Suite Caminos

suite
Caminos
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Gonzalo Rubalcaba
suite
Caminos
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Gonzalo Rubalcaba
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9:11
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1 Sendero de Aliento
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2 El Hijo Mensajero
3 Destino Sin Fin
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14:48
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4 Sendero de Espuma
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10:01
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1 Santa Meta
2 Alameda de Vientos
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10:58
3 Via Prodigiosa
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9:29
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13:41
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4 Ronda de Suerte
Gonzalo Rubalcaba
My point of departure for everything
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is almost always the experiences I’m
having in life, on the path I’ve decided
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to take. It’s a path of information, a
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path of experience, a path of confron-
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tation, and it often is a path full of
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empty spaces. We don’t exactly know
what we’re about to see, and we’re
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ignorant of what’s already happened.
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We don’t know it all. This is what
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makes me think that we should never
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stop researching, searching, listening,
reading and being curious.
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Yo casi siempre me lo planteo todo a
partir de las mismas experiencias que voy
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teniendo en la vida, en el camino que
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información, de diversas experiencias de
confrontaciones, y otras veces lleno de
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vacios. Ignoramos precisamente que
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vamos a ver más adelante, incluso
ignoramos en parte que ha pasado detrás.
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No lo sabemos todo. Eso es lo que me
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hace pensar que no se puede parar nunca
de investigar, buscar, escuchar, leer,...
mantener la curiosidad.
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Gonzalo
he decidido andar. Un camino lleno de
Yoruba
“...it is precious in the biodiversity of world religion.”
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Over two centuries or so of this
process, what we now call the Yoruba
religion has become Cuban, and this
Afro-Cuban religion has in turn traveled
to distant parts of the Americas and
around the world, especially in recent
decades. Everywhere it has traveled
to from Cuba – New York, Miami,
Puerto Rico, Caracas, Mexico City and
many other places – it has continued to
transform.
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This religion – or practice, or system
of knowledge – that came to Cuba in
the heads of chained-up people has
been maintained with great clarity, in a
stunning number of variants, by men
and women of humble means. As such,
it is precious in the biodiversity of world
religion. But that’s not the whole story.
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going on for as long as we know, always
growing out of what already existed.
The 20th-century Cuban scholar
Fernando Ortiz, author of the first
historical ethnographic work on AfroCuban culture as Cuban identity, wrote
of transculturation: Cubans adapted
African principles and practices to serve
their needs. They did so over and over
– during slavery, the independence
struggle, the racist neocolonial republic,
and in the postrevolutionary Cuban
state and its associated expatriate
diaspora.
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Americas still receiving African captives,
a wave of human trafficking is said to
have brought entire villages at a time
from Oyó, including, intellectuals of
the religion. The musical legacy of the
Yoruba religion is particularly brilliant – a
great West African classical music, conserved in astounding detail – and has
played a vital role in the continuity of
knowledge that the religion embodies.
Organized at a high level of complexity,
it has been conserved with a sense of
orthodoxy in Cuba by deeply committed believers.
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Wherever there is a sense of African
religion in the Americas, it appears as
something in the process of continual
transformation, even though the sense
of an ancestral tie is paramount. This
process of transformation has been
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The most visible of these systems,
and the one on which Gonzalo
Rubalcaba’s Suite Caminos is centered,
is the Yoruba religion (known by various
names, including santería, or regla de
ocha, or, in the 19th century, when the
name “Yoruba” was not yet in use in
Cuba, lucumí.) The last major African
religious system to arrive in Cuba, it
was transported there from the Oyó
empire, in what is now Nigeria, after
Oyó was taken down by an Islamic
jihad in the 1820s and ‘30s. In the 1850s,
when Cuba was the last place in the
La religión yoruba is not simply a feat
of preservation, but a dynamic process
that came from Africa. Much of the
formalization of the Yoruba religion
in Cuba happened after the end of
slavery, implemented by free people
in a complicated process that involved
back-and-forth with the motherland, as
well as with other kinds of influences.
