Edgar Hernández, from la maya to la yuma - Entrevista

Latin Beat Magazine, Nov, 1999 by Luis Tamargo

During the second half of the 1990s, the L.A. Latin music scene was revitalized by the arrival of various talented Cuban musicians. Most of the young defectors (Jimmy Branly, Ilmar Gavilán, Leticia Sierra, Carlos Parra, Gonzalo Chomat, Iris Sandra Cepeda, Luis Eric González) have joined forces, at one time or another, with another expatriate in the City of Angels, bassist/composer/arranger/piano tumbao guru Edgar Hernández, whose L.A. -based groups, including the popular Charanga Cubana, have served as a steady source of employment for any newly arrived desertores.

As a follow-up to Charanga Cubana's successful recording debut (Añoranzas De Una Epoca, GMC, 1998), Hernández recently recorded a session as leader of the new Grupo Timba, to be released in the near future by Roly Garbalosa's GMC label. In this case, GMC stands for Garba Music Corporation, instead of General Motors Corporation.

The following dialogue covers diverse geographic phases of Hernández's music career, from Santiago de Cuba to Havana to Mexico City to La Yuma (Cuban slang for USA). The Edgar Hernández story, however, begins in a musically rich region of eastern Cuba called Songo La Maya. (No relation to any Indian female from Yucatán or Central America)...

LUIS TAMARGO: Where are you from?

EDGAR HERNANDEZ: I was raised in La Prueba, a small town near Santiago de Cuba.

LT: La Prueba means "The Test." What kind of test are we talking about?

EH: The test of fire. La Prueba is located in an area called Songo La Maya, between Songo and Mayarí. The region is associated with the son de maniguá (rural son).

LT: Were there any musicians in your family?

EH: Not professionally, but my father played guitar, and I had a brother who played contrabass. Both played música guajira on birthday parties and certain holidays.

LT: Tell us about your first musical instrument.

EH: The guitar was my first instrument. I took guitar lessons in 1975-1976, but what I learned was rather elementary.

LT: I assume that you didn't learn to play son at school.

EH: No. So many strange and absurd things have happened in Cuba. There was a time, for example, when jazz was forbidden. And believe it or not, back in the 1970s, the native son was prohibited in the music schools. If a guitar player, for instance, was caught playing son, he was reprimanded and even punished. The school authorities felt that playing son would lead to the student's technical deformation. Cuban music was greatly affected by such prohibition.

LT: You went to music school for two years to become a guitar instructor, but instead you turned into a charanga electric bassist.

EH: The guitar provided the basic foundation to switch to the bass. After graduation, I was supposed to be sent to La Maya region to be a guitar teacher at a local school, but somehow my paperwork got lost. Back in 1977 or 1978, I started playing electric bass with Sierra Cristal, a charanga from Mayarí Arriba.

LT: Did you have a decisive influence, in terms of bass playing, in those formative years?

EH: Humberto Perera, Ritmo Oriental's bassist. I was a hard-core fan of Ritmo Oriental (RO). The RO's percussionists formulated a new rhythmic combination. Not to mention their coros and arrangements. Compared to Juan Formell's work, their music was more accessible to the people. Unfortunately, the government bureaucrats were not properly attentive to RO.

LT: After you moved to Havana in the early 1980s, you were featured for several years as musical director of a new version of Conjunto Casino. Why did you leave such conjunto?

EH: Due to the difficulties that I experienced with the musicians and the bureaucrats. Then I joined the post-mortem version of the Benny Moré Orchestra at the Hotel Riviera for a couple of years. In 1993, I joined Rumbavana, with whom I worked for six months at the Tropicana.

LT: I hope that Tropicana remained, at least architecturally, "a paradise under the stars."

EH: I have never seen so many tembas (Cuban slang for old farts) accompanied by 14 or 15 year-old girls. It was a terribly abusive and sad situation... For quite some time, I had been contemplating the idea of permanently leaving the country. The opportunity was presented when I traveled with Rumbavana to Mexico in 1994, to play at the Veracruz Carnaval (Mardi Grass). After one of the Cuban dancers defected on the second day in Veracruz, our identification documents were confiscated by those in charge of the musical delegation. On the third day, I took the first bus to Mexico City.

LT: Did you leave your bass behind?

EH: Yes. I did not want to look suspicious, carrying that bass all over the place. If a Cuban defector was caught in Mexico, he was quickly deported to his native country... During my stay in Mexico City, I had to play mostly at tongales (Mexican slang for legal hooker bars) in order to avoid detection. I had to play a lot of quebraditas and rancheras, mostly on piano. There was not much demand for bass players at the congales.

LT: As opposed to tuba players? (LAUGHTER)