Lazaro Ros y Mezcla
by Neil Leonard

Rhythm Music Magazine
Vol. 2, Num. 11, Dec. 1993
Copyright 1993, Neil Leonard

Since the U.S. imposed a trade embargo on the island in 1961, visas for Cuban artists have been difficult to obtain and visits have been sparse.   However, a recent approval of U.S. visitor visas for  jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and the Muñequitos of Matanzas gave us a preview of the spectacular Cuban groups due to become fixtures on the U.S. concert circuit when political tensions between the two countries are resolved.  The reception of these groups was beyond all expectations.  The Muñequitos played West African rooted Yoruba, Abakua and Bantu music to capacity crowds in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston, each concert an ecstatic celebration of folkloric music and dramatic performance.  Rubalcaba, whose visa was secured in part by Dizzy Gillespie's widow and Wynton Marsalis and petitioning Secretary of State Warren Christopher, played a sold-out concert at Lincoln Center, which was the jazz press event of the year.  The next wave in this imminent invasion of Cuban musicians is scheduled for November first when Afro-Cuban singer Lazaro Ros begins a tour of the United States, accompanied by Cuban pop group Mezcla. 

Lazaro Ros is one of Cuba's foremost singers of Afro-Cuban religious music.  During his long tenure as an original member and principal singer in the Cojunto Folklorico National de Cuba (Cuban National Folklore Group), Ros performed a variety of West African styles.  With the Cuban pop band Mezcla, Ros has moved in a new direction, advancing the Cuban tradition of integrating sacred and secular song. 

While Ros has sung in a variety of Afro-Cuban styles he specializes in  music of the Yoruba.  The Yoruba nation is one of the largest African ethnic groups, whose homeland covers most of Nigeria, and one of the most artistically gifted cultures on the continent.  Ros is a master Akpuon (lead singer of Yoruba liturgical repertoire).  In addition to singing, the Akpuon directs the three bata drummers and chorus through the spontaneous ritual where the length and order of songs is determined by the possession of a believer. 

True to the style of the male Akpuon, Ros' voice is coarse and relatively narrow in range compared to the female Akpuon.  Ros sings the ancient chants with Mezcla accompaniment which employs heavy use of electronic instruments, innovative harmonies as well as Latin and Afro-pop rhythms  While his voice is unconventional in a pop format, Ros and Mezcla have done a brilliant job of bringing down the boundaries between styles and melding the secular and sacred.

Africa exists in Cuba.  As a North American musician hearing a performance by Afro-Cuba de Matanzas, a Cuban folklore group, I was overcome by the feeling that I had been transported to Nigeria.  This impression is not only common among North American visitors to the island, I was later told by renowned Cuban musicologist Argelier Leon that he felt the same way.

Unlike African descendants in the United States who were forced to suppress their religion, herbal medicine, language and music, Africans in Cuba were able to preserve those aspects of their culture.  Given the Cuban slave trade continued  into the late nineteenth century, it is possible to find Cubans today who learned African culture from a relative raised in Africa and transported to Cuba as an adult slave. 

The Cuban government of the colonial era permitted African culture to exist within the confines of Cabildos (African cultural social houses) and tolerated African celebration in the street on religious holidays.  Over the years Cuban society assimilated many aspects of African culture, gradually developing a tropical psychology that in many ways reflected African thinking.

Due to this Africanization of Cuban society, Cuban music drew heavily on African roots from the beginning, as contrasted with North American music, which  began including unaltered African rhythms and melody during the second half of this century.  In Cuba the pioneering musicians of the big band era such as Mario Bauza, Benny Moré and Prez Prado based their swing on Afro-Cuban rhythms.  Later in the sixties Cuban bands such as Irakere and Afrocuba expanded pop and rock to include undiluted Afro-Cuban chants and instrumental music.  In the early eighties the Cuban band Síntesis, lead by Carlos Alfonso, created an entire rock repertoire with the leader singing songs in the West African Yoruba language.  Lazaro Ros and Mezcla advance this tradition significantly by integrating ancient religious Yoruba chants with a popular context that contains elements of zouk, pop, rock and jazz.

Ros' new repertoire is the result of an American musical family's long term presence in Cuba.   Mezcla (Spanish for mix) was founded in 1986 by U.S. born guitarist Pablo Menendez.  Menendez's mother Barbara Dane is a singer and political activist who performed with seminal jazz and blues musicians including Lightnin Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, T-Bone Walker, Jack Teagarden and Louis Armstrong.  Pablo was contact with these musicians from infancy, when they passed through the Dane household in San Francisco.

In the early sixties, after the United States imposed a ban on travel Cuba, Dane was one of the few Americans to risk traveling to the island to perform, meet with the people and observe the experiment of socialism.  This trip let to an invitation for her fourteen year old son Pablo come study at the National School of Art (Cubanacan) for one year in 1967.  By the end of the year Menendez had established strong musical alliances.  He extended his visit for several years before deciding to permanently relocate to the island. 

In 1979 Menendez became a member of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC (Group of Sound Experimentation of Cuban Institute of  Artistic and Industrial Cinema) led by virtuoso guitarist and cutting edge composer Leo Brower.  Brower encouraged all members to write and experiment with new ideas.  GES became the most innovative ensembles of the seventies, nurturing major talents such as Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, Emiliano Salvador, Leonardo Acosta, Carlos Averoff and Eduardo Ramos.  The diversity of repertoire and penchant for experimentation had a lasting influence on Menendez.

