Saturday, February 22, 2025
Last night, at the Sardine in San Pedro, a band called TRUPA TRUPA played an hour-long set of their songs that had every bit as much vivacious embodiment as any band has ever brought to a stage that is only 20 inches off the club’s floor. The Sardine is two large rooms in a corner storefront at 11th and Pacific, in San Pedro; the front is a bar and a record store, which I perused the bins of during various stretches of the opening act, a duo called Soft Palms. Almost all the vinyl albums were distributed by RECESS RECORDS, whose founder is one of the co-owners of Sardine.
Thanks to the encouragement of Cecilia Woloch, Linda and I ended up being part of a crowd of three dozen people who had the good fortune to be at one of second stop of Trupa Trupa’s national tour; the band is playing in seven cities in 11 days, and those who live anywhere in the vicinity of Western Avenue and Santa Monica Blvd. in East Hollywood can catch them tonight (Saturday, the 22nd) at Gold Diggers.
Feb. 19 — San Francisco, CA @ Kilowatt
Feb. 21 — San Pedro, CA @ The Sardine
Feb. 22 — Los Angeles, CA @ Gold Diggers
Feb. 25 — Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
Feb. 27 — Washington, D.C. @ Quarry House
Feb. 28 — Philadelphia, PA @ Silk City
March 1 — New York, NY @ Bowery Electric
Trupa Trupa is as distinct and rambunctious as one could hope for as a counter-balance antidote to the self-serving mendacity that is spreading like a corrosive virus in global politics right now. When I checked out their influences, it didn’t surprise me to see the Beatles listed, especially given that the band’s driving force, a poet named Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, sang a snippet of George Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way” (“Don’t be long, don’t belong” is how it ends up sounding in Harrison’s vocal, carried over into last night’s performance). The music has a gliding rumble, however, that owes more of its staccato punctuation to the kinds of bands that played in San Pedro during the glory days of Mike Watt, D. Boome and the Minutemen. Trupa Trumpa spins its melodies in relentless undulations of recoiling to-and-fro jump-start melodies, all underpinned by some of the most intelligent drum-work I’ve heard coming from the rear stage in a long time.
The is political art of a very high order. Although their music has attained international recognition, including praise from Henry Rollins at KCRW, Trupa Trupa is unlikely to ever win the attention of those who nominate records for Grammys. No surprise there. But if you wish to strike a blow against the kind of cultural appropriation that is taking place with the appointment of the new Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., however, the best way to do so is to buy Trupa Trupa’s new record and listen to their song, “Mourners.”
“What we carry with us, as people from the city of Gdańsk, is hope. Here, we believe in hope, in solidarity, in democracy, in the idea that even the greatest evil can be defeated. We know that it can be overcome — and not through violence, but through peaceful means.”
— Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
GLITTERBEAT RECORDS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trupa_Trupa
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/trupa-trupa-new-song-tour-dates-trump-1235244949/
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Sample record bin at the Sardine
About Bill Mohr