Serving the needs of its living community, and constantly transforming
through interventions by scholars, ritual
experts (including musicians), and believers that have fed back into traditional
practices, the Yoruba religion in Cuba
has diverged in many ways from what it
has become in present-day West Africa.
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Even a casual visitor to Havana can
observe how widely the African-derived
religions are practiced there. The big
three are Congo, Abakuá and Yoruba,
but there are more. They are important
as belief, and also as a high culture of
systems of knowledge in Cuba, each
with its own legacy: cosmology,
language, deities, dances and music.
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b y N e d S u b l e t te
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PAT H S
“This religion...has been maintained with great clarity...”
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There is no central authority for the
Yoruba religion, no Afro-Cuban Vatican.
Some practitioners insist on the separateness of orishas and saints, and will
not call the orishas santos. But in any
case, the orishas don’t lose their identity
by being correlated with saints; they
have plenty of selves.
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Los cubanos, lo mismo van a la
misa católica dominical, que salen
de esta para un tambor yuka,
un toquede santo o un guiro.
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In Cuba, under conditions of duress,
the orishas assumed the images and
names of Catholic santos (saints), hiding
in plain sight. So, for example, the image of Santa Bárbara with her hatchet is
understood to mean Changó with his
ax. But even though people commonly
refer to them as santos, the orishas are
something quite different from saints.
The orishas are complex beings who
embody natural forces – Changó the
thunder, Oyá the wind, Ochún fresh
water, Olokún the depths of the sea,
etc. – each with his or her own gender
and personality, expressed in foods,
colors, attributes, preferences, dislikes,
songs, rhythms, and dances.
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O R I S H A o r S A N TO ?
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Cubans go to a Catholic mass, then leave the mass and go to a tambor de yuka, or a toque de santo.
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The cantos (songs) and toques
(drum pieces) that call the orishas
constitute a repertoire that is as
rhythmically complex as music can be,
with a steady flow of elaborate, subtle
melodies whose twists and turns are
reproduced with great consistency
by different singers
This kind of marginalized, subterranean
ambiguity has been with the orishas all
along in Cuba. When Pope John Paul
II visited Santiago de Cuba in January
1998, he placed a crown on the head
of the yellow-gowned figurine that lives
in the hilltop Catholic church by the
town of Cobre. It – she – represents
La Caridad de Cobre, the protector of
Cuba. John Paul was not attempting to
endorse African religion, far from it;
but in the eyes of practitioners, it was
the orisha Ochún that the Pope
crowned – the deity of eroticism and
prosperity, who has her own Oshun
River in Nigeria and is understood by
santeros to be syncretized with La
Caridad de Cobre, complete with
yellow dress.
Gonzalo
Walking down the street in some parts
of some Cuban towns on the right
day, you might pass a house where a
tambor is going on. If you were to be
invited in, you would see a celebration
going on in which the orishas (deities)
are addressed through music.
Managing the energy that calls divine
forces down to “ride” the believer
in a state of possession requires the
knowledge of specialists: the olu batá,
or drum master, and the akpwon,
or ceremonial singer.
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PAT H S
“The orishas are complex beings who embody natural forces...”
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The caminos are the avatars, they’re
the guidelines that echo through each
of these sanctoral entities. It’s naturally
very plural, the form in which we use
this knowledge, for you, for me, for
him, for her, for the other.
When we listen to this oddun the “letter” of divination that the babalao, or ritual expert, must interpret after consulting the oracle Ifá and when we hear what each of your santos says, it applies in a personal way. It’s not a static,
inflexible, non-dynamic order that requires we all inform ourselves the same way going in, no? It’s an
instruction that doesn’t lose sight of who each of us is, that is to say, of individuality. And that’s the concept of camino.
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Gonzalo
Bringing it into the domain of sound,
Gonzalo Rubalcaba sees these caminos
as “echoes” of each other – his word
– that express the individuality of
believers.
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caminos may have strikingly different
characteristics. Some see the Catholic
syncretization as merely one more
camino.
