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Various Artists Colombie: Chants des Llaneros du Casanare Maison des Cultures du Monde (www.maisondesculturesdumonde.org)
¡Cimarrón!
In the savannas south of the Andes, joropo or música llanera, the energetic string-band music of the cattle-ranch uplands of the Orinoco River, spread west from Venezuela into Colombia with the advent of commercial recording after World War II. Rooted in the Spanish colonial era, the sound is characterized by a variety of acoustic guitars and guitar-like instruments (bandola, bandolín, bandolón, cuatro), harp, violin, bass, maracas and other native percussion, and the region’s distinctive high-pitched nasal vocal style. Joropo in Colombia has been overshadowed by the popularity of accordion-based vallenato music, and Venezuela’s claiming the genre as a national style. Featuring contributions by over three dozen regional performers, Colombie draws from recordings made with Colombian government support in 1995 and 2003 in Casanare, in the Venezuela border region. It highlights such African-influenced dances as the golpe, pajarillo and zumba, the parrando and joropo fiesta rhythms, the corrido ballad form, the verbal poetic competition of the contrapunteo (with comparable forms traceable to Spain and Portugal, as found in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America), a cappella work chants and the pasaje love song. The illustrated CD insert (in French, Spanish and English) is augmented by a 104page PDF included on the disc, with complete lyrics, song commentaries for its 18 representative tracks, and contemporary and historic photographs. Colombie is a worthy introduction to folk traditions little known outside of Casanare. Since 1986, Cimarrón founder and musical director Carlos Rojas Hernández has sought to build upon the roots of joropo in Colombia and disseminate the sound, augmenting the harp and teasing out its rapid-fire African-Colombian inspired rhythmic underpinnings by adding cajón and upright electric bass. In recent years, Cimarrón has taken the Colombian joropo sound to Western Europe and the United States. The CD presents 13 fresh settings of mostly traditional joropo numbers, superbly performed and recorded. There’s a joyous jazz-like improvisatory freedom here, as on such knockout tracks as “Joropo quitapesares” and “Cimarroneando,” or the raw, in-your-face insolence of “El guate,” sung by a proudly unrefined llanero who enumerates his gritty rural know-how and dares anyone to test their abilities against him. The informative illustrated 36page booklet by Rojas Hernández and Smithsonian ethnomusicologist Daniel Sheehy has notes in English and Spanish. Michael Stone
More info about Cimarrón
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