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Artist List:
Amampondo
Amjad Ali Khan
Asad Qizilbash
Bembeya Jazz
Chico Cesar
Clave Y Guaguanco
Eliza Carthy Big Band
Ensemble Kaboul
Jimmy Cliff
Julien Jacob
LoJo
Manecas Costa
Manu Dibango and
Ray Lema
Nitin Sawhney
Ojos de Brujo
Oumou Sangare
Pape and Cheikh
Samba Sunda
Sevara Nazarkhan
Sierra Maestra
Super Rail Band
Temple of Sound
Teofilo Chantre
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Profile:
Clave Y Guaguancó
 
Rumba is the spiritual and ancestral core of most Afro-Cuban music. It's a vocal and percussive genre that preserves the strongest and most palpable links with the island's west African Yoruba and Bantu roots. It's also a community music whose natural habitats are the communal 'yards' of old Havana and the santeria ceremonies where Afro-Cubans gather to worship and venerate Yoruban deities like Ogún or Yemayá.
The music is naked, raw, passionate, built on unadorned and palpitating beats made using boxes called cajas or cajones, depending on their size, as well as more modern percussion like bongos and congas and overlaid with the blood red call-and-response vocals of the singers. Then of course there's dancing too; sensuous, theatrical, unleashed.
Clave y Guaguancó are masters of the genre. Their existence stretches back over six decades to the 1940s when a group of friends, who were already used to playing together at parties and impromptu community gatherings, lead by Mario 'Flor de Amor' Pinci, Agustín 'El Bongocero' Gutiérrez and singer Gloria Moria, decided to create a more official entity for their activities. The troupe fizzled out in the '50s after attempting to play less rootsy 'son' music but were revived again a decade later thanks to the intervention of respected musicologist Dr Argellier León.
Present group leader Amado de Jesús Dedeu Hernández joined in 1980 and proceeded to nurture the experimental tendencies that have always characterised Clave y Guaguancó's approach.
If you're in Cuba on a Wednesday afternoon you can check one of the group's pulsating weekly performances at the UNEAC building in downtown Havanna. But you can also save yourself the price of a plane ticket to Cuba and see them live and direct at the WOMAD festival…..and thank one of those awesome Yoruban gods for your good fortune.
Biography by Andy Morgan, July 2003
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