Los caminos son los avatares, son los lineamientos a travez de los cuales cada una de nuestras
entidades santorales hacen eco
de nuestro pasado, presente y
futuro. El uso de sistema de
conocimiento ha de ajustarse a
las circunstancias por las que
atravieza cada persona.
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These multiple selves of the orishas
are very much like what in the Hindu
system are called avatars. The Cuban
word for this phenomenon is caminos
– a Spanish, not Yoruba, word, meaning
“roads” or “paths.” Even under the
umbrella of the same orisha, these
Gonzalo
Unlike in Haiti, where the spirits called
lwa are a densely teeming otherworld,
in Cuba the orishas are finite in number,
far fewer than existed in the motherland. But they are multiple: the orishas
are not single beings, but are clusters
of related figures. So there is not, for
example, one Yemayá, but several, who
are refractions of each other, each with
her own name, song, characteristics,
etc. The songs of the various Yemayás
are sung one after the other in a kind
of sacred medley within the larger
ritual sequence in which each orisha is
represented, each one with its own set
of multiple selves.
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SUITE CAMINOS
“...the orishas are not single beings, but are clusters of related figures.”
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musicales con tal necesidad:
“Irakere” y posteriormente otras
agrupaciones como “AfroCuba,”
“Opus 13,” “Proyecto” entre otros.
Pero digamos que las agrupaciones
mencionadas respondían a un instinto de conexión histórica con
excepcionales creadores cubanos de
principio de siglo, que ya proyectaban dicha estética musical, entre
ellos Ernesto Lecuona, Amadeo
Roldán, Alejandro Garcia Caturla...
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Este no es un primer intento de
llevar la tradición a un contexto sinfónico, o de escucha. En los años 70 en Cuba aparecían entidades
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Writing large-scale musical works in
the form of an oru is a distinctly Cuban
compositional genre that flourished
in Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s generation.
The late 1980s was a watershed time:
the official atheism of the Cuban state
receded, and was discarded in 1992.
As the African religions exploded in
popularity, the melodies and rhythms of
the sacred Yoruba repertoire turned up
both in popular Cuban music as well as
becoming familiar in jazz, both in Cuba
and internationally.
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intellectual feat for percussionists and
singers, requiring a huge commitment
of study and practice. A drummer can
learn by playing on unconsecrated
drums, but he must be initiated before
he can touch a drum empowered by
añá — a spirit placed inside the drum
by its builder, who is both an organological and a spiritual craftsman.
This is not a first attempt to bring the tradition to a symphonic con-
text, a context of listening. In the 70s, in Cuba, this phenomenon was consciously brought about by Irakere and later in the ‘80s, other groups came up, like Afro
cuba, Opus 13, or Proyecto, which I formed after I left school.
The objective was precisely to establish an intellectual order in the creative process of this music composed of elements that were born of an attraction of folkloric elements, among other things.
And I don’t want to simply go
back to that idea, but to continue
developing it, continue expanding that idea.
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The oru, which did not exist as such in
Africa, is a sequential salutation to the
various orishas. There is an oru seco,
with drums only, played for the orishas
to the exclusion of the public, and an
oru cantado of songs. Memorizing and
performing this liturgy is a virtuosic
Gonzalo
In Africa, different orishas had their
own territories, their own rivers, their
own drums. But in the compressed
space of a sugar prison camp, or behind
the doors of the cabildos de nación
in Cuba’s city and towns, where the
religion and the music kept each other
alive during long years of captivity and
persecution, the orishas had to coexist.
It was apparently under the influence
of the Catholic mass that a creolized
ceremony emerged, in which Changó’s
batá drums (though other configurations exist) had to serve for all the
orishas, who had their own drums
in Africa.
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SUITE CAMINOS
“...añá – a spirit placed inside the drum by its builder...”
On the evidence of this album, the orishas are hearing great music these days
in Miami, where Rubalcaba lives.
“...the orishas are hearing great music these days...”
