For the last 10 years, performances by the Zoppé Family Circus have been a much-loved and much-anticipated treat. Playing to packed houses and wowing kids and adults alike, the artists of Zoppé work with traditions that date back to the Circus’s founding in Italy in 1842.
This year’s run, however, reflects the new and current reality of 2020/21, and so the extravaganza has been reborn at the Zoppé Family Circus Drive-In. Instead of sitting under the big-top tent, the 2021 circus will allow audiences to enjoy the circus from the safety of their own vehicles, while the performers can be seen on an elevated stage and circus ring, as well as displayed live on large LED screens. Sound will be broadcast through car stereos, just like a traditional drive-in movie theater on FM radio, with minimal sound coming from the stage. The circus family will be welcoming cars for half an hour before each show, including an old-fashioned circus parade through the cars. Performers and acts for this year’s Circus include high-flying gymnastics, acrobatics, and feats of strength, all under the watchful eye of ringmaster Mace Perlman. Shows will run between January 15 and January 31. For tickets and showtimes, please visit the Mercado’s website.
It doesn’t take more than a glance at the news—and at the streets—to know that our country is suffering a crisis in racial and ethnic relations, especially with regard to the African American community. Recent incidents have pressed the point, and have opened the door to a long-overdue discussion that, we hope, will defang racism and bring about a new, better day.
Meanwhile, African Americans are suffering unduly from the many-pronged crisis that marks our time, with disproportionate casualties to the COVID–19 pandemic and disproportionate losses in what now appears to be a profound economic recession, perhaps the worst in nearly a century.
It’s against that backdrop that Tucson entrepreneur, event planner, and networker Ashley La Russa has assembled a database of Black-owned businesses here in Tucson. Working with artists, businesspeople, and activists Seanloui Dumas (Black Renaissance), Khailill Knight (KPMADMAN/BLAX), Shannoah Green (Curated Colour), Terrell Henry (Creative Collabs), and Cruiz (Cruiz Photos), she has developed an online directory to highlight those businesses, one that will be updated regularly.
The directory project is just a beginning. Says La Russa, “We’re working on having businesspeople develop a one-minute pitch about what they do and why people should seek them out.” On Friday, June 26, an inaugural event will be staged online at the BlaxFriday website. The website, launched today, will stream these presentations, and will be followed by regular events to encourage Tucsonans to buy local and support Black-owned businesses and venues, from the Downtown Clifton Hotel to Smokey Mo restaurant to Zo Carroll’s health-coaching enterprise, Dr. Sharon Lister-Green’s dental practice, and Barbea Williams’s legendary dance company.
To follow #BlaxFriday as these events unfold, find the group at Instagram (@blaxfriday). Visit the website of Black-owned businesses at BlaxFriday.com
“I hope we’ll help the Tucson community to realize that these businesses deserve our support,” says La Russa. We here at Zócalo share that hope.
Lydia Millet has lived in Tucson since 1999, a year before her second novel, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, appeared. In the years since, while working as a writer and editor for the Center for Biological Diversity, she has published 16 more books of fiction for young and adult readers. Of her latest, A Children’s Bible (Norton, $25.95), Washington Post books editor Ron Charles writes, “I swear on a stack of copies that it’s a blistering little classic: ‘Lord of the Flies’ for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet.” Alternately dark and comic, it’s told from the point of view of a young woman who grows to maturity in a time that, like our own, is full of threats and terrors—but also great beauty. Copies of the book are available at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.); call 792-3715 to reserve your copy for curbside pickup. Evoking a world of missing things that is all too recognizable, here’s a glimpse inside the covers. —Editor
By late winter all the vegetables we ate were coming from the hydroponic nursery and the indoor garden in the basement (what used to be the squash court). Fresh produce could no longer be ordered online—no refrigerated trucks were running, at least not for the average rich person in our neck of the woods—so we had to eat what we grew.
We didn’t have fruit, of course. We’d planted apple trees, but it’d be years before they were fruit-bearing: that planting was a Hail Mary. No citrus at all, and we missed our orange juice and lemonade. The parents missed their slices of lime.
And we had dry and canned goods, a trove far more extensive than the one in the silo. We had made sure of that.
