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 Thursday, May 23, 2013
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WALTER KROCHMAL
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  he phrase "el cuero flojo," depending on where you hail from in the Spanish-speaking world, can mean many things, to name just a few: "the haggard hide," "the indolent ho’," or simply and literally, "the loose skin." You snicker at the multiple entendre, brain laboring upstream, ravaged by exposure to bad Spanish radio. Aha! You think: A column with tips for picking up cheap tricks!
Ha! We don’t do cheap, and we may do sex, but that would be a different department. This column exists solely for us to wax wonkish on World Music, with forays into film and performance.
I literally use the title phrase to mean "the loose skin," based on the information my percussionist friend Roberto Torres once passed on to me as we walked along Calle del Sol in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He told me that the original Cuban rumba combos always included one cracked drum-skin. Aside from honoring the extreme deprivation under which African culture developed in the New World, the flaccid drum-skin’s deep drone lends spiritual depth and dimension to the melodic and rhythmic tapestry that the lead drums weave.
The Garífuna of Central America achieve a similar effect by stretching a taut wire over the head of their garawon, lending their music its own distinctive high-pitched drone. In both cases, a minuscule supposed "imperfection" in the instrument keys us into the whole world and history of the music and the people from which it springs.
I use the flaccid skin scenario (stop snickering) as my own benchmark for approaching cross-border musical hybrids, or World Music as they call it. The best performers in the genre possess, first and foremost, deep knowledge and practical uses for these details of their ancestral culture, spiritual codes, and identity trademarks.
Beyond that, they also demonstrate a malleable, global sensibility which allows them to weave their ancestral skeins with "alien" musical idioms and into the warp of modern recording and production technologies.
The Cubans and Brazilians embody both these attributes brilliantly. They've reached out to the furthest corner of the planet with their masterful creations, whether adopting and nationalizing jazz or exporting their own forms in turn to leave an indelible mark on jazz, African music and so many other forms.
The element of flexibility, or malleability, plays a critical role in defining World Music practitioners, and in that sense we Latinos have been born with a 500-year old advantage that springs from the painful events of the Conquest. We come from a tradition of syncretism, a form of resistance by which a conquered people outwardly adopt the spiritual and cultural codes and symbols imposed by their conquerors but retain their own spiritual identity by imbuing these elements with their own ancestral meanings. In practical terms, Santería serves as a good example. Catholic saints retain their Catholic names while also embodying the essence of West African deities. Syncretism is a conscious process.
We also come equipped with another advantage. Throughout Latin America we call it mestizaje, or miscegenation, which sounds kind of rough in English, no? "Authorities have expressed alarm at the rampant epidemic of miscegenation!" This word originally refers to the mixing of bloodlines between Spaniards and indigenous peoples, an unconscious act to some degree. In modern times the term has been re-appropriated to mean a conscious process of mixing and matching across lines of race and color, or simply of sensibilities. It implies a conscious study of the multiplicity within ourselves and the world around us.
In other words, history and nature have given us a tremendous head-start in this global phenomenon, which has only recently acquired the identifying tag (for marketing purpose no doubt) of World Music.
Not that you would guess as much if you tune into Spanish radio here in New York City and elsewhere throughout the U.S. No wonder you can’t stop thinking about those cheap ladies of the night you want to score every time you think about this section’s title. We've allowed ourselves to be degraded. Take back the airwaves! If nothing else, wake up to the gold mine under your feet. Someone somewhere open the door wide to the Afro-Cuban legends who can’t get a lick of air-time in edgewise here in New York City and elsewhere, welcome the richly talented new generation that mostly languishes in anonymity. New York City stands as the most diverse Latino community on the planet. Maybe we'll see a change in the quality of our media programming, in the coming years, that reflects our rich history, our now almost overwhelming numbers and purchasing power. That would go a long way to counteracting the damage inflicted on us by the strident, lubricious, lowbrow programming our media churns out.
There I’ve said it. Now to the subject at hand: World Music and its interplay of conscious and unconscious, resistance and seeming compliance, multiplicity and singularity, spiritual and secular. This section will range far and wide, from the Far North to Asia to Africa and back to the rich soil of Latino expressions, which encompasses everything and misses nothing.
I’m going to review two recordings that appeared on the market some time ago. It doesn’t make the artists and their creations obsolete or less worthwhile. Latino Journal wants you to have a reference point for when you see this artist and his accompanying musicians any time they come to town. So come along with us on a titillating (there you go snickering again) world journey for which we are uniquely suited. ¡A rumbear!
The Deep Rumba Collection: Kip Hanrahan’s Curlicues and Whirligigs
An Irishman? You betcha. An Irishman and a citizen of the world. An honorary Latino. Put these parallels in your pipe and smoke 'em: Eamon de Valera, Ireland’s first president, had Spanish blood; last century’s literary titans were mostly Latin American and Irish; Chile has the "O’Calaján" clan; in fact, Spain’s Galicians play the bagpipes (which historians trace originally to North Africa, the misnomered "Middle East). You get my point.
Hanrahan plays with a monster lineup that includes Rubén Blades, "Mañenquito" Giovanni Hidalgo, Milton Cardona, Paoli Mejías, "Puntilla" Orlando Ríos, and Pablo Ziegler, Astor Piazzola’s protegé. As Hanranan himself says in the liner notes of Days and Nights of Blue Luck Inverted: "Some records are there because there’s money that demands to be made, some records are there because there’s a career that needs to be realized, this record’s here because there was (is?) a mood... that demanded to be heard." The credits dispense with accustomed formalities, you don't get lyrics to help you sing along, and Hanrahan appears in the distance or in shadows in the still images. A superb introduction to World Music at its best.
Deep Rumba: This Night Becomes a Rumba and its three companion recordings put rumba under the microscope, speed it up, slow it down, bring it to a boil and cool it off, or let it peep out from a wirebrush shuffle stroke only to thrust it back at you from between crackling conga reports. Wisps of the rumba snake out from between snatches of phrases and jazzy flourishes, garnish funk riffs, push a pulsing tango to the depths.
Rumba pounds along with the poetry of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Peruvian poet César Vallejo in disembodied voices and semi-chants that challenge the ear, in Hanrahan’s musings, in instrumentation that includes Ellington and Piazzola arrangements, electric violins and slide guitars, even in the silences and caesurae that bridge one passage into the next. Nightmarish vocals punctuate Days and Nights of Blue Luck Inverted, which also demonstrates how to make a trumpet or violin sound like a bandoneón! On A Thousand Nights and a Night, the congas flirt with North African cadences until centrifugal forces in "Ghanim ibn Ayyub's Tale and Kut al-Kulub" and "The Jewish Doctor's Tale Continues" threaten to send the varied individual strands of the music flying into orbits of their own. The lyrically aggressive Vertical’s Currency leans heavily on poetry and expands outward from there. They all flow into the title CD, Deep Rumba: This Night Becomes a Rumba, the most recent of this monumental undertaking. Rumba for the 21st century, a syncretist, mestisized achievement of the highest order: sensuous, complex, and sexy to the core.
See?… Everything goes better with… El cuero flojo
WALTER KROCHMAL is a Honduran-born, writer, translator, performer and actor. He was a producer at WBAI 99.5 FM (Pacifica Radio) and is now working at HBO Latino.
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