by Susan Kepecs
Changó,
Orisha of lightening and storms, dance and music, is in the house. His colors
are red and white. Offer him red apples,
red bananas, a red rooster. He loves to
sing; his dances are wild. You will
sense his presence all over town for the next two months, starting with the
appearance of San Francisco-based Cuban son septet Pellejo Seco at the 12th
annual Madison World Music Festival (Willy St. stage, Saturday, Sept. 19, 5:15
PM) – and again at Music Hall on campus (Tuesday, Sept. 22, 7:30 PM), when UW-Madison Arts Institute Interdisciplinary Fall Artist in Residence Dr. Juan de Marcos
González gives us all a superlative lesson on the long evolution of Cuban son, with
Pellejo Seco illustrating the music’s many forms. The open-to-the-public son class is the first
in Dr. Marcos’ series of public presentations on Afro-Cuban music. FYI – and
you will want to know – here’s the complete list of events: http://artsinstitute.wisc.edu/iarp/juandemarcos/events.htm
Marcos is the founder of the traditional, still-in-Havana son outfit
Sierra Maestra; the force behind the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon of the
late 1990s; and the leader of the legendary Afro-Cuban All Stars (who appear at
Overture Hall on Oct. 2). And
Cuban son, to be clear, is today the descendant of the muy Africano Changó and
the madre patria – Spain – in the late nineteenth century. Juan de Marcos and Cuban son don’t need much
of an introduction to my regular readers, but if you want more, try these: http://culturaloysterwut.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-taste-of-february.html;
http://culturaloysterwut.blogspot.com/2014/11/barroso-en-cha-cha-cha-ay-mama.html; http://culturaloysterwut.blogspot.com/2012/03/gran-baile-at-great-hall-much.html).
That said, Pellejo Seco is making
its very first Mad City appearances next week, so here’s the scoop. Marcos had planned to bring back our beloved Sierra
Maestra, which hasn’t played here since 2012.
Unfortunately, the band’s visas got caught in the shark’s jaws. “When Sierra Maestra couldn’t come I thought
of Pellejo Seco right away,” Marcos says. “They’ll be perfect to fill the big hole in
the schedule left by the absence of Sierra Maestra. They’re excellent musicians, and the band is
perfectly representative of the traditional son septet.”
Marcos met the leader of Pellejo
Seco, composer and tresero Ivan Camblor, in Havana, back in the early
2000s. The latter was working on a
recording with Marcos’ good friend, Cuban composer / filmmaker Edesio Alejandro
– I think this was during the production of the outrageously funny Cuban film Hacerse el Sueco, for which Alejandro
composed music with Camblor’s collaboration. A few years later Camblor married
a Californian and moved to the Bay Area, and ever since, he and Marcos have
gone to (and sometimes sat in on) each others’ gigs there.
Camblor, born and raised in
Havana, considers himself a composer first and foremost, but he’s also a
helluva tresero. The Cuban tres –
slightly smaller than a modern guitar, with three sets of two strings – provides
the looping, rhythmic melodies quintessential to the son sound.
But son is old-school music, and almost
all of the great old soneros, including Buena Vista stars Compay Segundo,
Ibrahim Ferrer, Pío Leyva and Manuel “Puntillita” Licea, are gone now. And despite Sierra Maestra’s continuing
presence, along with a handful of younger Cuban players who, like Camblor, love
son, popular music on the big island today leans heavily toward hip-hop
influenced genres like timba and guarapachangueo.
“At first I wanted to play rock n’
roll,” says Camblor, 44. “That’s what my
generation listened to – North American rock.
But when I was very young I heard son, in concerts and on the
street. I loved it, I thought ‘why don’t
people still write these songs?’ So I
started studying it with some of the old-timers, and I had to leave rock
behind.
“I’m not an academic, I’m a street
musician,” he adds. He started
learning to play with the late Octavio “Cotán” Sánchez, a guitarist and tresero
from the golden generation of soneros.
Sánchez was born in Oriente – the east end of the island, and the cradle
of son – though he migrated to Havana and became part of the urban son movement
in the 1940s.
“It was Sánchez who first had me
play the tres,” Camblor says. “He had me
play it in a trio and I figured out that I had opportunities as a tresero. I’d wanted to be a guitar player, but I
decided to learn the instrument Sánchez put in my hands. He told me ‘you’ll never lack money if you
learn the tres.’”
Camblor started following the
sound. “Wherever I heard son I’d enter
and ask to play with the old timers.
When they weren’t playing they were sitting around telling stories. It was a great education.”
After Cotán, Camblor continued his
formal studies with el Niño Rivera, definitively one of Cuba’s greatest tres
virtuosos. “I was with Rivera till he
died. I was going to his house, playing
for classes. When he died I dedicated myself
to following his work.”
Camblor says he’s always studying
the great son composers from Oriente and Havana. “I wanted to develop my own sones. So that’s what I’ve been doing, ever since I
was 17.”
