Polo Montañez: opaque memory of a wake

"Let no one come to tell me that those in front of me are far ahead, 

let the one who comes behind be given a chance...

And you will see.

Polo Montañez

On one of those nights, when darkness tries to swallow all the stars in one bite, a beam of light splits the sky in two. Before such an extraordinary event, countless emotions are revealed: the persecution of some, the surprise of others, the joy of all, while the image disappears.

I cannot avoid making the parallelism of that event with the fleeting career of the one who became a phenomenon perhaps without realizing it. That native of the cimarrón mountain; the one who brought the smell of charcoal and the aroma of the batey; the one with whom we danced the tin-marín de dos pingüéThat one, Polo Montañez, was a talent hidden among the hills, capable of aligning Latin America and Europe in his singing.

The first time I heard it was in high school, when we were waiting for the credits to roll on the teleclasses to watch a music video.

It was a rhythm of an unmistakable traditional sonority, but one that touched you. Under a short-brimmed hat, a man in his forties - older in appearance - was singing about the misfortune of a love. To make matters worse, he even called himself an idiot. The music was as honest as every word he sang.

The 2000s were beginning and the music scene could not have been more heterogeneous: the fascination for American hip hop videos, pop, disco, Shakira causing a furor, Vico C's songs becoming anthems, and reggaeton was beginning to capture the attention of the youngest. Los Van Van had just received the Grammy, Charanga Habanera was sweeping the world, and Orishas was attracting attention to rap made in Cuba.

Proof of Polo's courage is to make a place for himself in the midst of this very competitive panorama. Hats off to this gentleman who manages to achieve so much success in this precise space-time, with his unique type of sound, mixed with this and that. Today some will say that it was just a matter of luck. And yes, at some point, but where did we leave the effort.

We learned of his existence too late, as is often the case. More than four decades ago, a boy Polo was preparing for a very big success, unexpected by everyone, except his mother. Imitating here, improvising there, absorbing there. Stalking at the slightest opportunity when an instrument was left hanging on the nail. This is how he learned to play by ear, on the fringes of an insufficient artistic education system, even in the head municipality of his native province.

It was the result of a self-taught family tradition, dedicated to that pure form of art when it is done for pleasure, in the leisure time left by the hard work of farm life. What else would that be if not a training of the will and the spirit?

The baptism of fire to gain confidence came from going from party to party, singing non-stop, moving from here to there with the instrument on his back. He knew how to understand the audience and guess what they were asking for. During the experimentation process, the family group covered songs by Orquesta Aragón and the Spanish Década Prodigiosa, and closed the circle by performing their version of the traditional Cuban son.

Thus, by 1994 he had already put together his own group and was working professionally at the recently inaugurated Moka Hotel in the community of Las Terrazas. Known only to those who frequented these places, they were not in the sights of record labels and cultural authorities who do not make enough effort to find and elevate genuine talent beyond the confines of their offices.

How is it possible that Polo, with such a striking talent, went unnoticed without opportunities to develop more ambitious projects? How many others have passed and are in this situation right now, because of so-called geographic fatalism? He himself questioned this institutional myopia:

"Yet those who are bright as the moon

there is no one to offer them a chance.

What a lot of poets, their drawers are full of them

of interesting things that are true.

Nor could it be called a coincidence that a foreign businessman, José da Silva, director of the Lusáfrica record label, made the discovery. On someone's recommendation, he went in search of him a couple of times, until he heard him wherever the guajiro was performing. A common practice in the world, and one of the reasons why our artists dissolve in the mist. These necessary demons appear, if they can be called that way, who invest at a favorable cost in artists thirsty for options. In the starkest reality this is, if anything, the only offer that comes to show up at their doors, when they don't have a name or don't live in the capital.

Polo himself was amazed of his overflowing growth: "Imagine, people like me and my boys, always in the hills, singing to the cows and... getting out of a van to an airplane; [going] from singing for 30 people to singing for 70 thousand".

Unusual was undoubtedly the reception he received from the youth of Colombia. It was so well received there that he received a platinum and a gold disc, becoming the third Cuban to achieve this volume of sales. To top it all off, the album was presented to him on the anniversary of the founding of the city of Bogota.

How cool it is to know that that poorly educated guajiro, ignored in his own country, managed to conquer a people that lavished so much praise on him and elevated him in his rightful dimension. His gratitude was embodied in the song Colombiawhere he emphatically stated: "You are so much like Cuba that I will never forget you".

By that time Polo was slightly absolved from national anonymity and began a late diffusion in the island. The local industry was trying to catch up and awarded the gold record to Natural Guajiro (2002), and the Cubadisco Award for his album My guitar (2003).

People crowded the squares, Polo Montañez appeared on television and sounded in the streets every now and then. Finally, the prophet was leaving his homeland, and the wildness increased. Then it did not take long for the malicious commentary of those who lacked proposals, of the defenders of the habit to surface. Polo knew how to elude this with songs: There is a run-run and I have my babalao They disarmed those bickerings by which sometimes the artists of the patio, jealous of the random nature of talent, debase themselves.

Without being very clear about what he was doing, he would find in an emotion or a feeling enough motives to invent a song. Lyrics and melody drifted in his head until the song was forged, in the few free moments, when the muse descended. He composed in his mind, without playing the guitar, always based on a song he liked to listen to.

His creations had an accentuated spiritual character, and spoke of women, gratitude, pride in his origin, aspirations, death, love... With austerity he posed plausible edges of a life that seemed to decipher all its secrets. In them he reinvented the popular proverb with a carefree manner, and as a result of his born talent for improvisation, elegant humorous nuances shone through. His language was different, devoid of the macho egomania common in other interpreters. In addition to being suitable for all ages, it had a rhythm that could be danced to.

His work was very prolific, considering that he composed a hundred songs, of which only a third were enough to complete two phonograms. I would say that most of his success can be attributed to the personality of the interpreter, rather than to luck.

Polo danced and spoke naturally, like a hard-working guajiro. However, his diction was clear. He made jokes with his folksy slang; he would say things like: "don't take my aisles, they're mine", and he smiled, he laughed a lot.

A minstrel with an extraordinary sensitivity to tell simple stories that fill you. With an ordinary voice, but capable of transmitting the sounds and smells of the bush. His way of intoning even serves as a remedy when you listen to him. You could feel sadness, longing, illusion, joy, all in one. That was the magic: endearing and unique themes, difficult to be defended by another singer.

This is what happened to me with Pale flowerThe Puerto Rican Marc Anthony's version is simply another song. The Puerto Rican Marc Anthony's version is simply another song: without the whine of the Pinar del Río native's voice, without the intimate sonority, without the alchemy of that love he professed to Adys García, the song's inspiration. And the same story was repeated: another foreigner was awarded for taking advantage of the value of this work that then, by chance, sounded again.

Twenty-two years have passed since his abrupt departure. The man who was acclaimed by multitudes and named adopted son of Colombia is only mentioned in Cuba on special dates. How quickly we neglect our own. So voracious is our forgetfulness that it dissipates the wake of that wandering guajiro like the darkest of nights.