the official blog of afropop worldwide: you have to dance...

3/29/2013 11:51 AMThe Official Blog of Afropop Worldwide: You Have to Dance Before You Can Walk: Los Muñequitos de Matanzas in 2011

of 14http://blog.afropop.org/2011/05/you-have-to-dance-before-you-can-walk.html

You Have to Dance Before You Can Walk: Los Muñequitos deMatanzas in 2011

Afropop Producer Ned Sublette recently attended a rare and special performance by Los Muñe-quitos de Matanzas in NYC and filed this report.

New York, May 17, 2011. Legendary Cuban music-and-dance group Los Muñequitos deMatanzas returned to the U.S. for concerts in April and May 2011 after a nine-year ab-sence. The tour included three shows at New York City’s Symphony Space on May 5-7,presented by the World Music Institute. (The photos accompanying this piece were tak-en by Banning Eyre at the May 6 performance.)

Not only have Cuba and the United States both experienced major changes in that time,so has the group. Since their first, precedent-shattering U.S. tour in 1992, four senior mu-sicians of the troupe have died. First we lost magisterial founding member Gregorio“Goyo” Díaz, then singers Ricardo Cané and Alberto Romero, and finally quintero andcomposer Jesús Alfonso, who was the group’s music director and one of the most magi-cal musicians I’ve ever heard.

Meanwhile, we lost touch. There was 9/11 and the consequent implementation of theHomeland Security state. The onset of bushismo in U.S.-Cuban relations at the end of2003 unilaterally slammed the window shut and stopped communication. No Cubangroups were allowed into the United States to perform between the last days of 2003and October 2009, while travel from the U.S. to Cuba got much harder.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--O3h9Nmuq8k/TdQeeEen-KI/AAAAAAAABFw/cAFs9DD77n4/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+353.jpg



Though the Muñequitos were regular visitors to the U.S. in the 1990s, with fans allacross the country, their last U.S. appearance was in 2002. Only now has it been possibleto bring them back -- a mind-numbingly difficult labor involving much bureaucracy, alot of lead time, and the risk of a considerable amount of money. And with so many se-nior members gone, there were going to have to be a lot of new faces. It was going to bea new group.

I knew that Matanzas was a great incubator of talent, so I wasn’t concerned theywouldn’t be good.

But I didn’t know how good.

They did it right. This new, younger version of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas is a modelof generational continuity and transmission of knowledge, drawing on the collectivecultural understanding of an interconnecting web of families who have conserved andnurtured the rumba all these years in the same barrio where the style grew up. It’s apowerful group that will continue to grow in the years to come.

* * *

Inspired by Arsenio Rodríguez, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas were founded in 1952 un-der the name Guaguancó Matancero by a group of rumberos who were patrons of a barcalled El Gallo in the black barrio of La Marina in the old sugar-and-slave Gulf of Mexi-

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JKyrllW10ps/TdQfpK7gLvI/AAAAAAAABF4/nopRj-risUY/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+301.jpg



co port of Matanzas. They acquired the name by which they were subsequently knownbecause they had a hit record in Havana, “Los Muñequitos,” about comic-strip charac-ters (“muñequitos”) in the Saturday newspapers – not a historically-themed lyric, but acontemporary one. (The other side of the 45 was called “Los Beodos,” or “The Drunks.”)

They fell inactive in the 1960s, then regrouped toward the end of the decade. By thetime they first traveled outside Cuba, to London in 1989, they were almost entirely a sec-ond-generation group, continuing in the style of the founders, with only Gregorio Díaz(“Goyo”) remaining active from the original lineup. They made their second trip outsideCuba in 1992, when they played a ten-week U.S. tour to sold-out houses across thecountry.

At the start of that tour, in the heavily cubanophile Bay Area, they received a standingovation before they started to play. They weren’t used to that. Despite their good name,Los Muñequitos had not exactly been headliners in late-80s Havana. Like the rumba it-self, they were seen in Cuba as subcultural, and living outside the capital, they werepractically invisible.

Foreign travel revolutionized the group’s own understanding of the importance of theculture they represented, and appearing on different stages in different cities night afternight further professionalized them. They came back to the U.S. again and again as thecultural opening widened in the 1990s, appeared in Europe and Latin America, andeven headlined in Havana.

* * *

This writer does not claim objectivity. It’s hard for me to know where to begin in talkingabout Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, so thoroughly was my life transformed by them.

