Dengue fever hits congress
Cambodian pop
By Gerald M. Gay
ggay@azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.27.2008
Drummer Paul Smith was skeptical when his friends, brothers Zac and Ethan Holtzman, pitched the idea of forming a Los Angeles-based Cambodian pop band.
"I basically said 'Good luck with that,' " Smith recalled in a recent phone interview with Caliente.
Neither he nor the Holtzmans are in any way, shape or form Cambodian.
"I said I would play drums with them and the idea sounded cool, but I didn't know how they were going to pull it off."
Lo and behold, the siblings came through. They rounded up some local Los Angeles talent, bassist Senon Williams and sax player David Ralicke, and recruited Chhom Nimol, a well-established Cambodian singer living in Long Beach.
Despite Nimol's lack of English fluency and the band's limited exposure to Cambodian pop and psychedelic rock, Smith said Dengue Fever was charmed from the get-go.
"We started off very strong," he added. "There was a really good turnout for our first show. The response was crazy. We've been extremely lucky. For a band that has been together for seven years, I can count how many lonely shows we've had on one hand."
Dengue Fever released its latest album, "Venus on Earth," on M80 Records in January. A Los Angeles Times review described the CD, which features songs in Khmer and a few in English, as "sexy and eclectic. It's world music for the cool kids."
The band plays Club Congress Wednesday night.
Fever factoids:
The band has canceled on Tucson twice.
"That is not normal for us," Smith said. "On one occasion my son had a medical emergency and it required surgery. That happened a week-and-a-half before and I couldn't leave my wife with him recovering like that.
"The other cancellation was a complete misunderstanding with our booking agent. We told her months in advance that we couldn't do that leg of the tour and she booked us anyway."
The language barrier has been a challenge.
"For the first year-and-a-half Chhom had an interpreter with her at all times. We would sit in rehearsal and say 'sing here' and we'd have to say it to the interpreter. That slowed things down, but it made for a unique writing process.
"When we write songs, we send our lyrics off to an interpreter in Washington, D.C. Sometimes we don't know if what we sent is what is written. We get the translations back and check them in some fashion, but they could be saying, 'Who are these stupid white boys?' for all we know.
"One of our first translators did that. He rewrote the songs so it would be easier for him. We found out and had to stop using him."
The band was a hit when it toured Cambodia in 2005.
"That was a lucky trip. One of the first shows we did was on Cambodian television. There are only four or five stations in Cambodia. We played an hour-and-a-half special on a Friday night on live TV and basically the entire country saw us."
They don't want to be historians.
"We don't want to intellectualize what we are doing with mixing these cultures. We want to give ourselves a long leash. I've learned stuff over time, but I'm not going out reading books and pretending I'm some sort of expert. I'm just not."
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