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| Juan de Marcos (L) at the Cardinal on Feb. 10 with Richard Hildner (guitar) and Nick Moran (bass) © SKepecs 2015 |
-- SK
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February's Afro-Cuban Music Feast
“Y en la vida se debe andar derecho,
Rendir tributo a quien se lo merece
Con la imaginación crear lo bello
Y que sea distinto, diferente!”
“In life
one should play it straight,
Pay
tribute to whose who deserve it,
With
imagination create what’s beautiful –
And let it
be distinct, different!”
– Juan de Marcos González, from his song “Distinto,
Diferente,” on the eponymous album (World Circuit, 1999).
There’s
nothing in the world as bold and bailable Afro-Cuban music. The thrilling syncopation
of its basic rhythmic patterns, clave and tumbao, are gifts from the Orishas –
the ancestral spirits of West Africa who crossed the Atlantic on slave ships
and landed on the biggest Antillean island. The Orishas are the most dynamic of
deities, and though Afro-Cuban music is unmistakable in any of its forms, it’s
constantly evolving. Juan de Marcos, renowned leader of the Afro-Cuban All
Stars, is a master innovator, as is his younger counterpart, Pedrito Martínez. Both
will be in Madison the second week of February, giving us a chance to check out
the state of Afro-Cuban music in early 2015. The Pedrito Martínez Group plays
Overture’s Capitol Theater on Thursday, Feb. 12, at 7:15 PM. Marcos, the
UW-Madison Arts Institutes’ Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence for fall,
2015, thanks to the efforts of Willie Ney, Executive Director of the UW-Madison
Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives – what a coup! – is here to meet the
community at a reception in his honor at the Cardinal Bar on Feb. 10 (5-7 PM),
and to give a pre-residency talk at Overture’s Wisconsin Studio (it’s up on the
third floor) at 6 PM before Martínez’ concert on Feb. 12.
Both Marcos and Martínez were born to this music. Marcos hails from Pueblo Nuevo, Centro Havana, a veritable hotbed of urban son y rumba. His puro –
“pure one,” a Cuban term of respect and honor for father – sang with dance
bands all over Havana (sometimes with the sire of son montuno, Arsenio
Rodríguez, or with piano potentate Ruben González) – and led a chapter of the
secret men’s society, Abakuá; its sacred Nigerian drum rhythms are rumba’s
heartbeat.
For a while Marcos'
family lived next door to the late, great sonero Compay Segundo, whose song "Chan
Chan," sung by Ibrahim Ferrer, is opening track on the original Buena Vista Social Club album (World
Circuit, 1997). "When I was about 10, my puro bought me Compay's
guitar," Marcos says. "But music didn't pay. He didn't want me to be
a musician. He always had various jobs besides his gigs. He was a guaguero [bus
driver] and a stevedore on the docks. And he was a leftist – a union
leader." So Marcos ended up with a
doctorate in engineering, though he organized his first band, Sierra Maestra
(most recently in Madison in 2012, though by then Marcos was no longer
involved) during his student days. Fortunately for us, Marcos ultimately gave
up engineering for music.
It was Marcos who brought the old soneros, then more or less
relegated to the dustbins of prerevoltionary history, to the attention of Ry
Cooder and Nick Gold. From that collaboration came the Buena Vista Social Club
phenomenon (http://www.buenavistasocialclub.com/), with its famous Wim Wenders
film and its fat handful of group and solo albums recorded on the World Circuit
label at the end of the 1990s, including the Afro-Cuban All Stars’ first album,
A Toda Cuba Le Gusta (World Circuit,
1997).
Today Marcos brings together several generations of Cuban
musicians, now scattered across the globe thanks to the limitations of the
island’s political economy, to perform and record under the Afro-Cuban All
Stars banner. He also uses his astute eye for talent producing albums by the
best of Cuba’s next-generation players. One of his outstanding successes
in this role was the 2007 production (on his own label, DM Ahora!) of the
landmark debut album by leading Cuban rapper Telmary Díaz, who melds Afro-Cuban
rhythms with urban slam poetry.
Martínez grew up in the section of Centro Habana called Cayo Hueso, like
Pueblo Nuevo a cradle of son y rumba. Martínez learned to play as a youngster
in the streets. “He comes straight from the source,” Marcos says, “he developed
by playing with rumba’s greatest protagonists.” Since 1998, though, Martínez
has lived in New York. He was a founding member of Afro-Latin New York fusion
band Yerba Buena before branching out on his own. The Pedrito Martínez Group’s
first, eponymously titled studio album was released in 2013 (Motéma Music). It’s
a chart-buster, the top Latin jazz seller on both iTunes and Amazon.
