Celebrities conk out every day and pop culture rapidly moves on. But for the Garifuna people, descendants of shipwrecked slaves whose culture extends through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, world-music sense experience Andy Palacio was more than a star. The Belize native, who suffered a fatal heart blast and cerebrovascular accident at the age of 47 in January, was the psyche of a culture that many feared had been close to extinction earlier he committed himself to its rescue and renewal.
Palacio will be the subject of a extra musical protection today at California Plaza in business district Los Angeles, with members of the Garifuna Collective paying homage to his talent as part of the free Grand Performances series.
"We're very curious ourselves, honestly, to see what effect [Palacio's death] testament have on the group," said Dean Porter of Grand Performances. "Although they may not have the, quote-unquote, star topology quality that Andy had, we know they play the same authenticity that the audience comes here to engage with."
Some of the musicians played with Palacio at the venue last year. But this sentence, the headliners will be three women singers -- Sofia Blanco, her girl Silvia and Desere Diego -- world Health Organization are featured on a new album, "Umalali: The Garifuna Women's Project," released domestically on the Cumbancha label.
That assemblage is the result of a decennium of fieldwork. Since 1997, producer Ivan Duran has devoted himself to the Garifuna Women's Project, a systematic effort to search out the strong female voices of this cultivation. Like a musical anthropologist, he visited remote villages to record book women in their kitchens and temples, accumulating sufficiency material for an album and a tour, originally scheduled with Palacio this year.
"You could feel among the women a renewed level of commitment and a sense of urgency after his decease," said Duran in Spanish this week from his home in Belize. "We all felt that we had to do everything possible so that this door that Andy open for us would non close on us again."
The women ar the real stars of Garifuna culture, forged through the exogamy of early African slaves and the indigenous Carib and Arawak Indians. The men like the spotlight, said Duran, but the women are the cultural anchors.
"Garifuna women are very strong," he said. "Traditionally, the workforce are fishermen and the women ar in charge of cultivating the fields, as well as raising the children. They ar also the ones responsible for transmitting many aspects of the culture. They have a very trenchant timbre to their voices and they bring a whole different sensibility to the music."
The motivation to preserve the native culture resonated with Duran, who has roots in Catalonia, the area of Spain whose independent identity was threatened under the Franco dictatorship. The acclaimed album he produced for Palacio lowest year, "W�tina," is credited with sparking the Garifuna renaissance.
"The stage of preservation is past times and it's now important to move the music into the future," he said. "That's the only way young people will identify with it. And when the youth stoppage relating to their own music because they see it drilling or old fashioned, that's when the music will die."
Duran was an infant when his parents moved to Belize in the early '70s, an era of revolution and violence end-to-end Central America. They established one of the nation's first record book publishers, Cubola Productions, specializing in the history and anthropology of Belize.
Two decades afterward, Duran became his possess cultural trailblazer when he launched the first label devoted to Belizean euphony, Stonetree Records. Before that, artists had to locomote to Mexico or the U.S. to record -- Palacio made several records during the 1980s in Los Angeles, where in that respect is a significant Garifuna immigrant community.
(L.A.'s inaugural Garifuna Settlement Day celebration, featuring a hip-hop style lineup, is planned for Nov. 14, with tickets available at Little Belize eating house in Inglewood and other locations.)
Duran undertook the women's envision in 1997, intrigued by their voices and stories. He recorded some three hundred songs by 50 women and selected 12 tracks for the album. He added touches of blues, rock, Latin and other styles to make a modern record, not but a historical document.
The music reflects the merger of African, Spanish and Indian derivation. Yet, in their relation isolation from the rest of Latin America, these artists preserved an reliable West African style, with high-pitched nasal bone vocals and echoes of tribal chants. In some songs, you can discover the magnetic core 3-2 clave beat of the Garifuna's Afro-Cuban cousins. In others, there are the joyful grooves of Afropop or an nervy electric guitar.
On one caterpillar track, "Uruwei" (The Government), Duran adds the sounds of a hummock swinging on his porch with sea waves in the background, enhancing the ambience of the rustic vocal data track from his original field recordings.
Duran mightiness have made the music contemporary, simply the themes are timeless. In "Nibari" (My Grandchild), Sofia Blanco offers a warning to a contrary granddaughter with a taste for linear away from home. The lyric was written by her hubby of almost 40 days, Gregorio, based on a conversation he had overheard on the street.
In "Yunduya Weyu" (The Sun Has Set), Blanco writes her own painful lyric about the difficult nascency of one of her four children.
One of the newest members of the Garifuna Collective is singer Lloyd Augustine, 31, formerly with the band Punta Rebels, who switched to more traditional music, such as the rhythmical paranda, partially thanks to Palacio.
Diego, the third vocalizer on tonight's bill, is also one of the youngest in the picture and one of the most desired. Her herculean voice often is heard at d�g� ceremonies, a traditional healing ritual.
"On this tour, the important thing is to show that there's so much talent in this community," aforesaid Duran. "This project is not summed up in one person or one artist. We want the world to be aware of what we give to put up."
Or as Palacio would often say at concerts: "There's a lot more where I came from."
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