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“Suite Caminos” agrupa una selección de cantos y toques predominantemente Yoruba y Arara en el
caso de “Via Prodigiosa,” a travez
de los cuales promueve un discurso
que defiende la evolucion espiritual, el descanso eterno del espíritu
y su alzamiento; la educación,
conciencia y libertad de todos los
seres humanos, la salud y bienestar
de estos, el amor de y hacia las
madres, la esperanza, la fe, la
union, y la indetenible fuerza
creativa de la juventud...Una obra
musical llena de contrastes sonoro,
ritmico, armonico y estructural,
persiguiendo una personalización en
cada una de las piezas.
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formal contrast, a personalization of each of the pieces.
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The two groups’ paths interlock. An
essential figure connecting them, a key
musical facilitator of this album, is the
New York-based Pedrito Martínez, who
in recent years, while becoming famous
as a percussionist, has brought the art
of the akpwon to public attention in
various high-profile collaborations, and
who is also an excellent vocal harmonist
and first-call studio musician.
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In Miami: a group of traditional percussion and voices. The singers are highly
skilled, active professionals of the Yoruba
repertoire. Their harmonies are glorious.
There isn’t a complete sequence of all the santos, but with the
santos who are being saluted,
I have created a sequence that is more or less a religious se-
quence. I see it as a suite, because I see it as a group of pieces whose discourse ultimately shares an
idea. [That idea] was precisely [to express] what the songs say, what the songs defend. There’s a contrast of tempos, a contrast of spirits, a rhythmic contrast, a
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orishas’ rhythms, the intensely
rehearsed group recorded at the studio
called – a curious name in terms of this
project – Avatar. (Rubalcaba’s 2008
album Avatar, a landmark of 21stcentury jazz, was recorded there.)
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In New York: a mini-orchestra with
three horns (Will Vinson, alto and
soprano; Seamus Blake, tenor; Alex
Sipiagin, trumpet), guitar (Adam
Rogers), bass (Matt Brewer) and
Ernesto Simpson on drums, with
Gonzalo Rubalcaba leading from the
keys. Through its combo instrumentation, Rubalcaba’s way of writing entails
much orchestral-style doubling, thereby
pulling a precise rainbow of fused
timbres from this small group. Playing
in Rubalcaba’s highly personal melodic
and harmonic language, in rhythmic
templates that converse with the
Sonyalsi “Sonia” Feldman, whose soulful
voice powers two songs (to Olokún
and to Obatalá), is well known as a performer and teacher of the repertoire, as
is Philbert Armenteros, who does the
heavy lifting together with Pedrito on
the layered choruses. Mario Hidalgo,
whose powerful song to the dead
opens the album, had never recorded;
Rubalcaba heard him at a misa in Miami.
Gonzalo
It’s not necessary to hear Suite Caminos
as a dialogue between past and present, although that dimension exists. We
can also hear it as a dialogue between
present and present. Structured as
a dialogue between two groups of
musicians, it’s a feat of performance,
composition and production.
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SUITE CAMINOS
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S e n d e ro d e A l i e n to
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Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and
Its Music: From the First Drums to the
Mambo and co-author with Constance
Sublette of The American Slave Coast:
A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry.
Thanks to Dr. Julie Skurski for her comments. Thanks also to Dr. Ivor Miller,
and to Ted Panken.
harmonizes in a style that approximates
the parallel organum of Gregorian
chant, while also evoking African choral
styles – defining in the process a sound
unique to this recording.
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gotten used to what happens where,
but I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it.
Every time I listen to it I hear more.
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This first exposition creates a sound
portrait of the overlay of religious
systems in Cuba by framing traditional
Yoruba musicians in the sacred space
of Catholicism. The link is Rubalcaba’s
organ, heard in a cathedralesque acoustic, evoking the mystical Spanish church
composers of the 16th and 17th
centuries. The multitracked coro
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The two antiphonal groups of Suite
Caminos express the same spirit as they
flow in parallel; an endless flow of musical legacy crosses paths with an endless
flow of musical invention.
