By Juaniyo EY Arcellana
The band is called Lagkitan and the last Friday night of August belonged to them at the Bar@1951 in Malate (at times called “the former Penguin”), the power trio named after a type of cannabis playing until the wee hours a set that ranged from Jimi Hendrix Experience to Cream to Stevie Ray Vaughan. Don’t be fooled by the wisp of the man on lead guitar, because when he plays he turns into a giant.
No need either to request a song like “Crossroads” because they inevitably played it, as naturally as their DNA the tale of setting a pact with a devil on a forked road for a birthright of the blues by way of Robert Johnson. Or “Red House” that has the singer taking on the persona of the protagonist in the Nolledo story “Rice Wine,” the poor bolo wielding father who could barely accept that his daughter was working in a house of ill repute over yonder.
Apart from Texas blues courtesy of Double Trouble, there were some recognizable strains of Savoy Brown, long before they became Foghat. Something happens when a band plays the blues, and it could be one of the great hallucinations the way Lagkitan stands on the shoulders of giants on Adriatico Street, and the coming of the monsoon season resembles an Adriatic blue.
Of course rock history is replete with power trios, from the aforementioned Hendrix all the way down to the Police, and even the bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave have the same power trio core save for a change in lead singer, though the sonic assault remains intact and unwavering. The jazz pianist Keith Jarrett too assembled his own three-man band for his standards sets, alternating with Gary Peacock-Jack de Johnette and Charlie Haden-Paul Motian, the common feature being the Jarrett piano punctuated with his trademark swooning.
Ditto the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny who along with Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses recorded the unbearable lightness of “Bright Size Life,” the selfsame tune essayed by local musician Johnny Alegre’s own three piece with Colby dela Calzada and Mar Dizon at the old Penguin along Remedios Circle, long before it moved to Kamagong and back again to Malate of the ever changing moods.
Lagkitan was not the only trio that night at the bar, as there was also Tons of Others that has a funky blues-based ensemble, though being the undercard understandably not as consummately bluesy as the main event. Maybe one can liken Lagkitan to the celebrated Bleu Rascals, also a trio, when it comes to power blues playing, though the Rascals seem partial to Vaughan of the lightning-quick lower registers.
A late blooming music impresario in fact approached the Lagkitan lead guitarist after set to invite the band to the Ati-atihan festival 2016, the better to conquer the natives with homegrown blues. They seem to be also tailor fit for Malasimbo, the arts and music festival in Mindoro early in the summer that could be seven hills away as soon as the “ber” months start.
On a bigger stage they might be expected to play tunes like “Born Under a Bad Sign” with its ominously snaking bass threatening to drag the listener to the depths of uber-hell, or Neil Young’s “Down by the River” that tells of romance turned to murder driven by minimal lead guitar lines, or Savoy Brown’s “All I Can Do is Cry” that redefined the white man’s blues in a bygone age.
Something that can be said of Lagkitan is that the hunger is there, the band members lean and mean, as if deprived of the munchies, the better to keep the plateau rolling. And if you listen to them up to the wee hours, say, just to get your money’s worth, well neither is that chopped liver. What it is that hardly anything can stand between a man and his blues, a woman and her blues, somewhere over the rainbow connection be damned.
Everyone is worried about traffic when it is fairly easy to slip into some hole-in-the-wall for some blues rock reggae for the sticky stuff, wait out the madness till morning.
