Wandering minstrels corner cattle market audience
Asip A. Hasani, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta
A young woman clad in a traditional Javanese costume danced under the scorching sun at a corner of a traditional cattle market in Pakuncen, Yogyakarta. Her audience was an amused crowd of traders who were having lunch or just hanging around smoking.
With her was an older woman singing traditional Javanese songs to the accompaniment of a Javanese drum, sitar, kendang (drum) and zither played by an old man and a middle-aged woman.
Some cattle dealers swayed their heads to the drum beat and melody of the zither, while having lunch at a small foodstall.
An elderly cattle seller rose and danced with the young dancer. Sweat streamed down her face. When the music stopped, the old man fished a Rp 5,000 bank note from his pocket and slipped it down her cleavage. She smiled flirtatiously at him.
Another cattle seller shouted at the young singer, asking her to sing his favorite song Bojo Loro (Two wives), a contemporary Javanese song, a mixture of Javanese and dangdut. This highly popular music is locally called campursari.
The street show has rekindled the spirit of regular market- goers.
Unlike annoying street singers, whose number has sharply increased in Yogyakarta since the economic crisis in 1997, this traditional street music group is worth listening to, and it is popular because the fee is not obligatory.
Leader of the group 74-year-old Supono, or Pak Pono, knows only too well the right time to show up at the cattle market. The band usually appears at midday or lunch time, when most of the traders have called it a day.
"We can make a lot of money performing at the cattle market. People here don't mind giving us between Rp 5,000 and Rp 20,000 for each song we play," he said. The band gets between Rp 150,000 and Rp 200,000 for each session.
Their income is shared between himself and his three band members: his 49-year-old wife Lasasih who plays the zither; two female singers -- Setiatun, 25 and Padmi, 40.
Unfortunately, Pakuncen cattle market only opens once a month. For the rest of the month, they perform at other cattle markets.
Sometimes Pak Pono's band performs on a door-to-door basis, when they cannot perform at the cattle market.
"We are lucky when there is a group of pedicab drivers or city bus personnel who hire us to perform for them. When this happens, we don't have to wander about," he said.
Strength and patience are well-reflected in Pak Pono's blackened face. He still smiles when people in the street say nasty things about him and his band, or when members of his audience refuse to pay for his music.
He has spent 20 years of his life busking.
"I love music and I'm happy to earn money from playing music, even though I'm only a street musician," he said.
Pak Pono moved to Yogyakarta from his hometown of Semarang, Central Java, in the late 1970s, along with four band members, including his wife Lasasih who used to be the group's singer and dancer.
Some 10 years after, two of his members died. While one of his four artists, the zither player, quit to form his own band in Semarang.
Of the original personnel, only Pak Pono and his wife Lasasih remain. He recalls that he tried hard to re-establish his music group. First he trained his wife on how to play the zither. When she was good enough with the musical instrument, he went home to Semarang to recruit his neighbors, Padmi and Setiatun, as singers.
He finally made it, but is worried about the group's future, because he has no apparent successors.
But Pak Pono is for the time being a popular street entertainer, offering enjoyable music at a time when most buskers are more renowned for being scroungers, scaring the public away rather than attracting a regular, faithful audience.