Knowing the high regard in which they were held by the most serious members of theNew York Latin music community, I set out to hear them in February 1990 during thefirst of twenty-five trips I would make to Cuba, driving to Matanzas from Havana in arented car, arriving like an extraterrestrial cowboy one Saturday morning. The previousweekend in Havana, I had met the late Pedro Izquierdo, better known as Pello El



Afrokán, and I asked him if he knew how to find the Muñequitos. He shrugged. “Askanyone in Matanzas.” I followed his advice and found them quickly by asking aroundin the street, and was immediately invited into the home of singer Israel Berriel whileDiosdado Ramos was out arranging things for their gig later that same night.

I first heard them play that Saturday night, February 3, 1990, in a state-maintained Casade Cultura in the dim light of the old sugar town of Cárdenas. They invited me to attenda Monday morning rehearsal of Yoruba batá music in the front room of Diosdado’snineteenth-century house – high ceiling, tiled floor -- in the traditional Matanzas barrioof La Marina. They were preparing the show they brought to the U.S. two years later,though at the time they had no travel plans. But they were ready.

I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. I still think that. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, none has brought me more honor than being asso-ciated with the Muñequitos. I didn’t book their U.S. tours – I would be incapable -- butlet’s just say, I was there. The 1992 tour was the right place and time: a watershed inCuban-American cultural relations, a popular and artistic smash hit that established im-portant bureaucratic precedents and, after years of intimidation and threats (which onDecember 29, 1978 included the bombing of Avery Fisher Hall by the domestic terroristgroup Omega 7), demonstrated to presenters around the country that it was possible toproduce Cuban artists in their communities.

Together with a partner, Ben Socolov, I released six albums by Los Muñequitos deMatanzas on Qbadisc, the record label I co-founded. Three of those albums I producedmyself, including Live in New York, a concert recording at Symphony Space in New Yorkin December 1992 undertaken in my capacity as producer for Afropop Worldwide, whichbroadcast it over National Public Radio. I subsequently traveled with the group to Puer-to Rico – that was fun -- and to Brazil, the latter of which trip included a jam at Ilê AxéOpo Afonjá, Salvador’s oldest candomblê house, as documented in an Afropop Worldwideshow I produced (“Percussion Panorama”). I make no bones about being really proud ofall this. Suffice it to say that the personal respect and affection with which the grouphas always treated me is something I aspire to be worthy of, and though I have not beento Cuba since 2003 and did not have a hand in the 2011 tour, I still feel deeply connect-



ed.

I am apparently not the only one who feels this way. The entire team that made this tourhappen was the one that made it happen back then – producer Ann Rosenthal of MAPP;tour manager Estrella Quiroga; audio and drum tech Scott Wardinsky, who at show af-ter show prompted the venue’s sound engineer about which drum mike needed to comeup in order to make the percussive cross-melodies cohere; and Caridad Diez, thegroup’s Havana-based Cuban representative, whose life has been illuminated by theMuñequitos as much as anyone’s has.

Thankfully, the group still counts on plenty of elder knowledge, with singer RafaelNavarro Pujada “Niño,” who for me is the very voice of rumba, and with Israel Berriel,the group’s akpwon, or lead singer for the Yoruba sacred repertoire. There is dancer /singer Ana Pérez, the only female voice in the chorus, who dances Oyá (warrior god-dess of storms and the cemetery) and partners in the yambú (the sensual style of rumba,for older couples) with Diosdado.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N24tH-etXk4/TdQgvAGo2GI/AAAAAAAABGA/THkO8YxxuCE/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+13.jpg



I think Diosdado Ramos must be the most subtle rumba dancer alive.

I first realized that when I saw him dance at an Abakuá ceremony in Matanzas twenty-one years ago (which is not rumba, but the two are closely associated). He was a teenag-er in the 1960s when the founding members of the Muñequitos, at the time an all-music

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xMnznADWGGk/TdQhH7bIc2I/AAAAAAAABGE/vg4tYyfPmdw/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+57.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BMLbYQvSQIQ/TdVnu6M3wMI/AAAAAAAABG4/y0HXrSTzjjk/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+231.jpg



group, invited him to join in order to reinvent the group as a dance-and-music troupe,of which he subsequently became the director.

