Pista sa Nayon: Filipino Pride, Cute Little Old Ladies, and Rock and Roll [Photo Gallery]
“This is so bad for you; pure sugar,” Mike tells me.
My half-Filipino pal’s only exaggerating a little, I think as a perky Pinoy woman slides our desserts towards us. Mike’s introducing me to halo-halo, a frozen cup of wonderful strangeness comprised of ice cream, shaved ice, coconut, sweet beans, candied fruit cubes, and other miscellany.
It’s cold; it’s so packed with natural sugars that it’d put your average diabetic into seizures; and it’s oddly, wonderfully tasty. You know you’re in for a treat if the food’s so exotic that even your well-heeled tour guide/host can’t identify the chunks of yellow fruit pulp bobbing in the cup’s center (it turns out to be jackfruit).
“Welcome to Pinoy cuisine,” Mike tells me as he jabs a spoon into the mixture and begins stirring with glee. Welcome to Pinoy everything, I think with a smile.
I’m joining Mike on this warm August 1 for Pista sa Nayon, Seattle’s 21st annual celebration of Filipino music and culture. On this day, Seward Park’s transformed into Ground Zero for the Emerald City’s Filipino community, and it’s no end of fun to be an onlooker.
On the surface, Pista resembles any one of the scores of ethnic festivals hosted at the Seattle Center during the spring and summer months, only liberated from the sometimes-staid atmosphere of the shiny cosmopolitan Center. There’s a relaxed vibe to things: Filipinos and Filipino Americans from every strata of the local topography waltz through the Park’s grounds, eating, laughing, hanging out, and drinking deeply of their culture.
B-boys and elderly widows weave cooperatively past one another, bonded by little more than their mutual heritage, and that’s more than enough on this inviting day. The wide-eyed experience sponge in me enjoys it heartily, and my Filipino ex-pat chum is reveling in showing me around.
It’s a fascinating window into Mike’s homeland. The Philippines have always been considered the scrappy blue-collar sibling amongst eastern countries, a nation of remote Asian islands living under the dual shadows of Spanish and American influences. But like a lot of non-Pinoy, I’ve never seen how Filipino culture synthesized those western influences with its own hothouse exoticism, and short of booking a flight to Manila, this is the closest this outsider will come to viewing it.
For that reason, the succession of traditional dance demonstrations presented throughout the day mesmerizes me: Young women balance glasses of water gracefully atop their heads and in their palms like living shivas, two young people practice tinikling as they hop bird-like between two rapidly-manipulated bamboo poles, and four Filipino women perform flamenco-accompanied steps and pirouettes, pink dresses catching the hazy Sunday sun as their male partners smile and stand at continental attention.
The area surrounding the Main Pista sa Nayon Amphitheatre is peppered by merchandise and food booths. A local branch of Jollibee, one of the Philippines’ most successful restaurant chains, makes its presence known. Corporate displays, meanwhile, trumpet connections with the local Filipino-American community.
Mike’s a great, erudite tour guide through the labyrinth of food and business, but his Gen-X roots show when we pass one merch table covered with an explosion of loudly-colored caps, T-shirts, scarves, and bling that slam together Pinoy pride and American hip-hop style. Mike left the Philippines in the mid-eighties, when a surprisingly large youth contingent embraced college rock and Filipino bands like The Dawn and Afterimage packed venues in the island nation. “Nobody listened to R&B when I was there,” he says with a grizzled ex-goth’s bemused chuckle.
We’re music nerds, Mike and I, so a good deal of the fun for both of us is hearing original and cover tunes from several part-or-full blooded Pinoy pop acts. An hour before our halo-halo, we stumble onto a teenage power trio– average age fourteen–pounding out classic rock covers on the smaller Ihaw Ihaw Jam Stage. They play Santana’s “Black Magic Woman,” and the gawky young guitarist replicates the song’s elastic solos with surprising skill. “Filipinos love their cover bands,” Mike tells me affectionately before we hike up to the main amphitheater.
