Hearing the rooted Puerto Rican and Cuban songs recorded by this cult band in the mid-70s in these two releases, the folklórico part was clear. But seeing the experimental took a little more thought.
But if there was any doubt that the band looked forward as much as backward, you only had to hear the rendition of "Perdón" toward the end of the second set at Hostos.
Jerry González, likely the heppest cat left in all of Latin musicdom, steps to the mike with his trumpet (up to then he'd been on percussion only). The rest of the band watches and waits. Through the mute, the notes are clear as a knife edge, unhurried. All the lessons of bop mellowed but still biting.
He steps away from the mike, fidgets, moves over to another mike, but clearly in control of time and space, molding it with an insinuating melody that remains intelligible even as it's unspun and reconstituted at the molecular level.
We all hold our breath. Brother Andy, Jerry's oldest collaborator and leader of the band, watches too. Until it's time for the band to come in, a guaguancó heavy on the percussion, Andy's bass the heartbeat, Oscar Hernández's piano the circulation. Abraham Rodríguez and young turk Pedrito Martínez sing Trío Los Panchos overlapping harmonies over the rolling drums.
And then, when Jerry hesitates between mikes, Pedrito leaves him his mike, moves up front and begins a rumba that moves the song from celestial to grounded, out of the coco and into the body. The mind-body dialectic not as opposition, but as call and response, a metaphysics of Ochún (pace Víctor Hernandez Cruz).
And that is where you hear what the Fort Apache Band jazzheads Andy & Jerry heard back as smartass teens in their Bronx basement: that New World Africans in the Caribbean (whether Black or jincho or jabao) knew how to construct fractals of sound, break the false modernity of cement and welfare, played in the key of life. That folklore is a myth; descargas are not past, but multiplying universes.
The salsa hardcore was there in the sold-out hall. A group of musicians drove all day after a late gig in Columbus, Ohio, to be in the audience. Others came from D.C. and other corners of the second Boricua diaspora away from the Barrio homeland. People you'd never see in one spot anywhere else anymore.
And thinking back to the Buena Vista tsunami, I knew why some roots do better in the market than others. That moving, steadfast supergroup appealed to the imperial nostalgia the U.S. has for Cuba. A group like GF&EN is a kick-in-the-face reminder that colonized boricuas, at least then (hopefully still), took all their traumas and rewired them into software for enduring.
[fuzzy G Phone photo by Roberto Lovato]