The dance side of the Muñequitos is a Ramos family specialty, and includes Diosdado’ssons Bárbaro and Figurín, daughters Vivian and Yamilé, and Vivian’s son Luis DeyvisRamos, all grown to adulthood. Featured on the cover of the album Vacunao,Bárbaro and Vivian were the masterful young dancers of the troupe in 1992; nowthey’re the intermediate generation.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5JzNsnYc4OI/TdVoDOCsNNI/AAAAAAAABG8/Z4EM_kCXBrE/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+281.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_rw-YSxaOdU/TdVoRELdzlI/AAAAAAAABHA/hoBetUv9lmo/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+203.jpg



Figurín, meanwhile, has emerged as not only a fine dancer, but a percussionist, compos-er, and singer who can work the crowd as a charismatic front man. The first generationof Los Muñequitos consisted of musicians only, not dancers, and it was all-guaguancó(the most popular style of rumba, fast-paced and with a danced game of sexual pursuit-and-capture). I didn’t get to hear them live, and hardly anyone is still around who did. Ionly know them from a handful of immortal recordings, which was way more than thelegendary rumberos before them left behind. But I heard the second-generation groupin concert dozens of times. They were phenomenal, they created their own glory out ofa grand legacy, and they took the continuity of their group seriously. In doing so, theyburnished the names of the founders, taking them beyond a status as revered disco-graphic figures to being living influences, founders of a school that continues rockingthe world at the heart of an art that at this point is the great African city ofMatanzas’s principal claim to fame.

I might best explain the new version of the group bytalking about Deyvis, whom I met when he was a tod-dler. In many Cuban households, everything is donewhile dancing – mama does a few steps while she cooksdinner -- but at Casa Ramos, it’s a little more intense.Before Deyvis could walk, he was following his momand her girlfriends as they danced around the house,and when they changed steps, he changed steps withthem. I saw this. Meanwhile, the men showed him howto play drums. The kid’s talent was a common topic ofdiscussion. Deyvis knocked everyone’s socks off as a10-year-old whiz kid on their 1998 U.S. tour; now he’s a

man, and he’s multitalented.

What I’m saying is, you don’t just answer an ad in the paper and join Los Muñequitosde Matanzas.

* * *



The program Los Muñequitos brought to the U.S., titled Tambor de Fuego, varied in con-tent depending on the night, but it always began with a sung prayer and invocation ofthe departed members of the group.

The dead were dancing with them.

All three of the drummers in the Muñequitos’s 2011 rumba lineup – Freddy Alfonso,Eddy Espinosa, and veteran Agustín Díaz – are sons of Muñequitos drummers. LikeDeyvis, from before the time they could walk, they were hearing and imitating thegreatest drummers, observing the inner workings of the rumba motor every day.

Freddy Alfonso sat in his father’s chair, and when he smacked the quinto (the high-pitched, hard-cracking, soloistic, commenting drum), he cocked his head to the side theway Jesús did, with the same ecstatic open-mouthed expression.

Jesús was there in the room.

Eddy, the center of gravity on the (low-pitched) tumbadora (conga) drum, is the son ofVictoriano “Tití” Espinosa, who was the group’s quintero before Jesús. Augustín, on sali-dor (or “seis por ocho”) is the son of Goyo. Between the two, they carry the tumbao, orgroove. It’s not the same sound as the father-and-son pocket between Goyo and Au-gustín used to be, nor, on the basis of the records, did Goyo sound with Agustín like he

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0pxXqLKiYaw/TdQiU2JuMKI/AAAAAAAABGM/kPaRb-tYN6o/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+262.jpg



did with Pablo Mesa a generation before. Right now Eddy and Agustín are it, and thensomeday they will be the bygone heroes.

What lived is still alive.

You honor your father by living a good life. To honor what has lived, the new group hasto be alive, using their knowledge to put their own seal on their own version of it. That’swhy this music still exists, because it lights on the head of generation after generation,and it’s illuminating these younger heads now. They know what they have to do, andwhat they have to live up to.

Another new addition to the group is Luisito Cansino, a former member of the venera-ble group Afro Cuba de Matanzas (and Ana Pérez’s nephew, of whom she is mightyproud). He’s not an obvious replacement for any particular chair; he’s there for his deepknowledge. He switches positions during the show, now playing this drum, now that,now singing in the coro. His influence is felt in the group’s present musical direction,and it looks like he’s going to be a key figure in the future development of the group.

Diosdado brought in two impressive young singers: José Andro Mella Bosch andReyniel López González, who were previously in Rumbatimba, a youth rumba group inMatanzas that effectively wound up functioning as a farm team for the Muñequitos.Part of the novelty that made the Muñequitos so popular back in the day was that theirsingers, Esteban Lantri “Saldiguera” and Hortensio Alfonso “Virulilla,” had been in sonsextets. In the era of Arsenio Rodríguez, they brought the two-voice primo and segundoharmonies of the son into the guaguancó. These two young singers have made a seriousstudy of Saldiguera and Virulilla – it’s not just a style, it’s a school -- and they negotiatethose tricky harmonies in tune, with strong voices. The result is that the group’s singingis now better than I’ve ever heard it.