Martínez is the whole package –
a superb percussionist (he won top honors in the Thelonious Monk Institute
Afro-Latin hand percussion competition in 2000), a tremendous vocalist, and a
surprising innovator. His instruments of choice are the tumbadoras (congas) and
the hourglass-shaped, double-headed batá, the sacred drum used to call up the
Orishas.
Given
its folkloric roots, Afro-Cuban music is organically linked to dance. “It’s
important,” Marcos says,” to speak of rumba as a music / dance complex,
encompassing several relatively distinct rhythm and dance styles. But the term
‘rumba’ also applies to any fiesta at which these genres are played and danced.
By extension, in Cuban slang when someone throws a great party, even if the
music is reggaeton or heavy metal, people say “yesterday there was a great
rumba at Pedro’s house.”
But if Afro-Cuban music is for
dancing, it’s also dazzlingly complex. Jazz is intrinsic, says Marcos. “In
rumba, in particular, improvisation is and always has been key. It goes back to
the abolition of slavery; the flow of blacks between New Orleans and Cuba led
to a certain confluence of ideas and styles.”
In New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton
called it the “Spanish Tinge.” In Cuba, you can see it in the early twentieth
century rise of the French-inspired Afro-Cuban danzón orchestras, which got
their characteristic, stately sound from violins, flutes, and piano, mixed with
bass and timbales. “Since that time,” Marcos says, “open solos for piano and
flute have been part and parcel of Afro-Cuban music. Moreover, with the signing
of the Platt Ammendment, which made Cuba a quasi U.S. colony [it was repealed
in 1934, though heavy U.S. investments in Cuban land and the sugar industry
remained until the 1959 Revolution], American capitalists living on the island and their allies, the elitist
Cuban oligarchs, demanded to stay on top of the latest foreign fashions.”
By the 1920s, Marcos continues, U.S. jazz orchestras, like those led by
saxophonist Ted Naddy and violinist Max Dolin, were common in Havana. Eventually,
these leaders began using Cuban musicians – it was cheaper than bringing in and
manitaining complete ensembles from the States. This musical interaction
reached its peak in the 1940s, with the explosion of Afro-Cuban jazz – son y
rumba now threaded with the structures of blues and bebop that originated in
the African-American experience, like the call-and-response patterns of trading
fours or eights.
Marcos’
talk on Feb. 12 – essentially a preview of his fall residency on campus, which
will include a public lecture / concert series on the order of the John Santos
Latin jazz residency of 2004 (also a Ney initiative) – will put all of this in
context and perspective. “The talk’s about the history, development, and
musicology of Cuban music since the eighteenth century,” he says. “I’ll go from
Cuban baroque composers like Esteban Salas and Juan Paris, whose works stem
from European rather than Cuban forms, through today. It’s a panoramic overview
that, when I get to the present, will pay special homage to the artists we’re
going to invite to Madison during my residency, and to their particular
styles.”
As a musician Marcos takes a similarly broad tack with his Afro-Cuban
All Stars shows – and there surely will be one this fall, the first since
March, 2009 (the All Stars also played here in April, 2000). “What I try to do
in my concerts,” Marcos says, “is approach the greatest possible number of
genres, to reveal the panorama of popular music in my country. I’ll play very
traditional [late nineteenth and early twentieth century] genres, like danzón
and contradanza, and go from there through son y rumba to timba” [an Afro-Cuban
style invented by a new generation of rebellious youth invented during the
island’s post-Soviet crisis in the 1990s, which opened the island to tourism
and all the outside influences that brought, including hip-hop and the multiethnic,
multicultural cross-currents of New York].
“I’m not going to say that I’ll play a lot of timba,” Marcos continues,
“or that I’m going to include Cuban reggaeton. But sometimes in my arrangements
I incorporate a few measures of that and of Afro-Cuban hip-hop.” He also
uses elements of funk, swing, or anything else that feels right. I’ve posted a
few recent videos of the Afro-Cuban Allstars on my blog, CulturalOyster (http://culturaloysterwut.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-taste-of-february.html)
– there’s also one of Martínez there – to give you a taste.
