Customer Reviews

Havana & Matanzas, Cuba 1957: Bata, Bembe and Palo Songs

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To set the record straight and as a response to your reviewer who said the songs on this cd sound like they were sung by a couple of her drunken neighbors, as she wittily puts it, and which in fact were performed by large groups with drummers, I am copying below the Amazon.com review by Christina Roden, and Amazon's product description:
"Pre-Castro Cuba was not only about cigars, rum, and tourism. Even more than today, the countryside was a haven for practitioners of African-derived religions. These marvelous field recordings are a treasure trove of rare and thrilling material and still sound remarkably clear and immediate. They were the work of Lydia Cabrera, an anthropologist and writer of Cuban birth and Parisian nurture. She began gathering examples of music from slave descendants during the 1950s, often accompanied by photographer Josefina Tarafa. Using Tarafa's portable tape recorder and with help from engineers who later transferred her finds onto fourteen discs, this intrepid woman captured indelible examples of religious drumming, chants, and songs from the Yoruba, Angolese, and Dahomean traditions, back when the original languages and drumming styles were still relatively unadulterated. The accompanying booklet is chock-full of fascinating details and illustrated by examples of Tarafa's idiomatic black-and-white photographs. --Christina Roden"
Product Description
These recordings, made just a few years before Fidel Castro's rise to power, reflect Afro-Cuban musical and spiritual life in Havana and around the sugar cane mills of Matanzas. In 1957, Lydia Cabrera and Josefina Tarafa captured a fascinating snapshot of African slave-descendant communities performing their religious songs and ceremonies. Influences from present-day Nigeria, Angola, and Benin became some of the critical components of a vital religious movement in the Cuban countryside where linguistic, symbolic, and musical elements blended over time. As reflections of evolving practices, these recordings, are considered a soundtrack to Cabrera's writings on Afro-Cuban religions and are the perfect complement to volumes one and two.Havana Cuba ca. 1957: Rhythms & Songs for OrishasMatanzas, Cuba ca. 1957: Afro-Cuban Sacred Music

This is a great album for those who want to preserve the Lucuumi style African Traditional Religion's way of giving praise to the forces that sustain us. A very good buy!!

Only 1 song was appealing. All other songs sounded like a couple of drunk neighbors with no idea how to sing or play music.