Cultural Exchange: Marimba mania

Woodstock, it’s not. And therein lies much of the appeal of a once-obscure Afro-Colombian music festival that, despite being held in this out-of-the-way corner of the Andes, attracts increasing numbers of international visitors, in addition to die-hard locals.

The common thread that ran through most of the Petronio Álvarez Music of the Pacific festival, which ended last weekend, was acoustic marimba music from the Pacific coast. There, inhabitants of poor, isolated Afro-Colombian communities located amid mangroves and estuaries have clung to music styles their forefathers brought with them as slaves two or three centuries ago.

Among the 18,000 cramming Cali’s Pascual Guerrero soccer stadium for five days running were foreign documentary filmmakers, DJs, tour packagers and talent scouts. Many said they’d been seduced by the music’s hypnotic quality and the frenzied audiences.

“It’s very different, very mystical,” said Pablo Ramirez, an organizer of the annual Viña del Mar music festival in Chile, who was here to scout talent for his February event. “Maybe it’s the fact that everyone in the stadium is dancing along with it, but the music is very penetrating. You can’t help but move.”

The festival’s namesake, Petronio Álvarez, was a musician and composer from the port city of Buenaventura who died in 1966 after writing dozens of songs and poems about the everyday lives of poor Afro-Colombians. The inaugural festival was held in 1996 in an open-air theater in Cali that seated a few hundred.

The success of the 15th-annual festival — it was moved this year to a giant soccer stadium from its former venue, a 2,000-seat bullring — speaks to a long-ignored musical genre getting its due. But the event’s popularity also testified to the fact that African descendants — who make up 15% to 20% of Colombia’s population — are claiming an increasing stake in a society that has long excluded them.

“Afro-Colombian culture is more visible, not least because the people are more visible,” said professor Juan Camilo Cardenas of the University of the Andes in Bogotá. “Displacement caused by decades of conflict has forced many more Colombian blacks from rural areas to the cities. And there is a push on for their equal rights with projects financed by U.S. aid.”

The festival is also a competition, with bands vying for cash prizes and recognition that can lead to regional, U.S. or European tours.

Most of the 70 bands included one or more marimbas, those 30-key xylophone-like percussion instruments. Others played guasas, a hollow tree branch with seeds inside that produce a rasping sound when shaken. Percussionists beat time on cununos, drums made with leather from the hides of tiny mangrove deer.

While Colombian cumbia and vallenato have worked their way into the world music mainstream, thanks partly to the popularity of pop singers Shakira and Carlos Vives, marimba is just now making inroads, said Will Sabatini, an L.A.-based DJ known as DJ Sabo. He attended the festival last year by happenstance, after being hired to work a show at a Cali nightclub.

He described the festival as a “life-changing event” and persuaded several colleagues to attend this year.

“Marimba has a rootsy feel to it, a side of the African influence I had never heard before,” Sabatini said. “With thousands of people in the stadium dancing along, it’s a feeling you can’t get anywhere else in the world. Among DJs who look to Latin music, it’s really getting known.”

But the Petronio Álvarez festival celebrates more than just music. One end of the stadium was given over to a food court where dozens of Afro-Colombian communities sold handcrafts and offered up local dishes including pianguas (clams), cocadas (coconut and pineapple candies) and arrechon (a home-brewed aphrodisiac liquor).

The many facets of Afro-Colombian culture are what attracted Stephanie Schneiderman, owner of the Ann Arbor, Mich.- based tour packager Tia Stephanie Tours. A marketer of roots cultural tours to Mexican American and Afro American travelers, Schneiderman said Colombia had only recently registered on the tourism industry’s radar screen.

“African Americans want to learn about the diaspora of former slaves in other countries as well,” Schneiderman said.

On the festival’s final day, Aug. 28, there were at least as many people outside the stadium watching the festivities on giant video screens as there were inside it.

Angel Beltran, the lead marimba player with the group Socavón, and winner of the festival’s top soloist prize, said the event was helping poor Afro-Colombian musicians seek better lives. The Colombian government recognizes the economic potential and is financing a marimba school that Beltran runs in his coastal town of Iscuande.

“The school is giving a skill to kids who otherwise would be on the streets, and it exists because Petronio Álvarez gives value to what we do,” Beltran said. “Every year, more people come to the festival, and soon marimba will be as popular as cumbia, even more.”

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