“In general,” Marcos says, “I
think music is all one thing, and it’s atemporal – only the quality and the
richness of the language is what speaks, what’s transmitted to the spectator.”
If
Marcos – professor and musician – embodies the spirit of innovation in
Afro-Cuban music over the long term, Martínez is the music’s U.S. present.
Before he left Cuba he played with an amazing slate of rumberos, from the deeply
traditional Muñequitos de Matanzas (who were here as part of the John Santos
residency in 2004) and the late, great conguero / composer Tata Güines, plus batá
master Pancho Quinto, one of the pioneers of the open, jazzlike, heavily
improvisational, polyrhythmic rumba called guarapachangueo that evolved out of
guaguancó, one of the three traditional twentieth-century rumba genres, at the
end of the 1970s in Havana.
The ‘70s were a revolutionary period in Cuban music. The sounds of
yankee imperialism were prohibited, but young conservatory players who are
legendary today – like Chucho Valdés, Paquito D’Rivera, and Arturo Sandoval –
held clandestine radio parties on late-night rooftops, absorbing jazz-rock
fusion and other styles coming out of the States. From this illigitimate crack
in the iron curtain sprang new, experimental Cuban bands – most prominently
Irakere, which included, at the time, Valdés, D’Rivera, and Sandoval. Folkloric
rumberos like Pancho Quinto, exposed to these new influences, started opening up
the way they played guaguancó, and guarapachangueo was born.
Guarapachangueo, like timba, incorporates incorporates elements of hip-hop
and the multiethnic, multicultural cross-currents of New York. It has the young
energy of timba, and sometimes resembles it, but it’s more rooted, and more
rumba than anything else. And Martinez is the
guarapachangueo virtuoso in the Big Apple. He’s been something of a star since
he arrived in New York 18 years ago – the list of musicians he’s worked with is
a knockout – but today he’s at the top of his game.
Nobody
else sounds like Martinez, though he’s very modest. “I don’t think I’m a
creator of anything. But I’ve been schooled by great rumberos and I’ve been
lucky to have the opportunity to play guarapachangueo here in the States and to
raise its profile. At heart I’m an Afro-Cuban folkloric player, a rumbero from
the marginal streets of Havana. I never studied in school. But I’d describe my
music as Afro-Cuban with a lot of New York.
“A lot of rumberos were here before me,” Martínez continues. “How many
came here in the 1960s? But I represent my generation. I came to the U.S. at a
good time for Cuban music, and it’s my responsibility to keep the Cuban flag
flying and to keep the music moving ahead. I’ve played with Paquito D’Rivera, with
Eddie Palmieri; I worked for several years with Wynton Marsalis, who’s on my
latest album. I’ve worked with Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon. I’ve had
the opportunity – and the curiosity – to play African music, Brazilian music –
to know and share sounds from so many places is a great advantage. I absorb other
music, other harmonies, for my own use. I try out new sounds – if they don’t
work they go, but if they click they stay. I’ve learned a lot this way.”
Martínez’ band – it’s a quartet, but it sounds so rich and full you’d
swear there were more than four players – is international, too; pianist Edgar
Pantoja-Aleman is from Santiago de Cuba, but bass player Alvaro Benavides is
Venezuelan and percussionist Jhair Sala is from Peru. “I don’t want to impose
my own folklore or any specific sound on the others,” Martínez says. “Each of
them is a leader in his own right, with his own band and his own ideas. Each
contributes his own themes to my group. Together the music we make is very
complete, and we play con mucho sentimiento.”
If this description makes the Pedrito Martínez group sound like just
another altermodern world beat band, it’s not. Despite the confluence of
influences Martínez cites, its sound is completely, unmistakably, Cuban. Yep. That’s
the power of the Orishas.
El Cantante del Pueblo (AC All Stars, song by Tirso Duarte)
(song by Juan de Marcos)
Sometimes I use some swing or funk with Afro-Cuban percussion, as I do here (below)
---- Juan de Marcos
And here's Pedrito Martnez (who's played with everybody who's anybody in New York and recorded for a number of years with the Afrobeat / Latin fusion band Yerba Buena, of which he was a founding member) in a video of a tune off the debut studio album for his own quartet, The Pedrito Martinez Group (2013 Motema Music). The fabulous, cubanísima keyboardist in this clip, Ariacne Trujillo, has gone on to make her own mark, but her replacement, Edgar Pantoja-Aleman, is emerging in his own right as a force on the Cuban music scene in New York.
¡Aché!
