Desde La Bahia—San Francisco

Latin Beat Magazine, Oct, 2002 by Jesse Varela

ALBITA: When Cuban singer-songwriter Albita Rodríguez arrived in the U.S. in 1993, she splashed onto the Miami, Florida scene with a look and sound described as "part Marlene Dietrich and part Benny Moré." Creating a brand of salsa with producer Emilio Estefan that drew inspiration from the folkloric guajiro music of her native country and a fusion of American and Latin pop influences, she landed on the Billboard charts with the albums No Se Parece A Nada and Una Mujer Como Yo.

Her three recordings on Emilio Estefan's Crescent Moon/Epic label put her on the map as one of the leading Latina voices of the 1990s. A few years ago she began to take a more active role as a producer and the Sony-owned label dropped her when they didn't accept her album Son for release. She took some financial lumps but landed with Times Square Records in New York City. That label released Son and her latest effort, Hecho a Mano (Made By Hand).

"Sony didn't like the last album I offered them," remembers Albita from her home in Southern Florida recently. "Every day the business side gets more difficult for artists. There area lot of intermediaries between the public and performers. In many cases you rely on people who don't even know what they're selling. That's not the worst, though. The cruelest thing is closing a contract and having to wait two years before it's finalized and not being able to record an album to generate work. It's inhumane and the most terrible part of this ordeal."

On Hecho A Mano, Albita returns to Cuba's trova (troubadour) roots for inspiration. From the spontaneity of street rumba verses to the lyrical depth of the 1970s nueva canción (new song) movement, the music of her culture--along with the songs of the Beatles--molded a style that is distinct.

Albita began performing with her parents at 15. Well-known singers of punto guajiro (the rural Afro-Spanish country music of Cuba), her parents appeared on the Cuban television show "Palmas y Cañas" (Palms and Sugarcane), a program comparable to "Hee Haw" in this country. At 19, Albita was one of the youngest performers on the show. In 1988, she produced her debut recording for the state-owned Egrem Records.

"Part of the idea of this album is to rescue Albita the balladeer. When I began my career it was just me, my guitar and my songs. I wanted to create something again that was more intimate and to a certain extent more romantic. It's not a big change for me, that is how I got started, but people do expect the dance music that I also adore. I always do a song or two during my show with just me and the guitar. I was anxious to do an album of this type so that people could get to know that side of me."

Albita performed Saturday (August 3) at San José's Mexican Heritage Plaza with Congolese salsero Ricardo Lemvo & Makina Loca. It was part of the performance series "Live at the Plaza" produced by MHP and Giant Creative Services that will host concert/dances by Susana Baca and Claudia Villela (October 6) and a Día De Los Muertos Chicano Groove Festival (November 2).

BATA KETU: In 1996, Bembe Records, a small independent label specializing in Cuban music in Redway, CA, released an album by percussionists Michael Spiro and Mark Lamson called Bata Ketu. This musical interplay of Cuba and Brazil featured vocalists Bobi Céspedes and Jorge Alabe; an epic work of art about the uprooting of Yoruba music from Africa, transplanted in Cuba and Brazil, evolving separately over time and reuniting today.

A live performance took place at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley in 1998 but aside from the steady sale of the CD, the project sat dormant. Now, this work commissioned by La Peña, Soulbeat and the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, got two bonafide world premieres on Thursday, August 1, at Dinklespiel Auditorium on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto and Saturday, August 3, at the Alice Arts Center in Oakland.

The world premiere featured 21 musicians and dancers, including renowned Brazilian percussionist/singer Jorge Alabe, Cuban drum master Regino Jiménez and Bay Area talents Roberto Borrell, John Santos, Harold Muñiz, among many others.

"Mark and I started out in all this with an interest in recording a couple of things showing the relationship between Brazilian and Cuban music," said Michael Spiro from his home in San Bruno. "Next thing you know we ended up with this CD. It took a long time to make but it touched a nerve and a lot of people started saying how unique, different and profound it was."

As much as anthropologists have made reference to the relationship between Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban cultures, nobody had done anything musically to really point it out until Spiro and Lamsom. As this epic unfolds, the comprehension between the secular and non-secular cultural traditions they are interpreting and inter-marrying becomes clear.

"Maybe it took somebody outside the culture to say, `Hey, have you checked out how much this is the same thing?' Looking at universalities rather than specifics. One of my great memories is going Cuba with a tape of the CD before it came out and putting it on the headphones of people and watching grandmothers jump out of their chairs trying to dance to the samba and singing to the songs they knew at the top of their lungs with huge grins."