When the day’s work was done we got into the habit of preparing dinner for everyone, with the help of some mothers whose highest-rated skills were cooking. We’d all sit around in the vast sunken living room of fake Italy, with its wall of glass that opened onto the patio and the pool. We held our plates on our laps, eating and talking about the things we missed. The peasant mother was allowed to recite a blessing. Nondenominational.
She’d turned out to be no one’s mother at all. All she had was the cat. But I still thought of her as the peasant one.
Then we’d go through our missings. That was what my little brother called them. We figured it was healthy, for the parents especially, not to try to deny the fact of what had been lost but to acknowledge it.
Someone would mention a colleague or an ex, a grandparent or a bicycle or a neighborhood or a store. A beach or a town or a movie. Someone would say “ice cream” and someone else would say “ice-cream sandwiches, Neapolitan,” and we’d riff on it, go down a list of favorite ice-cream novelties that couldn’t be had anymore for love or money.
Zócalo Magazine is currently on hiatus. We will be back in print when more of our marvelous advertisers and distribution outlets are unshut and experiencing more traffic. If you subscribe to the print magazine, your subscription will be extended. In the meantime, we’ll be working on some digital assignments which we hope to bring you in the coming weeks. Stay safe, Tucson. We love you. Stayed tuned.
We are terribly saddened to learn of the death of our friend Lisa Kanouse Art, a tremendously talented artist whose work appeared on the covers of Zócalo. Lisa was a thrill to work with and we were truly inspired by her enthusiastic embrace of Tucson’s culture, history, architecture and natural surroundings. RIP, Lisa.
The health crises is forcing many small Tucson businesses to think outside the box. Once such business, Why I Love Where I Live, was unable to launch their new physical store as planned, so they’ve decided to do it virtually instead! With the help of Zocalo Magazine’s publisher, they’ve created an innovative and interactive virtual shopping experience where you can “walk” through the new store and explore their products online. Check it out below!
NOTE: We regret to say that because of the current health crises, the Robbie Fulks/Slaid Cleaves show has been postponed until further notice. We’ll post the rescheduled date as soon as we know it.
Robbie Fulks is stuck in traffic on I–395 in the heart of Washington, DC, when I reach him by phone. It’s a familiar condition for him: he’s been a road warrior musician for decades now, usually mounting small tours by car that take him from city to city in a well-worn car. He’s in no hurry, which suits his amiable, relaxed manner of self-presentation, but even so, he’s relieved to hear that the highways leading to Tucson are a lot less crowded.
I’ve seen Robbie Fulks play in Chicago a couple of dozen times now, for it seems that every time I hit town he’s on one stage or another in his hometown. The tour he’s on now is taking him out to different corners of the country, especially in the South, from which he’ll head to Tucson, arriving here to play on April 2 at 191 Toole. (Tickets are available here, at $25.00.) Sharing the bill with him will be the Maine-by-way-of-Austin singer Slaid Cleaves, whom Fulks characterizes as “a fine guitarist and poet.”
For his part, Fulks’s tour commemorates the 25th anniversary of the release of his debut album, Country Love Songs, which is now being reissued on vinyl. It’s country, for sure, if filtered through the likes of Joe Ely and The Clash, marked by exceptionally literate songwriting dealing with country tropes such as death, as with “She Took a Lot of Pills (and Died),” and heartbreak, as with “Tears Only Run One Way.” Greil Marcus, the rock historian and critic, has called Fulks’s later composition “In Bristol Town One Bright Day” a bona fide classic of Americana, and it’s a haunting piece for sure, one that could have been written in the Scottish highlands or Appalachians in the 1700s instead of bowing in with Fulks’s 2001 release Couples in Trouble.
“From going to nothing with all the attention given to Country Love Songs was both ego-enhancing and stressful,” Fulks says. “But it’s given me a way to live my dream, which is to play whenever I want. Now, 25 years later, I’m going back to my roots, so expect to hear a lot of bluegrass- and country-flavored stuff.” When the show starts at 8:00, he says, either he or Cleaves will hit the stage—they’ll alternate playing first and second—and then the other will follow, with a third set featuring both artists playing together. Whatever they play and in whatever order, expect an impressive night of fretwork and songcraft. For a taste of Robbie Fulks’s music, see a recent mini-set at Chicago’s Audiotree, which opens with the supremely lovely song “Alabama at Night.”
