Songs
Abakua Jazz
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- country:Cuba
- region:Caribbean
- style(s):Cuban, Fusion
- label:Habana Harlem
- instrumentation:instrumental, vocal
- artist posted by:Alexandre Jomaron
Line up
- Angel Guerrero (singer)
- Edmar Castaneda (Harp)
- Onel Mulet (sax, Flute)
- Paquito D Rivera (guest) (sax, clarinet)
- Pedro Martinez (percussion, singer)
- Roman Diaz (percussion, singer)
- Steve Turre (trombon, shells)
- with friends (bass, keyboards, horns etc..)
African secret societies played a formative role in Cuban cultural history. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ekpe (leopard), which was in effect the highest indigenous authority. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to the Americas, became known there as 'Carabali' after the port of Calabar from which many embarked.
Evidence of Carabali cultural practice is found today in Salvador Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Santiago de Cuba. However, only in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba did Carabali leaders reorganize their Ekpe clubs into a ;mutual-aid society called Abakua, a term likely derived from the Abakpa community of Calabar. Abakua ritual languages and practices became a unifying charter for transplanted Africans and their successors; its ideas and expressions became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music. Each lodge is a school that trains members in the performance of ritual theater and visual arts, as well as jurisprudence, or the legal codes of social organization.
In 2001, Nigerian Ekpe and Cuban Abakua met to display their related traditions, likely for the first time since separation through slavery some 200 years ago. The mutual excitement of this summit meeting, held at the Pratt Institute in New York, led to several further meetings, each incrementally larger. When the Obong (paramount ruler) of Calabar visited the USA in 2003, the Abakua who arrived to greet him received invitations to visit Calabar. In 2004 two Abakua and myself to visited an Ekpe festival in Calabar, where the Cubans won the hearts and respect of Ekpe leaders. In 2007, the Musee Quai Branly of Paris invited two groups, one Nigerian Ekpe, and another Cuban Abakua, to perform onstage for a series of five concerts exploring common themes in the music, chants, body masks, and visual signs of each group. The conversation that unfolded onstage demonstrated to both groups the significance of their links.
This recording by Enyenison Enkama is a brilliant effort to continue that conversation, using the same form in which both Ekpe and Abakua have recorded their own histories: ritual phrases with symbolic rhythms. The phrases of each composition describe sacred geographies (maps) of West African source communities, as well as histories (epic deeds) of the African founders.
By evoking these inherited chants, Enyenison Ekama' praise their teachers, as well as all those Abakua leaders of the past who maintained their faith in the teachings of those Carabali migrants who established Abakua.
By chanting within the context of contemporary arrangements played by vanguard jazz musicians, they celebrate a cultural victory of continuity and evolution across time and space, as well as offer a vision of the expansion of their traditions into the future.
Ivor Miller
African Studies Center
Boston University
author: Voice of the Leopard
http://afrocubaweb.com/ivormiller/voice2008.htm