a greater impact for good on the Middle East than the entire Bush Administration.”
Recalling her first concert performance in the Mideast, SONiA said that girls in the West Bank wanted her guitar. She promised them one and, indeed, had a guitar sent over. That experience, coupled with her deeply held belief in the power of music to unite people, prompted SONiA to create a foundation called Guitars for Peace. Its aim is to get acoustic guitars into the hands of children in war-torn countries, particularly those in the Middle East. Although the foundation is still in its formative stages, SONiA expects to ratchet things up over the next year. She plans to tour Israel again in May and is creating an illustrated, multilingual guitar instruction book.
disappear fear Began in 1987
2007 marks 20 years since SONiA initially launched disappear fear as a folk-rock duo with her sister, Cindy Frank, with whom she released four albums. Frank has not been performing regularly with her for the past decade, having left the band to pursue motherhood, although she does join disappear fear in concert occasionally. In the years since, SONiA has released several solo albums, and in 2005 recreated disappear fear with Cerulli on drums, percussion and harmony vocals.
Explaining how the name disappear fear evolved, SONiA said, “When you disappear fear between people, what you have is love. It empowers me to do what I do.” She said, “The essence of disappear fear, and really why I went to Israel during the war, was to see if the name was just la di da, with no substance to it, or if I was going to live into it.” Clearly, SONiA embodies the concept of disappear fear.
Committed also to helping eradicate world hunger and poverty, SONiA gives 18 percent of the proceeds from music downloads on the disapperfear.com website to the United Nations World Food Project. “The reason for the 18 percent is it’s the number (‘Chai” in Hebrew) that signifies life,” she asserts. “It’s a powerful number. It’s a process of “tikkun olam,” healing the world and easy to do. People get the music forever and also help contribute to the betterment of the world — by helping lift children out of poverty and ending world hunger.” As SONiA views it, this is a way for those who love her music to feed their souls while also helping to feed the hungry. She expressed hope that iTunes would follow suit “to help eradicate maybe all of hunger.”
SONiA Paints with Words & with a Brush
Besides being a gifted singer-songwriter who paints with words, SONiA also is a visual artist. The 24-page booklet included with Tango features images that she painted, as digitally captured and graphically manipulated by Cerulli, who also is a graphic artist. “Tango is thoroughly a joint collaboration of our creative abilities, musically and otherwise,” says the artist. She views the watercolor backgrounds on which the lyrics appear as setting or reflecting the tone of the album — with the more vibrant reds, oranges and yellows corresponding with the Latin sound, and the warmer textures and tones associated with the Middle East. SONiA has been painting for years. She takes particular pride in a recurring theme of “kissing guitars” — two guitars bending into each other’s shapes.
Although her current focus is “mostly bringing Tango to the world,” SONiA also plans to work on her Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish skills. “As time goes on, there may be other songs that I’ll translate. It’s different and it’s really fun,” she said.
SONiA also has written several soundtracks for film. These include last year’s “Autumn’s Harvest,” a short documentary by Dave Marshall, chronicling the life of a migrant worker who is HIV positive, that is being screened at film festivals the world over. She hopes to contribute to more soundtracks in the future. “Writing music for film is quite different. You have to zone into the moment and the message,” she said.
But for the moment and the near future, SONiA is focused on touring in support of Tango and plans to keep spreading the message of love, peace and equality through her music.
Discography:
Disappear fear: Tango (2007), DF05 Live (2005), Seed in the Sahara (1996), Live at the Bottom Line (1995), Deep Soul Diver (1995), disappear fear (1994), Echo My Call (1988)
SONiA (solo): No Bomb is Smart (2004), Live at the Down Home (2003), Me, Too (2002), Almost Chocolate (1997)
Compilations: The Songs of Phil Ochs
For more information and a tour schedule, log on to www.disappearfear.com
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