The children go to the west

For those of us who listen, the best thing that can happen in music is discovery. The moment when a subject, an artist, is revealed to us for the first time is usually recorded in us; or when a group connects with something essential in us. However, these discoveries depend, above all, on our willingness to let in, the moment of search, pause or need in which we find ourselves. I don't know what state of mind I was in on Saturday night, December 19, but judging by the world that surrounds me today, domestic and universal, surely uncomfortable even with the theater seat. 

I met the powerful voice of Frank Mitchel two years ago at Longina, one of the most interesting festivals of Cuban song today, an incredible space in a living city. When evening fell on the Armored Train, I heard him play songs by Santiago Feliú, Charly García and Spinetta, with that 70s rocker aura and a slightly nostalgic and irreverent troubadour voice. Something was there. Of his group Reflection of the stone in the water he only had references and some slight idea of the proposal that he and Abel Lescay were working on. Nothing else.

Frank Mitchell. Photo: Emilio Suarez Gonzalez.

And since one always classifies and delivers labels as if life and art were the corridor of a library, I assumed that on Saturday I would attend a trova concert, but Reflection of the stone in the water is not trova. It is song and rock and roll. 

The show, in the Theater Room of the National Museum of Fine Arts, was the launch / recording / filming of his first album made with the support of the creation grant El Reino de este mundo granted by the Hermanos Saíz Association. The group, made up of Frank Mitchel in the authorship, guitar and voice and Abel Lescay in the musical direction, piano and keyboards, was accompanied by Joel Alejandro del Río on bass, Henry Ferrán on drums and Iran Farías (El Menor) as a guest on percussion. The album, for its part, takes the name of one of the songs included: At the foot of the tree, and dialogues from beginning to end with the group's image: a mirror in which they are reflected, a stone that receives the constant force of the water, the natural world being the main inspiration for their music and the river pushing them to flow.

Reflection of the stone in the water. Photo: Emilio Suarez Gonzalez.

They bring very clear influences from Argentine rock and the new Cuban trova, especially from Spinetta and Santiago. They are there in their training, along with many other references in a very unique, interesting mix with a lot of potential. There are elements in his proposal that come from classical music, jazz, progressive rock, the symphonic and the use of more traditional instruments such as tumbadoras and acoustic guitar. 

Reflejo… defends a subgenre of rock that they call organic, and which they have defined in an interview with Cecilia Garcés for El Caimán Barbudo as “an interpretation of natural signs and forms through music” that, at the same time, comes from the song with the strong energy of rock. "However, ours does not pretend to be rebellious and break with the norms of society, but to communion with the forces of the universe." And here I, as a person who listens at the foot of the tree, I disagree. There is a renewing force that bursts into all his songs, as well as the rebellious energy of being old and living on this island, and loading his loves and heartbreaks in the root information.

Abel Lescay. Photo: Emilio Suarez Gonzalez.

Although the starting point of the band is not the destructive confrontation of the status quo as it usually happens in rock, it is the trip back to the seed, the nostalgic irruption that does not immobilize, to recognize part of ourselves. To stand in this place today, with the awareness that these musicians do it, is a very rock act.

Frank Mitchel's lyrics are poems in themselves, the image and the scene of the natural that empathizes with our subjectivities, the premonition of the storm: "tree, perhaps I was not born or am I barely surviving your loneliness" (at the foot of the tree); “This delirium is such a high regret (…). I search in the tear of time, which is the tear of the fish that has died / wounded from the root” (feel dystopian); "Don't let the river know that I'm crying / I've lost my way and it's raining / a flower flew / and this is my lament" (cosmic chant). In this way he joins those who make the song a literary exercise. These words are given musical body by Abel Lescay, drawing many worlds from the piano and keyboards, more than sound: the atmosphere and the creation of a way of feeling. 

The two go on stage for the first time. Shyness of hands that tremble when putting on the guitar strap or clinging to the piano chair, and then letting themselves flow in music and voice. His image is sustained in a time difficult to catalog: the long, loose hairs, the simplicity, the lack of protocol, necessary? The trust with the listening public. In essence, happy to share and respectful of the meeting.

Frank Mitchell. Photo: Emilio Suarez Gonzalez.

They are part of the so-called League sub20 of the Cuban trova, but Could they be part of a necessary renewal of national rock? Of the song? All this that is reflected in them, will it grow? I would like to be sure that they will find the audience they deserve, the stages they need. They still have a long way to go, a lot of experimentation, you will go and coming of which we will be witnesses. 

Today, Reflection of the stone in the water promises to go where the sun sets, to the left of the Compass Rose. It will dawn somewhere next to a river and, by then, it will not be just the children who sing the lullaby that gives title to this review and closes this album-concert that they give us/given to us at the foot of the tree.