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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
TORO MATA
Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco
Celia and Johnny
Fania : 1974
[Buy It]
Part II
Celia Cruz is not Peruvian; she's Cuban. And if you ever need to explain why salsa is salsa, just listen to what she does with this song. Her version was another huge hit. It was sort of a pan-African shout-out: Afro-Cuba flashing the fist to Afro-Peru. In fact, when the first generation revivalists got going in Peru, they filled in missing pieces by borrowing from Cuba and other successful Afro-Latin cultures. A nod from Cuba was like a pat on the back from your big sister.
According to their promotional literature, Peru Negro were the ones to introduce Cuban drums into Afro-Peruvian music. Remember, drums had been banned, they had to come from somewhere. Not that there weren't indigenous options. My favorite instrument is the cajita. It's a box, with a lid you open and close while you hit the box with a stick. It was made from the collection boxes the priests used at church. (Take that, Spaniards!)
TORO MATA
Susana Baca
Espiritu Vivo
Luaka Bop : 20002
[Buy It]
Susana Baca is an academic, a serious folklorist. She and her husband traveled to the coastal towns around Lima where black Peruvians lived, places like Chincha, site of a plantation that once housed 30,000 slaves, and El Carmen, the town where Peru Negro formed. They published their research and set up an archive of their findings in Lima, the Instituto Negro Continuo. Baca discovered different versions of "Toro Mata" with different political messages. One version warns of deadly Chileans instead of deadly bulls (there was a war going on); another sings about a deadly Spanish general. Caitro Soto de la Colina, Lucila Campos's lyricist, created his version from his childhood memories.
Baca's version (I don't have her lyrics) starts off with the sound of a quijada de burro, a rattle made from the jawbone of a donkey. I like that. But the overall result seems pale compared with the raucous, choral, dance-til-you-sweat versions. She's refined the song, made it more sophisticated, but she's taken the body back out of the music. This is a bit unfair to Baca, who is a joyous and radiant performer. She has a lovely, sensual vocal delivery; many of her recordings are poems set to music. Still, I find myself dissatisfied. Why is it that "refined" somehow always implies "less black" on the sliding scale of culture? And how did I learn to hear things this way? Is this refined sound a function of Baca's long-time collaboration with the noodly, cerebral Marc Ribot? Is it a concession to her overseas audiences? Or is it because, although she looks eternally young, she's getting older and prefers a quieter set?
Or is the real question this: what on earth do you do with a song that's been done so well already?
You see? It's all so complicated. It was Baca, by the way, who got Dave Byrne interested in Afro-Peru. (Who knows, the writhing, gyrating dancers might have scared him away.) Baca hadn't made a studio recording at all before his intervention, only cassettes she'd hand out at street performances. Now she tours and teaches and studies us: she was doing fieldwork in New Orleans when Katrina hit.
Peru Negro set up a school in Lima too; that's where los Peru Negritos come from. Institutions are funded; culture endures.
Addendum
A reader writes: "wonderful entry about an incredible tradition of music but the timing is tragically ironic. the earthquake that struck the day this was posted destroyed the city of chincha."
For more information about the August 15 earthquake, including some stunning photos, click here.Labels: afro-latin, megan, world
posted by Megan
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Monday, August 13, 2007
MARIA LANDO
David Byrne
Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru
Luaka Bop: 1995
[Buy It]
Some of you may remember the Tom Tomorrow cartoon where Sting, Paul Simon, and David Byrne, all wearing pith helmets and holding microphones, run into each other in a jungle searching for world music. (Was there a fourth guy? Maybe Ry Cooder or Mickey Hart?) The cartoon probably appeared a few years before The Soul of Black Peru was released, on the Luaka Bop label co-founded by Byrne with his new-wave wealth. Because of the cartoon, I've always been a little sheepish about liking the album. There was some imperialist sell-out anxiety. There was also the fact that Byrne insisted on recording an embarrassingly bad version of one of the most beautiful songs on the album: Susana Baca's "Maria Lando." What was he thinking? Did he think he was good? Did the marketing people make him do it? Was Baca stroking his ego, "Ah, David, you have such a gift for the tradition"?