“We can miss the ladies. Why do we miss the ladies? Because it has taken a really long time for women to get to the forefront of the music scene.”
Cathy Rivers, general manager of KXCI and a singer/songwriter/guitarist, reflects on a comment I just made about sending out interview questions to over 40 professionally established and talented women for this article, and I was still coming up with names of musicians I missed while we were chatting.
Rivers and I are sitting in her backyard, reviewing the Tucson music scene through the lens of local women artists over the last 30 years. The number of women performing has increased significantly from the 1990s to now.
As Maggie Golston, a singer/songwriter/guitarist and writing and humanities faculty at Pima Community College, shares: “Women songwriters and performers have positively dominated the scene of late, whereas in the ’80s and ’90s, having women and LGBTQ members made a band an exception, or worse, a novelty.”
Keyboardist/guitarist Uma deSilva, who plays with bands Max Parallax, Smallvox, and The Sapiens, notes that “there has been a strong wave of women coming into their own as musical powerhouses in the last decade. When I first joined the music scene in 2006, there weren’t many females making the kind of music I was trying to make. Any opportunity where female-led bands were playing, my band would get a call to join, but not necessarily because we fit the genre of the night’s show. I’ve performed in a few shows as a ‘token lady,’ but that doesn’t undermine the musicianship.”
Keyboardist/guitarist Uma deSilva shares that “there are some amazing younger ladies (in their teens) joining the stage and I can’t wait to see and hear more from them in the years to come. With all the seasoned professional female musicians here in Tucson, I can only imagine that more and more young ladies will gain the confidence to share their musical talent. I can’t wait to see what happens!”
photo: SpryTime
“In the ’90s and 2000s, there were very few local female-fronted bands,” singer/songwriter LeeAnne Savage explains, “and in turn many of us felt we were constantly fighting an uphill battle to be recognized and taken seriously. Women today are still fighting to be heard, however there is power in numbers and there are a lot of talented, energetic, fearless female artists that are making their mark in Tucson’s musical landscape! I am thrilled to see so many more women fronting and/or leading bands nowadays.”
Traction has been made insofar as balancing the gender scales on stage, though there’s still a lot of ground to cover to make things more equitable – gender wise and for women of color. Overwhelmingly, the musicians I contacted to contribute to this article – more than space allows – shared how supportive and talent-rich Tucson is, with a lot of opportunities for cross-pollination and craft development. However, there are still many issues that specifically vex women artists; there are glaring blind spots in a culture struggling with unconscious biases.
One bias in particular: “It is still a noteworthy aspect to be a female artist, and I do not think that should be the case,” shares vocalist Katherine Byrnes – a native Tucsonan who has been performing for the last 20 years. “We never say ‘the all male band’ or the ‘male artist,’ and it should be the same no matter what gender identity the artist has.”
Diane Van Deurzen and Lisa Otey, of The Desert Divas, agree. “Women artists don’t see themselves as ‘women artists’ until they look at a festival lineup or music calendar at local clubs and see only one woman on the bill. Fortunately, in Tucson, women artists don’t seem to feel held back by the oversight of these venues. As women, we have to make it happen for ourselves. You still see the token female act on many festival stages, not just in Tucson. We have to create our own opportunities. Our Desert Divas and Sabra Faulk’s Angel Band are examples of groups organized by local women who want to showcase other female musicians.”
“If you’re a musician and you’re building a bill, take a second look at the artists at the top,” advises Jillian Bessett of Jillian and the Giants. “Do you have women/femme people on the bill? Do you have people of color on the bill? If you don’t, think about whether it’s an anomaly or not. When was the last time you shared a bill with a woman or a person of color? If it’s been a while, ask yourself the difficult questions about your unconscious biases.”
Jillian Bessett, photo: Julius Schlosburg
Another bias that several musicians talk about surrounds sound.