In the course of preparing these notes, I
listened to Suite Caminos every night,
more or less, for a month or so. I’ve
Aumba waori,
aumba waori,
awa osun, awa
oma, leri oma
leyawo, bobo
egg un cawe . . .
The ceremonial
sequence begins with a salute to
EGGUN, who are not orishas. They’re
muertos – spirits of departed ancestors,
who are the spirits nearest to us, living
presences that help us in life and who
are invoked before the orishas are
invoked.
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EGGUN
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Coming together after intense rehearsal
during the few days when everyone’s
schedule could be cleared to coincide,
the instrumentalists make this complicated music sound easy. Their tracks
were mostly recorded live, playing
those perfectly fused lines and those
tense silences together in the room.
The solos aren’t dropped in; you could
never get it to feel like this putting parts
down one at a time. We’re so used to
music being assembled that it’s all to
easy to forget what it means that this
intricate music was played.
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Path of Breath
“Every time I listen to it (Suite Caminos) I hear more.
E l H i j o M e n s a j e ro
The Son Bearing a Message
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Gonzalo
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Los cantos y toques suceden en cada pieza de acuerdo con el plan
estructural que persigo, y no hay un
patron religioso en este sentido. Busco simplemente un balance y
una unidad formal dentro de
cada pieza.
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first exposition of the piece, some
times in the center of the piece,
and some times almost at the end of the piece. This comes from an intention to follow
not specifically religious templates, but templates that are authentic, musically speaking.
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Ante cualquier paso o decisión
(santoral) hay que contar primero
con los muertos, los espíritus,
En Cuba la fe y practica religiosa
se da de manera especial: no
importando a cual de ellas estamos
afiliados o identificados se establece
siempre un puente o abrazo. Los que
hemos crecido con la fe en la llamada
santería, abrazamos y respetamos
la iglesia y la fe católica y somos
igualmente respetuosos de otros
sistemas de fe. Esto explica que
aceptemos el bautizo catolico antes
del proceso de iniciacion en la religion
Yoruba o Santeria, Palo, entre
otras creencias y rituales africanos
asentados en Cuba.
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The cantos don’t always appear at the beginning of the pieces. The cantos appear sometimes as the
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When at last the voice kicks in (at 7:44),
Philbert Armenteros sings not over
church organ and batá, but over a funky
Cuban bass tumbao with conga. At that
moment, we are fully in the presentday sacred space.
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Now that the
orishas are being
saluted, the horns
come in. The
path-blazing
Elegguá,
often depicted as
a mischievous child, who dresses in
red and black and who is only rarely
depicted in his Catholic identity of El
Niño de Atocha, is always saluted first
in ceremonial order before the other
orishas.
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E L L E G UA
Gonzalo
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Before doing anything else, you have
to reckon first with the dead, with the
energy, with the spirit of the departed
in order to then focus on the santo
(orisha). . . Because first the santo has
to pass through the stage of being dead.
I wanted to create a bridge –
in this case, a sonic one – to tie the
instrumental and vocal world that
comes from the African tradition in
Cuba to the instrumental world of the
organ, associated with the Catholic
ecclesiastical space. In Cuba there is
a very special religious phenomenon:
independently of whether you have a
family heritage based in Afro-Cuban
religion, there is also an embrace of
the Catholic church. So we can’t go to
santería or return to the African faith
unless we’ve been baptized under the
umbrella of the Catholic church.
That’s how it works in Cuba. Not
only within santería;
“Before doing anything else, you have to reckon first with the dead...”
S e n d e ro d e Es p u m a
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O LO KU N
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Nunca hemos sabido con exactitud
la identidad de Olokun-mujer,
hombre, monstruo, sirena, habitan
te de las profundidades, de lo
desconocido, lo inesperado y
abrupto.
We’ve never known exactly what Olokun is –woman, man, mon-
ster, or what. And that condi-
tion of the depths of the sea is surprise. You run into something you never imagined you’d en-
counter, you run into unexpected, abrupt changes.