Through GES Menendez became closely associated with Milanés and Rodríguez who were rising stars of nueva trova.  Nueva trova was Cuba's contribution to the political song movement of the Americas.   Intended as listening as opposed to dance music the center piece of the repertoire was acoustic guitar and voice.  Nueva trova drew on national sources such as bolero, guaracha, canción, guajira, guaguancó, punto guajiro and son and international sources such as Bob Dylan (U.S.) and the Beatles (U.K.), Violeta Parra (Chile), Daniel Viglietti and Quintin Cabrera (Uruguay), Roy Brown (Puerto Rico), Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento (Brazil).  While Trova was relatively unknown in the U.S. it had a major impact in Latin American.

As the trova musicians were assimilating elements of rock and blues, Menendez fit right in.  In a short time he was playing a key role in the trova movement and was featured on a number of Milanés and Rodríguez ground breaking recordings.  Milanes and Rodríguez recordings of this era have recently been released in the U.S. by the World Pacific and Luka Bop labels.

In 1986, while researching music in Cuba, I met by Barbara Dane who took me to hear one of the first performances by Mezcla, which Menendez had formed earlier in the year.  The group was  exploring a repertoire drawing on nueva trova, pop, rock and jazz music.  While the compositions and musicianship were first rate, Menendez initial experiment of using one drummer and a drum machine as opposed to multiple percussionists, lacked spontaneity and interplay.

In the course of discussions both backstage and at his home Menendez was receptive to my view that Cuban percussion should play a greater role in Mezcla's instrumentation.  In Havana a year later he told me that he had thought about our discussion and was working more Afro-Cuban elements into the rhythmic foundation of Mezcla.  His long standing interest in Afro-Cuban music was greatly advanced in 1989, when Lazaro Ros approached him with the idea of collaborating in a new project that would combine Ros’ work in African music with Mezcla’s contemporary musical vision.  Having become fluent in a wide variety of Cuban styles with GES and played with Síntesis as they explored Afro-Cuban roots music for the first time, Menendez proved to be the perfect collaborator.

Lazaro Ros and Mezcla's debut CD Cantos integrates elements of African, Afro-pop and Latin music.  Acosta's arrangement of Iya Maasé Lóbi Shango, based on the chant to the god of thunder and lightning, begins with a minute long introduction featuring lyrical soprano saxophone and fretless bass counterpoint.  Menendez gritty distorted guitar provides a compelling backdrop for Ros' lead during their call and response with the background vocalists.  The percussion section consists of  bata drums, drum set and drum samples which provide and extraordinarily driving and precise groove throughout.

Menendez's arrangement of Aketé Oba Oba (Obatalá), father of the Orishas, uses bata, Latin percussion, backward drum samples, light synthesizer and guitar work a build a mesmerizing introduction to the vocal entrance.  Later, slap bass punctuates the bata rhythms through the breaks.  The rich harmonization and guitar-synthesizer background melody shed a refreshing new light on the Yoruba source.  The piece ends in a re-statement of the original chant gradually being augmented by electronic sounds as the tempo accelerates in ritualistic fashion.

Ros and Mezcla do an excellent job of adapting Ros' voice to contemporary pop music.  At age sixty with minimal experience with instruments outside the traditional African orchestra, Ros has never recorded with a pianist, much less heavily layered electronic arrangements.  The group is challenged by the difficult task of casting the male Akpuon as the center piece of a pop recording.  Ros' traditional raspy voice and narrow vocal range and are occasionally overshadowed by the group.   However, in the interest of maintaining the authenticity of his style Mezcla's arrangers have left his voice as is and created a new pop sound which blends with his authentic vocal style.

By placing Yoruba sacred chants in a popular setting essential elements of the African sources are unavoidably compromised.  The Akpuon's ability to lead the group through the ritual is made possible by his personal contact with the believers and the intimate scale of the ritual, typically is held in a living room.  In working with Mezcla, Ros has chosen to forfeited his spontaneous directorship to the arrangers favoring tightly pre-composed arrangements.

Lazaro Ros and Mezcla are challenged to maintain their integrity as their music is  marketed in cultures which have historically repressed African culture or treated it as an exotic commodity to be exploited.  As this go to press the promoters are indicating that a number of changes have been made to deliver a more danceable music to the U.S. market and accentuate Ros' role as the star. As we saw in the historic collaboration between jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and Afro-Cuban drummer/singer Chano Pozo both African and sophisticated urban American music can be well represented and co-existed without one party playing a subordinate role or leaving cultural roots behind.  It would be paradoxical if Mezcla's rich diversity, which is acceptable in Cuba was downplayed for success in U.S.

The upcoming tour will be Mezcla's first visit to U.S. and Ros' first visit since he performed in New York with the National Folklore Group two decades ago.  Historically, the U.S. debut of a Cuban band has been a highly charged event for everyone present.  The Cubans are finally playing in front of what could be one of their largest audiences.  In some cases the groups have spent years planning trips and waiting for entrance visas.  The musical result is often historic.  The excitement of having this group for the first time coupled with the exhilarating performances on their recent recordings suggests that this an event not to be missed.

Razaro Ros con Mezcla’s Cantos is available on Intuition Records.  Mezcla’s solo recording Fronteras de Sueños is also available on Intuition.   Producers Rachel Faro and Sammy Fuigeroa did an excellent job of producing the to disks.  Cantos comes with a ten page booklet which explains the Yoruba tradition in Cuba and translates the chants into English. 

Neil Leonard III is a composer, performer whose latest composition Totems was recently premiered by Don Byron at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall.  In November he perform the world premier of Cuban composer Juan Blanco’s Espacios V, written specifically for him.  He is currently teaching in the Music Synthesis Department at Berklee College of Music.