Being a young tresero in Havana was
a double-edged sword. “It was an offense
for a while [among his timba-loving generation],” he says. But in some places son was still in
demand. “My life was chaos. Every time
I’d go by a place where some old-timers were playing, people would say ‘there’s
a tresero.’ There aren’t many any
more. So I played everywhere. I played some clubs with other soneros of my
generation – there are some, but it’s hard to make a name in music now in Cuba,
so you don’t hear about them. And I played with famous old soneros. I played at the Tropicana – I was 16, 17
years old – with [Buena Vista Social Club trumpet player] Guajiro Mirabal and
the Tropicana Orchestra. People loved
it.”
California was a huge
change. Camblor arrived there planning to play, but he needed money. “It’s hard to get work if you’re not
American,” he says. He began by picking
vegetables in Ventura County with migrant farmworkers. The name Pellejo Seco is
partly a tribute to their hard lives and sun-scorched skin, though it’s also
Havana street slang with multiple sexual allusions. “I wanted to leave behind traditional Cuban
band names and have something happier – I don’t want everything to be serious,
I want people to laugh,” he says.
Money issues notwithstanding,
within a year and a half Camblor had put together a septet of Bay Area Cuban
expats and recorded his first album, Enganchate
(an independent production distributed by CD Baby, 2006). “We’re the only Cuban septet in California
that maintains the tradition of writing new music in the son style,” he
says. “The scene is much more fragmented
here than in Cuba, but I’ve had luck maintaining the septet. We’re always playing – we play a lot of big
festivals – and we have two albums out [the second is Despierta, with Chuchito Valdés on piano, CD Baby 2008], with a
third on the way.
“But,” he continues, “we haven’t
made much money. We haven’t traveled
much. We’re marginalized a little.”
Pellejo Seco is sometimes described
as a world fusion band, because you can hear a hint of flamenco there, a smidge
of hip-hop there. But it’s just the
evolution of Cuban son, says Juan de Marcos.
“A lot of contemporary son has the essence of traditional groups from
the golden age like Septeto Habanero or Septeto Nacional de Ignacio
Piñiero.” (I’m not going to upload a lot of
ad-laden YouTube videos, but here’s a gem I pirated
from the Internet. For more, Google these bands yourself!)
But,” Marcos continues, “in contemporary son the lyrics are
distinct. The musical themes are similar
to traditional son, too, but many contemporary Cuban composers add breaks or
blocks that aren’t characteristic of the original sound. Cuba was isolated for so many years – even
back in the ‘80s, musicians on the island listening to radio pirated from
Florida tried to use foreign sounds to add an air of cosmopolitanism. Ivan does that, he mixes global elements into
a base of son in his own music, but he knows very well how to play very
traditional son.”
There certainly are some world
sounds in the tunes on Pellejo Seco’s CDs, but after watching a bunch of videos
I gotta say that in live performance this band sounds absolutely, definitively
Cuban. Camblor agrees. “I’ve tried to stay outside of jazz,” he
says, “to conserve the son tradition. As
a composer I want to concentrate on that.
I do use some jazz and some other elements, but I use them in the
service of traditional cuban son. We’re
really a traditional son septet. I play
mostly my own compositions, I don’t have to play standards. When people hear my songs they recognize the
sound, they feel the accent of the son septet.
On Facebook they say things like “Cuidado, ¡esa gente tiene un gran
sonido cubano!”
And like many Cuban composers
before him, Camblor likes to use humor in his lyrics – guaracha, an uptempo son
style, is full of jokes and double entendres.
“I wrote a tune called Sushi Cha Cha,” he tells me, “because everyone in California eats
sushi. You’ll like the song. It’s spicy, ‘pa gozar.”
The great Orquesta Aragon – Cuba’s
most famous, most recorded charanga, the long-lived king of cha cha cha bands –
was visiting San Francisco for the Jazz Festival a couple of years back. “They didn’t know what sushi is,” Camblor
says, “so I said it’s like guanajo relleno.”
That’s stuffed turkey – both a dish and a famous son by the Septeto
Nacional. Aragon liked “Sushi Cha Cha”
so much they played it during their show.
Pellejo Seco plays Camblor’s
compositions almost exclusively onstage, but it’s impossible, he says, not to
play a Buena Vista standard or two. He
mentions a few favorites, including the guajira-son “El Guateque Campesino” and
the bolero “Dos Gardenias,” both Buena Vista classics delivered to the world
via the silken voice of Ibrahim Ferrer.
At the Madison World Music Fest,
Pellejo Seco surely will focus on Camblor’s compositions. The Music Hall lec/dem
offers a chance to hear another facet of this band. They’ll play a couple of their own tunes,
Marcos says, but also a number of traditional sones that illustrate the
evolution and styles of the form.
“It’s an honor to work with Juan de
Marcos,” Camblor says. “We’re very
excited to come to Madison.”
