Monday, 25 February 2008

Catching Dengue Fever

MUSIC Band fuses Cambodian pop with surf guitar, Bollywood

February 24, 2008

BY MARY HOULIHAN mhoulihan@suntimes.com

It's time to get familiar with Dengue Fever. Not the disease, the band. One look at this Los Angeles-based group and you know you're in for something way outside the norm.

Fronted by a former Cambodian pop star backed by five alt-rock musicians, Dengue Fever is definitely an unlikely mix of talent. And then there's the resulting music -- 1960s Cambodian pop infused with surf guitar, Ethiopian soul and Bollywood, all tinted with an alt-rock edge.

Dengue Fever debuted in 2002 and quickly caught on in the hip Los Angeles music scene, where it was named best new band by L.A. Weekly. High-profile fans included Matt Dillon, who used the band's Khmer version of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" on the soundtrack of his directorial debut, "City of Ghosts," and Jim Jarmusch, who included songs on his "Broken Flowers" soundtrack.

The band was born out of brothers Zac and Ethan Holtzman's growing interest in a sound that had mostly been a well-kept secret, barely heard outside of Cambodia. Ethan was backpacking in the Cambodian countryside when he heard a tape of '60s singer Ros Sereysothea and was blown away. He returned stateside with a suitcase full of cheap cassettes and introduced his brother to the music. (A friend he was traveling with came down with dengue fever, thus the band's name.)
"We loved the music and this idea of using it as the basis for a band began to take hold," Zac Holtzman says. "The songs that inspired us were pretty much Cambodia's version of classic rock, even though they were filled with surf, psychedelia and garage band sounds."

Dengue Fever returns to the Empty Bottle on Wednesday. Band members are Zac Holtzman (guitar), Senon Williams (bass), Paul Smith (drums), Ethan Holtzman (keyboards/Farfisa organ), David Ralicke (horns) and Chhom Nimol (vocals).

You can't help being charmed by Nimol's presentation of the songs that have become a nostalgic staple of Cambodian culture. Finding Nimol was the first challenge. The Holtzmans scoured the nightclubs in the Little Phnom Penh area of Long Beach. One night they ended up at the Dragon House, where Nimol was performing. The minute she began to sing, they knew they had found what they'd been looking for.

Nimol had a pedigree known only to the Cambodian diaspora community -- she comes from a well-known musical family, often referred to as "the Jacksons of Cambodia." When other singers invited to audition heard she also was a candidate, they left knowing they couldn't compete.

Holtzman, who sports a beard any ZZ Top fan would love, admits that at first Nimol didn't know what to make of the band. "We could hear her thinking 'I don't know about that guy with the beard,' " he says, laughing. "But her sister convinced her to give it a shot."

Cambodian pop was blasted across the region by Armed Forces Radio during the Vietnam War, and gained momentum until the Khmer Rouge came to power in the 1970s and destroyed much of Cambodian culture. Many singers, including Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth, the Cambodian Elvis, were rounded up and died in labor camps.

"There's something familiar about the music but also something very unique about it too," says Los Angeles filmmaker John Pirozzi, whose film, "Sleepwalking Through the Mekong," chronicles Dengue Fever's first tour of Cambodia in 2005. "The band does a good job of taking it in their own direction but staying true to the original spirit of the music."

According to Holtzman, the month-long trip to Cambodia was a "beautiful experience for the band." After performing in clubs and on a television show, which was re-broadcast three times a day, the band was getting recognized everywhere. But the most memorable show was in a shantytown on a stage lit by old car lights. "The crowd was really tripping out on us," he recalls. "We could hear them thinking, 'Why are these crazy people playing our music?' Winning them over was a gratifying experience."

Dengue Fever finds itself engulfed in a unique mission: re-introducing Cambodian pop to several generations of Cambodians while also catering to the indie-rock scene. "I guess the music has the right combination of being Western enough to approach and foreign enough to be interesting," Holtzman says. "It's a fever that's catching on in a good way."

DENGUE FEVER
When: 9 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western
Tickets: $12
Phone: (773) 276-3600

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