Jazz Afroperuano

Saturday night was filled with emotional highs for me. I visited this cool cafe called Jazz Zone in Miraflores where Gabriel Alegria's jazz afroperuano sextet was playing. I read about it online, and was excited to hear what Afro-Peruvian jazz sounded like. I arrived pretty early to buy tickets and saw some great pictures and paintings of jazz greats like Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker in the main hallway. A Miles Davis song was playing, and I knew I was in the right spot. It was interesting though having taken a jazz class in college, learning about the interplay between the birth and evolution of jazz over time with the changing developments in American society. Yet to musicians here, and indeed other places as well, these artists have no nation due to the ways in which jazz music blurs national, racial, and class barriers. The power of black music and performance to achieve this is exactly the focus of my trip. Black music is a language that always communicates an emotion, an experience, a history; it moves in and out of spaces, transforming so much in its path.

I had a brief conversation with a young woman at the ticket table, who was actually the sax player of the group. She saw the book I was carrying - the history of Afro-Latin America - and was excited to discuss some of it. We had a brief conversation about the slave experience in Peru and some of the instrumentation and traditions that grew from it. She seemed really knowledgeable. After a short dinner, I took my seat as the group set up to begin. A really jovial woman sat next to me, and she kept yelling across the room at this older black man. It turned out he was her husband and the cajon player of the group. The cajon is really interesting - it's a distinctly Afro-Peruvian percussion, pretty much a hollow box-shaped wooden instrument placed between the player's legs as he treats it like a drum. It makes booming sounds though; I found it difficult at first to distinguish between the sounds of the cajon and the traditional drum set. Anyway, the woman was really proud of her husband and I got to meet him between sets. He was a very fatherly Afro-Peruvian man, with no doubt a very interesting life.

The sextet had a guitarist (an olive-skinned man named Yuri Juarez who was bald except for a small tuft of hair on the hairline of his forehead - his CD Afroperuano is amazing!), saxophone (the lady had skills!), trumpet (this guy was the "leader" so to speak, his name being gabriel alegria), bass (this interesting guy from somewhere in Africa, I wasn't told the country, with a huge fro and goatee), cajon, and drums (slightly heavier-set guy with glasses). I took countless pictures and videos. They had such a ride variety of songs, including a version of the famous "Summertime" tune, my favorite upbeat song they did. My favorite slow tune was this song called "El Mar" with a great bass solo. It's interesting - the cajon element, and some of the other percussion, is really what makes this type of jazz different, makes it Afro-Peruvian so to speak. The cajon player would periodically shout small phrases or one word like "alegria!" or "vaya!" And the layering of the cajon beat over the drums made it sound really distinctive. The cajon player also had this crazy looking instrument with teeth called a "burro" which turned out to be a monkey's jaw. He ran a stick over the ridges of the teeth, making a pretty cool sound actually. I forgot to ask the name of the last instrument which was also pretty distinct. But the its kind of shaped like a bird house. It's a box that opens on the top, with a big hole in the middle and a strap that goes around the man's neck. He has a thick piece of wood that he bangs on the side while he opens and closes the box. The cajon player played this while dancing, then went into a tap-dancing finale which was great.

The bass player was really interesting to watch too. This man was in another world - the music just took him somewhere. His eyes would be closed and his head slowly swaying back and forth, his facial expressions changing from angry, to euphoric, to intense. This was a funny contrast to the guitar player who looked a bit bored, but you could tell that was just how he played, some people aren't high on emotion but still know how to connect. I was expecting the bass player to be kind of insane from all the devil faces he was making while he was pluckin the bass strings, but he when I met him briefly afterwards and said good job, he was quite soft-spoken.

It was such a great show and I had some nice conversation with people afterward about my trip and other afroperuvian music/artists to check out. I met one woman, a professor at Woodbury College, who teaches intercultural relations or something and speaks nine languages! I tested her out by having her go from Chinese, Japenese, Spanish, English, Portuguese, to French. After all those I was tired of asking. Impressive! We spoke about the importance of cultural understanding in medical care, something that interests me very much. The whole night was just so pleasant and I learned a ton. It was so wonderful to see such a display of afro-peruvian culture come alive.