Bill Summers: Studies in Bata from Havana to Matanzas

Latin Beat Magazine, Nov, 2002 by Jesse Varela

In August, 2002, Los Hombres Calientes brought the house down at the 13th Annual AT&T San José Jazz Festival, during a Friday-night kick-off show with Quetzal, the L.A. Chicano/Latino groove band. Co-led by percussionist Bill Summers and trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, Los Hombres Calientes served up a spicy New Orleans gumbo with potent portions of songo, samba, reggae, danzón, straight-ahead jazz and Basin Street vibe. A band of twenty-something musical chefs played the jazz-based pieces with a sense of tradition and youthful hip-hop urgency.

Playing largely from their album New Congo Square Vol. 3 (Basin Street Records), they did Foforo Fo Firi and ignited the party. People danced with gleeful abandonas they played Fantasia Do Samba and let the drums fly. Mayfield was having a field day. In a dapper three-piece suit, he produced stunning solos with great melodic invention. His cadenza on Night in Tunisia was masterful!

The 90-minute set ended with a second line New Orleans shuffle that had everybody parading. The hemispheric connection that Summers brings as a teacher and mentor to Mayfield and young people in the band is a rare apprenticing opportunity that will help make them grow into greater musicians. Summers, an advocate for batá drumming, was a pivotal force in the SF/Oakland 1970s-'80s jazz funk movement with Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and his own band, Summer's Heat.

After the show, I spoke with the long-time Eastbay resident and one-time UC Berkeley student, who shared his latest academic undertaking a self-published book titled "Studies in Batá--From Havana to Matanzas." Accompanied by a CD, the bulk of the 296 pages consists of annotated transcriptions of Afro-Cuban santería prayers.

Full of details and intricacies regarding the playing of the sacred hourglass shaped drums, the book's introduction is an overview of how batá drumming grew in the Bay Area.

Summers moved to New Orleans several years ago to continue his studies. This book is an advanced study of the Yoruba-derived batá drums and requires the ability to read rhythmic patterns.

Jesse Varela: This is a great book you've assembled, Bill. The introduction, glossary and annotations make this an invaluable resource. Tell us about it.

Bill Summers: It's an accumulation of information I've gathered in the 37 years that I've been around the batá. When I first came to the Bay Area, the only person I knew who had any information was Francisco Aguabella. At the particular time when I approached him, he was not willing to give me any information. It's okay. The African American has been removed from that type of religious music, practice and liturgy. The Afro-Cubans who held that knowledge were afraid it would be misused. It was legitimate that he had doubts. He instilled something in me though that he doesn't even know he did, which is a great respect for the religion. I knew you just couldn't do anything with it. You had to be real careful about who got the information and dealt with it. It inspired me and pissed me off too. So I made my own batá. I made the first set that was played around here, and there's a picture of them in the book.

JV: The scholarly work of Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortíz is renowned in the area of Afro-Cuban folklore and considered to be some of the first documentation of these drumming rituals and complex rhythmic patterns. What does this book add to this type of scholarship?

BS: Ortíz did important research, but he didn't write out the music. Gaspar Agüero, a concertmaster from Havana, was commissioned to annotate these drums played by Raúl Diaz and Giraldo Rodríguez. And even though Agüero was classically trained, he wrote the rhythms wrong. Fernando Ortíz was not a musician and could not double-check these rhythms. The musicians that played for them couldn't read, so they couldn't check and it was never cross-referenced.

JV: From your research did the Yoruba batá drum ever appear in New Orleans' Congo Square?

BS: Originally Conga Square was called Congo Planes. It was a huge area and on the weekends, at any given time, there were between 300 and 600 slaves in the center of Congo Square, unsupervised. The only thing they had to adhere to was a cannon shot when it was time to stop. There are some very good accounts from the Armestide that are archived at Tulane University. The accounts are from Cubans and show the links that existed between New Orleans and Havana. For many years, Havana was the Archdiocese for New Orleans and there were several Spanish governors. But the batá actually reached Cuba fairly late. The Congolese were there earlier, but the Yoruba arrived later in the 1800s, during the Yoruba Wars in West Africa. I doubt seriously that the batá made its way to Congo Square. But what did make it was Palo. It was in Congo Planes and there are detailed drawings by this Cuban cat that hung out experiencing these events. He drew this guy sitting over the top of a drum. If you look into Fernando Ortíz's "Los Instrumentos de la Música Afrocubana" there's a little kid sitting on a yuca drum, straddling it. The drawings are exactly alike.