The album didn't need Byrne and I wish he'd said no. Still, without his celebrity clout and his ethnographic bent, I probably wouldn't have heard this music. The African music revival only broke through to the Peruvian mainstream in the late 60s, one local outgrowth of Black Pride movements around the globe. Until then, most African-derived songs, dances, and instruments weren't considered part of official Peruvian culture. (In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, the rituals of enslaved Africans - especially the dances! - had been branded lewd, obscene, and un-Christian. The offending practices were suppressed, without irony, by the same morality police who invented the mestizo and the mulatto. The Spaniards also banned drums and marimbas, hoping to control that demon rhythm.)
The musicians and folklorists of the 50s and 60s recovered, and in some cases recreated, a musical idiom that was on the verge of dying out. And that brings us to "Toro Mata" ("The Bull Kills.")
TORO MATA
Lucila Campos
La Mejor Del Ritmo Negro Peruano
El Virrey: 1973
available on: Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru
This song has become the "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud" of Peru. But I didn't know that until recently. I grew to love this song because of its tight, springy horns and the cha-cha congas. The vocals are very salsa-influenced, which I would guess is less local style and more dance hit style. It makes me do a sort of stiff-legged merengue mixed with a samba-style shimmy. The way I do it, it's pretty strenuous. The song has Kikongo words in it, which suggests its great-great grandparents may be Angolan. If that's the case, my samba shimmy isn't so far off: A large percentage of Angolans were shipped to other Portuguese-held territories, such as Brazil. And the lando, another dance central to the Afro-Peruvian tradition, is close cousins with both the Brazilian londo and the Angolan londu.
Like the lando, the toro mata is a dance as well as a song. According to Wiki, the toro mata dance "mocks and parodies the stylized waltzes of European Conquistadores." The Wiki entry is also full of mistakes, so I'm not sure I should trust it. However, this bit of information does help explain the strange costumes you can see in this clip, where the Peru Negro junior dancers accompany Eva Ayllon's performance of the song.
And that brings us to Peru Negro.
TORO MATA
Peru Negro
Sangre de un Don
Times Square : 2000
[Browse Freely and Buy It]
Peru Negro were revivalists who could put on a show. They date from the late 60s, which makes them early adopters of the folk idiom, once its crossover appeal had become evident. Their shows featured not only the songs, but the lost dances of Afro-Peru, and it was the dancing that made Peru Negro famous. Consider how Dan Rosenberg describes the dance called the alcatraz:This is a couple's dance. Traditionally, the woman has a piece of tissue on her behind while the man dances with a lit candle. If the man can light the woman's fire, she is his. You see where the banning came in? Wait, there's more.Eventually, one of the dancers succeeds and the "burning dancer" gyrates uncontrollably until finally collapsing and grinding against the floor to put out the flames. For years I had idle visions of browsing a record store in Lima and stumbling across a 1970s Peru Negro release (worn but in good condition). Ah, dreams. I like this version fine, but the Campos still rules my heart. The legato delivery here masks the violence of the song lyrics, which include lines like "Who brought this black man here? / We must kill this black man." Note that both versions use a female lead, which is interesting. Although I can't hear Lucila Campos as a woman, no matter how hard I try. Is it just me?
What I discovered when pulling together this post is that Lucila Campos and Caitro Colina (the lyricist) were both members of Peru Negro in its early years. (I'm also guessing Lucila is related to Peru Negro founder Ronaldo Campos.) The Campos version was so hot, and such a big hit, it brought back to life the whole genre of the Toro Mata, which turns out to have a whole variety of secret meanings. And that means the David Byrne compilation was even more right on than I'd originally thought.
Are you guys over this, already? I have a few more stories and two more versions I could post, including a hot salsera rendition by Celia Cruz. Make yourselves heard.Labels: afro-latin, megan, world
posted by Megan
LINK |
Thursday, June 22, 2006
MONA KI NGI XICA
MUIMBO UA SABALU
Bonga
Angola 72
Reissued on: Tinder Records : 1997
[Buy It]
Sometimes I get lonely and I feel sorry for myself. But then I remember Barbra Streisand's nose. My mom would use this nose to make a point: "You see how Streisand never got that nose fixed? She's not crazy. She's not going to take a chance and get her voice screwed up. So she's stuck with that nose. What are you gonna do?"
