A bucket list item is now checked, and my 20 year old dreamer self could never have foreseen how today’s graying 60s version would check this one off the list. I am now the author of a book. I would have imagined a person who sat in front of a blank page and created it all right from his mind. Isn’t that what writers do? Maybe it would take a year, or maybe several years of constant steady word flow creating the manuscript. But, that’s not at all how it went for me. In reality, I’ve been writing this thing on and off for the past 20 years. It started with becoming enamored with a particular kind of music. It moved me. I found it intriguing. It appealed to my heart, but also my scientific mind. Afro-Cuban Folklorico
I had never been a musician growing up. Instead I went the jock route, even though I often critiqued music as if I knew something about it. Becoming a “musician”, for me, was a real slow and subtle path later in life beginning in my 40s. I decided when I first heard the sound of a didjeridu that I might like playing one. So, the droning of a didjeridu is how my path began. I started with basically a blast of sound. What’s more basic and fundamental than the drone of a didjeridu? But I noticed nuances in the layers of tones and overtones, so worked long and hard at gaining control over those sounds. And, I explored rhythm, which has always been at the focal point of what I love about music. Once I gained a bit of prowess with playing this most ancient and primal of sounds, I recorded a CD right at the end of the heyday of CDs in 2000, before internet digital hosting became the norm. It’s called Animal Dreams
The guys that played drums on one of my songs began teaching me hand drum technique and rhythms. I was hooked immediately, and looked forward to weekly lessons, daily practices, and the occasional lesson with the Afro-Cuban guru in the mountains. This guru, Dave taught us how to read his notation which was a mixture between Western European and block notation. I was eating all of this up just like everything I’ve been interested in throughout my life. Whenever I find a connection with something, I always go right in to the dangerous deep end. I learned terminology and many lifetimes worth of information all about African diaspora and Cuban music and history from Dave. Then, I started going to a Drum Song and Dance workshop each summer in Northern California.
By this time, I had struggled to learn the vocals of only one song and figured that would be the end of it because it was so hard to play an instrument and sing. But, in 2006 I was turned on by an old man’s powerful voice one night standing next to Lázaro Galarraga. He had a voice that sounded like pure love. I was inspired! I wanted to learn everything he sang, and my favorite classes to take each year at the camp were his song classes. So, I researched and found what few books on Afro-Cuban lyrics people had compiled. This story is all in the forward of my book, but I learned a way to place the syllables of the vocals inside of cells that followed the percussion rhythm. This was a necessary crutch to learning and replicating the sound and feeling of the vocals. Since I was already a drummer, I had to create a way that I could “woodshed” these vocals and internalize their fit within percussion. Thus began the book 20 years ago. My notes were all in “TUBS” time unit block system notation. So, about 5 or 6 years ago, I started collating and re-writing all my notes onto a few pages on my website.
Then, about a year ago I took this work along with a bunch of new transcribings and further consolidated it into this book. Now, though the book has my name on it, the real creating and most of the work to get it where it is now was done decades and even centuries before if you consider the source of this music. My friends and teachers are all in this book and they helped write it, so it took a group working together. I could never have done this on my own. – and with that Afro-Cuban Lyrics in Clave is released!