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Gonzalo
Intento evocar el mar, su fuerza, su intriga y secretos, su empuje, poder y quizás algunos de sus
sonidos.
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Here is an evocation, this is
the piece in which I most try
to evoke something . . . which
is, what’s tied to the sea,
its force, its intrigue, its
secrets, its pressure, its power,
its sound.
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From the
depths of
the ocean, OLOKUN, the
protector of
Benin City, is
unknowable.
The operative principle in this piece, the
longest of the suite, is that of surprise.
The beginnning recapitulates the
church organ before setting out for the
unknown. Sonia Feldman’s voice seems
almost bluesy, but that’s also the result
of the harmonies Rubalcaba nails it with.
Gonzalo
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Yemayá Asesú,
Asesú Yemayá,
Yemayá Olodo,
Olodo Yemayá
. . . YEMAYÁ,
blue-clad mother
of the sea, associated with salt water, took on great importance in the holocaust of the Middle
Passage. She is one of the most popular
santos, in Cuba and in the similar but
different orixa culture of Brazil. This
piece contains some of Suite Camino’s
most pictorial music, with a timbral
motif that glimmers.
Y E M AYA
Path of Foam
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Endless Destiny
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D e s t i n o S i n Fi n
“We’ve never known exactly what Olokun is – woman, man, monster...”
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Santa Meta
A l a m e d a d e Vi e n to s
Independientemente de la diversidad de Obbatala, para mi es una
representación señorial, magistral,
justiciero. Obbatala lo veo como el
conductor de la gran orquesta...
une, organiza, tranquiliza, y
trasmite ideas y sentencias de
manera virtuosa e inteligente.
Probablemente sea esta pieza
la de mas tratamiento orquestal.
Esta pieza quizás sea timbricamente la mas atrevida. Busco el
destello, la irreverencia del viento,
su aparente desordenado
desplazamiento.
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Gonzalo
winds with total irreverence, to install that as the spirit of the piece.
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OYA
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Gonzalo
most orchestral piece of the suite. Because I see Obatalá as the conductor of the orchestra – the one who directs, who says, this goes here, this there. The one who says, this is the best way to say it, this is how to put things in order.
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This is the edgiest use of timbre in
this group of pieces.
was looking for that flash, that power Yansá has of moving the
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I Even though there are various Obatalás with different person-
alities, I’ve always understood Obatalá as something lordly, majestic, that has the capacity to dictate rules of order, balance, and justice. This is probably the
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Not all the drum language on this album
is Yoruba; in this piece, the Yoruba melody rides a 6/8 palo (Congo) rhythm
– Congo is arguably the deepest-rooted
of African identities in Cuba – and uses
a conga drum. This is one of the secrets
of Cuban music: though highly differentiated in its varieties, it’s all superimposable, as indeed are the religions.
3
YANSÁ / OYÁ, the fierce female warrior, guardian of the cemetery, creator
of storms. Features guest guitarist John
McLaughlin, who blows up an electrical
storm, and the unmistakable voice of
Pedrito Martínez.
7
Akete oba oba
seniyé, baba
yokodara,
obanla ese, obanla
ese, baba funmiyale
. . . OBATALÁ is
the sober master of
justice and the law, the wearer of white
who can come down to any believer’s
head no matter which orisha acts as
their guardian angel. Some scholars
have suggested that the figure of
Obatalá is a syncretization (the combining of elements from different belief
systems) that took place in Oyó with
Islamic knowledge systems (Obat Allah).
O B B ATA L A
11
8
Grove of Winds
3
Holy Goal
“I see Obatalá as the conductor of the orchestra – the one who directs...”
R o n d a d e S u e r te
3
8
3
7 4
7
8
74
7
8
9 9
17
17
Melodicamente esta pieza
tiene un aire Arabesco sin que haya
sido un propósito consciente...
algarabia, goce, talante festivo,
bulla y celebración... Rasgos
estrechamente ligados al espíritu
de los Ibeyi, los Jimaguas.
