It is difficult to escape in Cuba to the rhythm of the drums. And of the rumba. Rumba is party. Going “out for a party” is going out to celebrate, go on a spree, have fun. But dancing and playing a rumba is a very serious matter, as was demonstrated this past week when Havana was rocked and seduced by dozens of concerts of various genres, percussion master classes and a high-end drummer competition. The Drum Festival, which this year celebrated its XIX edition, is already a consecrated festival of the highest level: even those with the least ear, even if they come from the North Pole, are captivated by the colors, rhythms and power of the music Afro-Cuban music and the quality of its performers, whether they are young or veteran, it doesn’t matter, because the rumba, the keys and the sound of the congas are in Cubans’ blood.
One can hardly find another place in the world where percussion and drum have influenced popular music, dance, musical genres and national temperament so much. There is no Cuban idiosyncrasy without drums, without rumba and without dance. Says the founder and director of the festival, Giraldo Piloto, nephew of the great Cuban drummer Guillermo Barreto, to whose memory the Drum Festival has been dedicated since 2000, when it was created in the basement of La Zorra y El Cuervo.
“The drum is the backbone of Cuban music, the common thread of all the styles and all the genres that represent us, the rumba, the son, the guaracha, the pilón, the mambo, the chachachá, the mozambique, the songo. , and over there pa there…. It is our identity,” says Piloto, who plays the drums like his uncle and is director of the Klimax group.
We are at the Hotel Nacional, one of the festival venues, where Piloto has just finished a master class that has left those present open-mouthed and dancing in their seats. Many were young people from the conservatory, most of them teenagers, students not only of percussion, but of various instruments, piano, trumpet, sax, all enthralled. Piloto made people clap the keys, pa-pa-pau-pa-pa, and on top of this mantra he mounted the drums touring the history of Cuban music, in which, he said, “without keys and without rumba, there is nothing”.
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As part of the lesson he talked about funky, blues and jazz, improvisation and Ella Fitzgerald and her way of interpreting How High The Moon, and how to “bring” a standard like that to Cuban rhythms. He put the version of this classic that he has just recorded on his latest album (the tenth, entitled A lot), with American singer Thana Alexa as a guest, and in her song jazz becomes timba and then guagancó, one of the three “paths” of the rumba (along with columbia and yambú).
A guaracha from the fifties, recorded by Sonora Matancera in the voice of Celia Cruz, sang that “everything comes from the mother rumba”; another, from the colonial era, said that “no matter how demure she may be/ A beautiful woman/ In the rumba she shakes/ From head to toe”. The great Cuban poet and musicologist Sigfredo Ariel always remembered that the first rumbas came from the slave barracks of the sugar mills and from the outskirts of Havana and Matanzas, his two great capitals, which also provided their most famous performers. Then the rumba and the drums were frowned upon, they were a thing of blacks and “of riffraff”, of “stream people” who made “noisy and disjointed music”.
“The rumba expressions were looked with grim eyes by those who were determined to whiten society as much as possible,” said Ariel, who quoted an anecdote by the writer Alejo Carpentier, when the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos visited Havana at the end of the 1990s. twenties of the last century and asked an official where he could see a rumba dance. “The official looked at Desnos strangely, saying: ‘What is that? Oh, I remember! You must refer to a black dance that existed in colonial times, but those things have already disappeared from the country”.
Those whitewashing efforts were unsuccessful. “The African had already reached the marrow of the culture and it was useless to try to extirpate it”, explained Ariel. And boy was he right. These last six days it was clear, Havana went crazy and the magic that caused that madness was the drum, which came from Africa and permeated everything.
Words cannot describe what happened. He didn’t care about the genre, they were all great concerts: from rumba groups, such as Los Muñequitos de Matanzas (which has just turned 70); of good Afro-Cuban jazz, such as Real Proyect or the picket line of pianist Rolando Luna and Cuban All Stars; or traditional popular music, with Los Van Van and Habana de Primera at the helm, who performed at the Salón Rosado de la Tropical, an escape valve for the pressure cooker that is Havana and a thermometer where the large orchestras, as it is a dance floor with room for 3,000 dancers (now with reduced capacity due to the pandemic).
In the midst of this hubbub, like every year, a drumming competition was held in which 13 young people competed, all stars. Piloto looked happy, the festival dedicated to his uncle was born with the vocation of teaching and transmitting the tradition to the youngest. In the past it was won by figures such as Yissi García or Brenda Navarrete, who had an anthology presentation at the Arco de Belén; The classes offered at the Nacional by Adel González (congas), Ruy López-Nussa (drums) or Eduardo Ramos (percussion), another of the past winners of the Drum Festival, were also masterful.
Needless to say what one feels when watching a guagancó dance, the most popular variant of the rumba. A couple of dancers represent a staging of the conquest of women, a kind of sensual game of I want-I don’t want. In the choreography, the man tries to possess his partner, who tries to avoid him throughout the dance. A quick gesture with the hand, with a leg, or an eloquent pelvic blow, symbolizes the possession of the woman, who must avoid this movement that is known by the name of “vacunao”.
The drums sound in Havana, and people lose their heads and feet, it’s in their DNA. “What a shake! / You jump so high!/ I get dizzy/ With so many jumps”, What did the guaracha say? “It doesn’t matter what instrument you play, the important thing is what you have inside,” said a famous trumpeter one of these days of rum and rumba. The Drum Festival ended on Sunday, but the drums are still ringing. As a man exclaimed when leaving one of the concerts: “Oh mommy, I feel a drum, it’s calling me!”.
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