The Muñequitos came not only with new personnel, but with a substantially new pro-gram, following the same general format of espectáculo they brought across the Straits ofFlorida nineteen years ago. The first half consisted of traditional African religious musicof Cuba centered on the Yoruba tradition of sacred dances for the orishas, the musicplayed on hourglass-shaped batá drums. In 1992, when they first came to the U.S., theydid much to spread awareness of the Yoruba religion through their presentations; manypeople got their first glimpses of the personalities of the orishas from the Muñequitospresentations. But even the orisha dances, though they are essentially unchanging,weren’t done the same way on this tour as on previous ones. And during the three con-certs and a workshop that I saw, they did not only Lucumí (the older name for Yoruba),but also Iyesá, Arará, Abakuá, and Congo numbers. At the workshop I saw, theydid makuta – a Congo rhythm that I’d never heard them do in the dozens of Muñequitosshows I’ve witnessed over the years.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DRc9gK9YEFE/TdQjEolMzsI/AAAAAAAABGU/sPEKAI6OnaQ/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+94.jpg



I would be derelict in my duty as scribe not to mention the rumbatap, inspired back inthe 90s by a collaboration with New York tap dancer Max Pollak, who was as fascinatedby guaguancó dancing as Bárbaro Ramos was by Pollak’s tapping. It’s been – I don’tknow, fifteen years now? – that they’ve had to think about this, so by now they have asocko-show-biz number in which Bárbaro, Figurín, and Deyvis, the three young maledancers, dressed in flash-of-the-spirit orisha-color-coded sequins, tap-slap batá rhythmswith their shoes on the floor and their hands on their bodies. To compare it with AfricanAmerican tap would be to miss the point, and in any case, the real power of it comesfrom the fact that you get to see these three young figures communicate on a high level.

The second half of the program was rumba, which is street music. The power of therumba today is that although it’s historically conscious, it’s not a museum piece. It’s aliving, breathing, growing thing that is still sung and danced in the street and stillserves the expressive needs of the barrios where it first appeared in the nineteenth cen-tury.

Continuity rules. It seems as though the elders are trying to be sure that the youth mas-ter the grand arc of the Muñequitos repertoire, and what a songbook they have. In thethree concert performances and one workshop I saw on this tour, they didn’t repeat thesame tunes all the time. They called up “Los Muñequitos,” the group’s first hit for thePuchito label, which popularized the Matanzas clave de guaguancó in Havana back in the‘50s, and I heard them do “Baba Cuello Mao,” recorded in 1977. They also sang a bunch

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f3QSufPqhEE/TdQk7lNoFII/AAAAAAAABGc/6qY4b5KrCpU/s1600/Munequitos_SymphonySpace+125.jpg



of rumbas I hadn’t heard before: at least four of the group’s young members are com-posers.

The late Jesús Alfonso created a repertoire of his own compositions that use traditionalimages and African-laced language to tell stories of his time and place – most famously,with “Congo Yambumba,” a hit when covered by Eddie Palmieri in the 1980s, whoselyrics are a street challenge to a barrio braggart. They didn’t do that one in the shows Iheard, but they did Jesús’s blissfully lovely “Chino Guaguao” and his exultant “Saludoa Nueva York,” written upon the group’s arrival in 1992.

They did an incredible amount of work to make this all happen. In Matanzas, the Muñe-quitos rehearse every day. They arrived prepared to a T, with a show that was tight, butstill loose enough that it could accommodate guests on stage.

How often do you get to hear a sixty-year-old group and say, they have a lot of poten-tial? The ensemble’s powers are growing before our eyes and ears.

* * *

The difficult transition they’ve managed is not their first one. They went from 1952across the rupture of 1959, reinventing themselves after a period of inactivity at the endof the 1960s, transitioning into a second generation of musicians, making it through the“Special Period” following the crash of the Cuban economy in the early ‘90s to play toan amazed world, and now returning in the unpredictable 21st century with a well-pre-pared new generation. Which is to say, the arc of the Muñequitos over the last sixtyyears pretty much traces the arc of Cuba.

For all that rumba is associated in folklore with guapería – a street-style, rum-fueled,cocky machismo -- Los Muñequitos, who are as true a posse of rumberos as exists, havealways represented themselves and their patria with dignity.

Because I pay attention to Cuban issues, people sometimes ask me what I think willhappen there. For the last twenty-plus years, my answer has been the same: I have nocrystal ball.



But my hope is that a wide swath of Cuban society, youth and elder, might turn out tobe as prepared as Los Muñequitos de Matanzas proved themselves to be on this tour.

Or, as a concertgoer shouted at Symphony Space in 2011 – the same guy who had shout-ed the same thing the same way in the same room in 1992, it’s on the record:

¡Viva Cuba!

the official blog of afropop worldwide: you have to dance...

Documents