Teenagers performing top-40 dance hits bear Mike’s statement out, and form the majority of the non-traditional presentations in the amphitheater area. These kids and pitch aren’t exactly the closest of friends, but their exuberance more than makes up for their lack of technical chops. There’s something charming–magical,even–about seeing a grandma dancing vigorously as her teenage grandchild covers Lady Gaga.
Soon after the girl does her number, grandma–a proud member of the Filipino-American Wives of Washington–gathers with her fellow widows to perform a drill-team-style march. After completing their drill, the Widows perform (I’m not kidding) The Chicken Dance. The thousand-plus onlookers carpeting the lawn (myself and Mike most emphatically included) roar in approval.
The most pleasant musical surprise of the afternoon comes in the most modest package. Agnes Ingarra, a Seattle-based singer of Filipino/Italian lineage, takes to the amphitheater stage in a blue polo shirt and black tights. She looks like she’s about to go to work at the local IKEA; until she starts singing. Like most of the other acts the majority of her set is covers, but they’re R&B remakes sung with a sultry easiness that blows the rest of the mainstage acts out of the water. She even sneaks in an effective original tune, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar as her keyboardist lays down sparsely effective percussion.
The audience goes nuts, giving her an ovation even more enthusiastic than the one they provided for the Chicken-Dancing Filipino American Widows of Washington. My jaded indie-rock-loving ass is mightily impressed: If Seattle clubs were more receptive to soul and pop singers, this kid’d probably have the town eating out of her hand.
I snag a plate of pancit noodles once Ingarra finishes. Several splashes of chile-pepper-infused sweet-and-sour sauce give it just the right heat level, and I devour this helping of phad-thai-gone-Pinoy enthusiastically before we wind our way back to the Ihaw Ihaw Stage. Mike’s just received word that Glenn Jacinto, lead singer of Pinoy rock outfit Teeth, will play shortly, and my buddy’s psyched.
Teeth remain obscure here, but the band were nothing short of arena stars in their homeland; the closest thing to Nirvana that the Philippines produced. Jacinto unintentionally reenforced the comparison by living a rock-and-roll lifestyle that nearly killed him, but he’s led a quiet life in Los Angeles in the six years since the band broke up. His playing on this small stage during this ethnic festival is the Pinoy equivalent of Dave Grohl playing a bar mitzvah.
After a set by Soul Candy (an energetic, Anime-infatuated local quartet who’s played more than one Anime convention), Jacinto begins performing. Low-key and shy, he plays for about a half-hour, backed by a pretty tight bunch of local players (sorry to say, I didn’t catch the outfit’s name). These guns-for-hire seem genuinely honored and elated to be sharing the stage with their hometown hero, lip-syncing along with the singer and all grinning ear-to-ear.
Jacinto’s style hearkens back to early Foo Fighters and Dinosaur Jr., with a pinch of one of the Grunge Era’s most underrated ensembles, California band Failure. I’m enjoying it a lot, but for Mike it’s a religious experience. Teeth hit it big in the Philippines while Mike was in America, but he connected deeply with the angst and rock-and-roll abandon the band represented for him and a lot of Filipinos of his generation.
I watch Mike go from savvy grown-up to starstruck rock-and-roll-worshiping boy by the time Jacinto vaults into his biggest hit, “Laklak.” The blistering ode to alcoholism sounds like a great lost Nirvana song spat out in Tagalog. It’s a powerful moment to witness my friend so immersed in the music, in large part because I understand how homegrown rock-and-roll can liberate and excite the citizens of any country, even if they’re not living in that country anymore. It represented, in microcosm, the connection that expatriates always know with the land of their birth.
That bond alone makes Pista sa Nayon not just fun, but absolutely vital to its patronage. That, and the cute little old ladies doing the Chicken Dance.
You had me at “cute little old ladies.”