“Stop with the assumptions about us,” asks vocalist Olivia Reardon. “Because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I don’t know how to turn on, set up and tear down the PA, or how to adjust the sound… because I can. As well as sing the hell out of a Zeppelin song.”
“The mansplaining. Oy,” groans Abby Corcoran of Moontrax and PIPELiGHTS. “This is rarely an issue for us in Tucson, however we encounter this often when we travel. We use a lot of electronic gear and it is wildly frustrating to have someone ‘teach’ us about a process with which they are unfamiliar. I know this sort of thing happens to female artists quite often. I wish our fellow male musicians would realize we are capable of plugging things in and pushing buttons as well.”
Violinist Samantha Bounkeua adds, “In live performance, it is far too often we are put in a position of being afraid to voice our concerns for fear that we would not be taken seriously or that the engineer we’re working with might passive aggressively sabotage the mix. This is why so many of have come to rely on and request very specific individuals who we know and trust, but those numbers are so few.”
“It’s always difficult to advocate for yourself, and especially when you’ve got that artistic vulnerable side, it’s even harder,” reflects Cathy Rivers. “I think that we need practice using our voices, and there are spaces for women to start having these conversations and together we should create more spaces to make this happen.”
It is also imperative that venues consider safety. Drummer Maggie Rickard of The Surfbroads and Sugar Stains explains that “women artists are frequently left vulnerable to fans that do not respect their personal or physical boundaries, especially after a performance. I appreciate any venue that offers some form of support to buffer these situations and step in to protect the artists when it is necessary.” Jillian Bessett offers that “a real practical solution would be security at clubs. If a club had a policy of having a staff member walking artists to their car if they’re alone, that would be such a comforting, proactive gesture.”
The beauty of the scene continues to be the cooperation and guidance musicians provide one another, through networks and groups – such as the Music Biz and Shoptalk Facebook group started by Jillian Bassett.
“I think this is a good time to be an independent female artist in Tucson,” shares vocalist and songwriter Najima Rainey of Just Najima, pictured above. “There is a community of supportive and experienced women who often support and boost other women in the scene. I literally would not have been able to record my CD if it hadn’t been for the kindness and encouragement of folx like Jillian Bessett, Miranda Schubert, Olivia Reardon, and other musicians who gave me advice and guidance the whole way through!”
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Gabi Montoya, who performs with Juju Fontaine, Taco Sauce and Gat Moony, says, “There’s a real sense of community, everyone makes an effort to reach out to up-and-comers and give others opportunities to get great gigs. There are growing communities of woman/non-binary, queer and Black musicians creating spaces and opportunities for each other, so the local scene is gradually becoming less of a boys’ club. Black Renaissance is an amazing new organization featuring Black musicians and creators around Tucson. Everyone should definitely follow them, because it feels like Black artists haven’t been given the same platforms in the Tucson scene, but this collective has made it impossible for us to ignore these incredibly talented artists anymore.”
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Gabi Montoya
It is vital to mention that so many men in the music scene do considerately and robustly embrace and uplift women musicians, and it is crucial that men remember that they need to continuously be allies.
KXCI’s Hannah Levin, host of The Home Stretch and director of content, states that “we need more male allies actively involved, visibly supporting female-identified artists. Share their work on social media, create space for them on bills and within live programming in general, and perhaps most importantly, recognize the privilege you have and the space you take up, literally and figuratively. This isn’t ‘women’s work,’ this is Tucson’s collective obligation if we want to be a truly inclusive creative community.”
Resources
To get involved with the Music Biz and Shoptalk Facebook group, email Jillian Bessett at jillianbessettmusic@gmail.com. LeeAnne Savage plans to start a consistent women-led showcase in 2020. Contact her at SavageMusicGirl@gmail.com or 520-471-5450.
The print edition of Zócalo Magazine has momentarily paused, but we’ll be back when more of our marvelous advertisers and distribution outlets are fully serving the community. In the meantime, please continue to support your local Tucson businesses!
TUCSON ARTS AND CULTURE – Zocalo is a hyper-local monthly magazine reflecting the heart and soul of Tucson through its arts, culture, entertainment, food, and events. Look for us at over 350 locations city-wide, read our digital magazine, or have Zocalo delivered to your home or office.
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