Cubafonía by Daymé Arocena

Daymé Arocena’s outstanding second album, Cubafonía, can be summed up in two words: maturity and intensity. The former can be evidenced in her approach to song-writing and arranging. It is bold and with a take-no-prisoners attitude. Opener Eleggua combines multi-layered vocals with looped bass and horns. This is followed by a lively party number, La Rumba Soy Yo. Scatting her way through parts of the song, Daymé reminds the listener that she is a pretty good jazz singer in her own right.

The intensity is found throughout the record, mainly in the first six tracks.  Lo Que Fue builds up slowly, starting with Daymé’s signature low rasp and ending with a Cuban descarga. Maybe Tomorrow (sung in English) deals with hope. Infectious Negra Caridad is a throwback to Cuba’s 1940s and 50s big band golden era. That a 24-year-old can hold her own belting tunes that the great late Celia Cruz took years to master, speaks volumes about Arocena’s standing in the Cuban musical scene at the moment.

The largest island of the Caribbean has always been a hotbed of creativity. However, for the last twenty-odd years the sounds coming out of my country of birth are more boundary-breaking and genre-defying than ever. Daymé joins Roberto Fonseca, Yusa, Danay Suárez and Telmary in the search for an identity which, although still recognisably Cuban, is not afraid to draw from other influences. A good example of this is Cómo, a ballad that would not be out of place in a record by Jill Scott. Performed confidently in both English and Spanish, the track shows off Arocena’s softer and more reflective side.

Special mention to Ángel, a minimalist composition (pared back percussion and piano) in which Daymé demonstrates a total vocal control. And also to the closer, Valentine (in which the chanteuse goes from English to French, to Spanish), a cute changüi number.

Cubafonía is a must-have for any jazz/Latin music aficionado. On the strength of this outing, I can only see a brighter future for Daymé Arocena.



© 2017

Next Post: “One-Minute Cycle Diaries”, to be published on Saturday 29^th April at 6pm (GMT)

Killer Opening Songs: "Madres" by Daymé Arocena

When it comes to music Killer Opening Songs is usually wary of hype. Big up an artist and call them “the next big thing” and our Regular Section of Introductory Tracks with Homicidal Tendencies will probably be heading in the opposite direction. It is chiefly to do with the fact that when it comes to art, and more specifically, music, K.O.S. likes to do its discoveries by itself, at its own pace and in its own time with no pressure from anybody. Sometimes, though, the hype surrounding an artist is well justified.

Up-and-coming Cuban singer Daymé Arocena deserves all the hype she has generated.

This young chanteuse has managed to combine elements of Afro-Cuban culture, soul, jazz and funk to create one of the albums of the year, Nueva Era (literally, New Era). The Killer Opening Song, Madres, is a fine example of risk-taking endeavour.

Rooted in a music-rich childhood (Arocena claims to have been singing since she was four), Daymé’s sound is one that belies her young age, yet her experience is evidence of her creative power.  She is a choir director, composer and arranger, in addition to being an extraordinary singer. Her background as a choir director shows in this K.O.S., from the multi-layered vocals to the piano and bass arrangements. Madres is about two of the better-known female Orishas in Afro-Cuban culture: Yemayá and Oshún, the two waters, the former is the sea and the latter the river. Sung in Yoruba and Spanish the song marks the arrival of Daymé, not just in the national, but also in the international scene, if reviews of her first concert in London last spring are anything to go by. Here’s an artist with an excellent vocal control and a heightened aesthetic sense.

It is important to highlight Arocena’s command in regards to her pitch-perfect voice. It would be too easy for her to fall into what Killer Opening Songs calls the “Mariah-Carey school of singing”. All high notes for the sake of it. Instead Daymé uses her pipes to explore as wide a range of vocal styles as possible. There is the mind-blowing scat in Don’t Unplug My Body, the soulful lament in the heart-rending “filin” Come to Me and the tongue-in-cheek in the salsa-lite El Ruso.

As mentioned before K.O.S. does not believe in hype. Sometimes, though, it will make an exception. This is one. Go out and buy the album.

© 2015

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 10^th October at 6pm (GMT)

Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On

I think that after this post my blog moniker will acquire an extra word: Luddite. And the noun “Cuban” will become an adjective. It is not my fault, however, that I am laying once again into technology. The stories that I have been reading lately just sound too preposterous to let go of so easily.

Now is the turn of the Poetry for Robots project, a bonkers experiment if ever I’ve heard of one. The scheme provides a bank of 120 pictures for people to write poetry based on what they see. That is all right, I hear you say. After all, there is nothing wrong with being exposed to the image of a beautiful sunset or a leave falling off a tree in autumn. But, it does not end there. The project’s goal is to feed the resulting poems to robots to “see what happens”. Did you hear that door being slammed shut? That is my hope leaving the room. I bet Mr Robot will interpret that sentence literally.

What is it I shall compare thee to again?

Some experiments are best left in the planning stages. Without wanting to sound too controversial, this whole enterprise is a waste of time in my humble opinion. We do not need robots to understand or interpret poetry because we are still not done ensuring some of our fellow humans do the same thing. I’d much rather spend the money (if money is involved) in creating a programme to make poetry, both home-grown and foreign, available to every single child in the world.

Poetry is one of those artistic phenomena (literature is an art as far as I know and I treat it as such) that sits around us, quietly, reminding us of the beauty of the world. We might bring it in from the background or we might not. We might fall in love with it or we might just dip our big toe in it every now and then. But that it affects us all, there is no doubt. A robot lacks one of the most essential human characteristics in order to appreciate poetry: the ability to be amazed. Whether you feed your machine 120- or 240-picture-based poems, there is no way that it will wake up one morning (do robots sleep? That is a good question. Sometimes you need to have been asleep to appreciate poetry better), look out of its bedroom window and liken the sky outside to the tiles of the kitchen downstairs.

Without wanting to put poetry on a pedestal, this is a literary genre that provides an extra dimension to the human experience. A dimension that is unique in its creation and its interpretation. Factor technology in the equation and you get predictability. Predictable poetry is bad art in my view. Necessary, still, do not get me wrong; we still need  written-by-numbers works in the world, but bad art it is. A bank of 120 images spells limitation to me. Poetry, if anything, should be the opposite of limitation, even when the poet uses one of the well-known traditional forms (sonnet, haikus, etc.).

A better idea in my view would be to create a bank containing every single poem ever written in the history of humankind and store it somewhere for posterity. Imagine that! Regardless of language or antiquity these works would show our common human bond. They would also be an invaluable educational tool to demonstrate to future generations how every single human being on the planet has consciously or unconsciously accessed the world of poetry.

I honestly think that the people behind the Poetry for Robots project are passionate about the power and reach of poetry to help us understand machines better. I just do not think that they have really thought their scheme through. In the process of understanding, decoding and falling in love with poetry there are many elements involved which robots sadly lack and will always lack, such as: nuance, emotions, aesthetics, spirituality, history, culture, upbringing… the list goes on. On the other hand, a project like the one I mentioned before could marry different generations across the ages. The irony is that we would have to get technology involved in it at some point in order to store the data and make it easily accessible to everyone. Without a doubt, that would be the kind of project where I would like to “see what happens”.



© 2015

Next Post: “Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music… Ad Infinitum”, to be published on Wednesday 17^th June at 6pm (GMT)