Grace Nono, TAO MUSIC, BMG Pilipinas, 1993

Grace Note

by Eric Gamalinda
March 1993

Some places have that unmistakable persona that sticks so close there's no way you can shake it off. It's like the way cigarette smoke sticks to your clothes and hair after a few hours in some blue-smoke dive where the faces are sad and the nights seem to go on forever, but the beer is cold and the music earnest and hopeful. It's always easy to associate a place with the music one chances upon there. The late unlamented Olongapo, for instance, was Hard Rock country (until the discos turned Pinoy rock greats into an anachronism). You went there to wallow in the dregs of the Great American Dream and came home, like everyone else, empty-handed and guttered silly. Baguio was, for some time, its antithesis: fog and the kindness of temperate weather turned it into a sort of mystic's refuge, an artist's haven, almost in fact dangerously close to a New Age cul-de-sac, and to this day a tourist trap. It was also, for some time, teeming with music-from the melancholy solitariness of fireside bistros, to the plaintive flutes of ambulant natives turned to peddling by their own unfortunate destinies, to sleazy dives tucked under carinderias, to red-light discos catering to the lowest end of the market. Baguio was music of all sorts no matter how you looked at it. But that day seems long gone. The folk houses where one spent most of Baguio nights are closed or given over to Top 40 metronome. A rock club struggles to survive cheek to cheek by jowl with an old mansion converted into a giant yuppie playground. Things keep changing, alas, faster than we can even hope to hold on to them. You walk around, hoping to stumble upon some lost jewel, the ghost of a memory, some unremembered refrain. Nostalgia is a terrible disease. But on one such night one happened to walk into the Underground, a rock club that's no longer there, and heard Grace Nono for the first time. It was no ordinary rock club-the world shrunk half its size and the air turned to smoke-but Grace was obliging a few drunk clients with music she seemed to like a long time ago, but didn't care to sing every night on end. Her voice was velvet, her presence comforting; here was someone who should be singing her own stuff, rise out of the inertia of the city and Be Somebody Good. As it turned out, she was writing her own stuff, creating her own music and keeping them for a time when whe was confident enough to tell everybody this was what she wanted. Nobody knew she was doing that until she released a tape of her own music a couple of years ago. It was the best collection this jaded archipelago had heard in ages. At a time when the world is glutted with pseudo art, when mass media exalts the mediocre and ignores what is important, when everybody and his dog can claim to be a poet or a seer, one can only feel relief that artists like Grace continue to work, to search, to find their center in a world gone way off track. A lot of us want to do that. A lot of us can't. It's a rare gift to be able to put that search into words and music; the search for one's self, one's world, one's gods, one's twin. And it's reassuring to know you don't have to go far now to find that kind of music.

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