Yemayá

I play the rocker, but what I like is the black one. Give me the dry sound of the congas, the hammering of the yambló and the persistence of the shell. All that can be achieved on this disc. Although also on Sundays from twelve to three in the afternoon in the Callejón de Hamel, and at the saint's parties of the neighbors across the street with their bells out of tune and out of time that sound like an old tin and that, on a Saturday at ten at night , are the definition of annoyance. What this album has, which isn't found in many places, is Chucho's piano and Mayra Caridad's voice. The two, Valdés surname. The piano, with that noise of a rattle, is the onomatopoeia of God. The voice, another of my emotional bumps. I tell you:

The album opens with the homonymous theme. Chucho looks. Plá, Mayra, César López, Basilio shine. They all shine. It is Iraqere. Nobody expected anything else. A great song, nothing more or less than that, until precisely minute five, when it stops being music and becomes state, nerve, trance.

A little earlier, at minute 3:33, the usual Yoruba chants begin, prayers where the soloist says and the choir reaffirms: "Yemayá olodo Yemayá...", and so on; but on the fifth Mayra suddenly changes the addressee of her prayer —I don't know why— and directs it towards Ochún, with that broken cock, tense, of a long-suffering and firm woman: “Ochún Ochún kolé, with her gold bracelet, Iyaamiileeeee ”. Right away Chucho, with the back of his left hand, presses the piano keys fast and hard, without distinction, from right to left. A climax occurs, and right there the brass break, blowing one of the most beautiful phrases I've heard in Cuban popular music: "Picket, that's very hard!". At that moment, what you want is to stop the subject, sit on the floor with your feet crossed, and burst into tears. Because? I don't know. It has made me think about Mayra's death, about the blacks crossing the Atlantic crowded in the holds of ships, about my great-great-grandfather Jovellanos' slave, about the Congo, the Carabalí, the Lucumí, the Bantu, Didier Drogba and the holy spirit. ¡Broder! Its alot! You have to change your heart when those metals sound, because the one that was there no longer works.

The Irakere push time to the limit of human possibility. There on that border they gloat, they relax, they begin to play, they speculate; as if to say: "Gentleman, let's see how far we can advance time without this turning into chaos." That's it Mr Bruce: speculator, mockery, bullying to the rest of the musicians of the world. During the first piano improvisation, it seems that Carlos del Puerto and Chucho play different songs; as if the bass were on his ball while the one from Quivicán, the man with the biggest hands, puts the fifth and is placed on a sound highway at 300 notes per second. It is only appreciated when we get closer, because if you look from above everything fits perfectly; like the children of Fidelio Ponce, who at 10 centimeters from the view are only mud stains. This happens because the topic is on the edge of chaos without being chaos, and that is only achieved by a few, very few.

Other samples of this inhuman tempo are the last two tracks, Squirrel (especially the first part) and They are Montuno. They gave this name to fuck, to see the unhappy face of someone who thought he was going to dance rich; because they are montuno nothing. That's the end. Time on these guys' minds has to slow down. It is the only explanation. That, or that when they mastered the album someone gave him fast-forward to the mixes.

I discovered the album relatively recently. The tachycardia hasn't gone away yet. Before writing this I heard it, it made me shudder and made me want to climb the walls. Now I put on some bandage indie soda to lower the heart rate and continue filming as a clean middle class child.