Point taken, mom. And so, with this in mind, I accept a certain degree of loneliness as an essential condition of my life. Lonely is my engine, the secret behind everything I do. Lonely makes me dress up to go to the library, but it lets me find an Ideal Friend inside a hardback cover. Lonely makes me talk to random people on the street, but it's why I know so many people, so many stories. Lonely makes me a magpie for wonderful, irrelevant things, and that makes me a person I like to be.
The trick is to make the lonely work for you. Lonely is a rupture with the world you're in, but if you use it well, it's also a door to other places, other lives.
I first heard Bonga in 1996. I was living alone for the first time since I'd left home and loving it. I had a sunny studio apartment near the lake that I couldn't really afford - not so fancy, I just couldn't afford much. I started work at 3, so I spent my mornings reading and writing, surrounded by the glow of hardwood floors. I couldn't afford CDs either, so I'd tape stuff off of college radio, diligently recording playlists for future reference. WNUR had this world music show, Continental Drift, that was so good I actually called in with a pledge during the inevitable fund-raising drive. I don't remember what I was doing when they played "Mona Ki Ngi Xica," or "The Child I Am Leaving Behind," but I remember I stopped and sat and listened. I put that song on the first mix tape I made in bulk, one of those crappy tape-to-tape-to-tape jobs I sent out to a handful of friends. At least one of those tapes is still kicking around; my college roommate stumbled across it when packing for a recent move. He'll tell you, it's a weird tape: Thinking Fellers and Funkadelic and Marian Anderson. And Bonga.
Bonga Kwenda recorded Angola 72 in Rotterdam; he'd been exiled for his affiliation with the anti-colonial insurgency, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. The album was banned in his homeland, offensive to Portuguese sensibilities on two counts: its lyrics described the desperate poverty of Angolans under colonial rule and its music contained coded shout-outs to Angolan national pride. Bonga's band back home was called Kisseuia, or "poor people's suffering." He wrote songs based on the traditional semba style, the ancestor or close cousin of Brazilian samba (depending on your read of the circular genealogy of Afro-Latin music). He included Angolan instruments like the dizanka, a bamboo-scraper-type beat-keeper that reminds me of the fish. Wait, is that what it's called, the fish? You can hear it in this song:
RIGHT ON
Marvin Gaye
What's Going On
Motown : 1971
[Buy It]
I don't know the lyrics to "Mona Ki Ngi Xica" - it's sung in Kimbundu - but the emotion needs no translation: the plaintive guitars, the throaty hum, Bonga's husky cries, all speak anguished accusation. In 1974, a coup in Portugal brought down the colonial government; in 1975, a newly independent Angola imploded into a 27-year civil war that left the country in ruins. For many Africans, especially Bonga's fellow exiles in Europe, Angola 72 and the follow-up, Angola 74, became landmarks in time, music made in an explosive moment and instantly imbued with history (see Marvin Gaye, op cit).
I didn't have access to that history or those memories when I first heard the song, but it haunted me. Little by little, I learned new stories - about the song, about Bonga, about Angola.
Maybe eight years after that first hearing, another friend who got the tape I made picked up a copy of Angola 72 on a trip to San Francisco. Hearing Bonga then called up a lost moment in my own history: a rough, disheveled time when it was easy and necessary to imagine a radically different life-to-come. I grew to love another song on the album, "Muimbo Ua Sabalu," about which I can say nothing except, listen.
Hearing Bonga changed my life. It wasn't a conversion experience; I just learned something. And because I had some time on my hands, and because I bothered, the Bonga spread. I even got a little of the Bonga back. Nice, huh?
But thinking about Angola 72 makes me revise my lonely thesis. Maybe lonely isn't quite right. Loneliness is too diffuse. Maybe what I'm really talking about is longing - for home, for a time long past, for a better tomorrow - whatever endlessly deferred dream traps you, arms outstretched, in the infinite present. It's longing that opens the door. It's the door left open, waiting for someone to come home. Lower the arms, shut the door, miss the chance? No, I'm stuck with the longing, I guess. What are you gonna do?
-by Megan MatthewsLabels: african, afro-latin, megan, memoir, world
posted by James
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