9
2
22
Quizas la mas abtracta de todas...
Existe en ella un abrazo entre
elementos ritmico - percusivo Arara
y otros imaginarios generados por
medios electrónicos. San Lazaro, el
milagroso, conocedor de todas las
situaciones extremas que nos ofrece
la vida.
And in this case, I found myself in a
musical language of Arabia and
the east. I don’t know why.
Inspiration, intuition – I can’t
explain it. Musically this could be a
connection I don’t yet understand.
17
7
99
percussion, some of which I played. Harmonically and in its dynamic approach, it might be the most abstract of the pieces.
8
22
There’s a tune that appears suddenly as a theme that I
realized later
was a little Arabic-
sounding. I don’t know why. I’ve tried in some cases to make a connection, but a con-
nection that contrasts, not a con-
nection where the principal idea of the song remains, but an idea
that contrasts with the songs.
9
3
7
3
The rhythmic part that accom-
panies the cantos is a hybrid
of Arará, rhythmically speaking...
with the presumption on my part, of introducing into this Arará system, rhythmically speaking, other elements that don’t have – not that I’m aware of, anyway – any direct contact with another Afro-Cuban tradition. I mixed the acoustic instruments playing Arará rhythms with electronic
IBEYI
SAN LAZARO
Gonzalo
12
Bejila omo edun bejila omo edun beji
bejila ambeku yare . . . The IBEYI son
dos jimaguas – they are twins, which
have a special significance in Yoruba
belief. The twinning is embodied here
by the pairing of Pedrito Martínez and
Philbert Armenteros’s voices. Then
there’s a sudden intervention . . .
Gonzalo
17
This movement is built on a rhythm from the Arará (Dahomeyan)
repertoire.
ASOJANO is the
figure who came
from Dahomey to Yorubaland, there
to be known as Babalú-Ayé, who helps
the sick. He is usually referred to in
Cuba by his Catholic name, San Lázaro.
Roundabout of Fortune
22
Prodigious Way
74
17
Vi a Pro d i g i o s a
“Musically this could be a connection I don’t yet understand.”
CREDITS
Ernest Simpson – Drums on all
selections except 1
Mario Garcia Haya,
Gonzalo Rubalcaba & Gary Galimidi
Editing
Pedrito Martinez – Lead Vocals on
selections 6 and 8 and chorus on all
selections. Percussion on all selections
and palmadas on 7
74
8
Philbert Armenteros – Lead Vocals on
selections 2, 3,7,8 and chorus on all selections. Percussion on all selections except 3
8
Dayne Dupree
Graphic Design, 5passion Design
7
Seamus Blake – Tenor Sax on selection
2, 4, 5, 6
3
7 4
Alan Tucker, Foothill Digital
Mastering
9
Alex Sipiagin – Trumpet on selections 2,
4, 5, 6 and 8. Flugelhorn on selection 7
22
Katsuhiko Naito
Special thanks for mixing guidance
17
7
Will Vinson – Alto Sax on selections
2,4,5 and Soprano Sax on selections
6,7 and 8
3
7
3
Sonyalsi “Sonia” Feldman – Lead
Vocals and Chorus on selections 4 and 5
74
Mario Hidalgo – Lead Vocals on
selection 1
9
13
Gonzalo Rubalcaba & Gary Galimidi
Mixing
99
Gary Galimidi - Electric Guitar on
selection 5
8
Akihiro Nishimura
Assistant Recording Engineer
17
Adam Rogers – Guitars on all selections
except 1 and 6
17
James Anderson
Recording Engineer
9 9
Matt Brewer – Upright bass on all
selections except 1
8
Special Guest:
John McLaughlin – Electric Guitar
on selection 6
7
Gonzalo Rubalcaba – Piano on all
selections except 1, synths on all selections,
palmadas and tambor on selection 7
22
3
All selections written, arranged, produced and directed by Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Vocal segments based on traditional compositions