Art project:
As an art project Carmela decided to cook a recipe that he learned from Otoqui Reyes, the Afro Puerto Rican artist whom he interviewed. He cooked Pollo Fricassee, a combo of rice and beans, and Puerto Rican cabbage salad. And he also made Alfajores, a dessert that he likes to make and connects him with flavors of Peru.
Question:
What is your background?
Answer:
I was born in a house of musicians: my aunt played the saxophone and my father and all of my brothers are percussionists so I grew up in a family with a lot of parties all the time. During my birthday my father used to come with the Bomba* group to celebrate everything and my mother and my grandmother hosted a lot of parties to celebrate anything. So yeah, music and parties were kind of my life. When my father left the group “Familia Cepeda” he created his own so I grew up with a lot of people who were part of Bomba groups. So I was around when everybody was rehearsing Bomba and that is my background: the rehearsals, I grew up with that.
My mom was a dancer from another bomba family so my father would go to her rehearsals and she would go to his rehearsals so you know bomba was all around. Suddenly, when I turned 13 or 14 I was like “I don’t wanna hear bomba no more”. So I started to breakdance and to hear more hip hop like N.W.A. and some others. I started to listen to all those types of music and to get involved in hip hop rapping with my cousin at birthdays and parties and breakdancing in groups so I spent like 3 or 4 years away from bomba.
My father started to find out more about bomba and tried to show me about it but I was not wanting to know about bomba until, suddenly, in one of my schools they knew about the fact that my father had a group and they invited him and his group to the school to play and I was like “no way! this is not happening!”. Everyone at the school said “oh you gotta dance and dadadadadada”, so I danced with my father’s group and everyone was like “wow! What’s that?”, and I answered, “that is our music! ” It’s bomba!”. And they said “that is not our music”. And I replied “yes it is!”. I was surprised because people don’t know about this and I thought I should learn more about it to teach them. And that is when I made the connection. This is not a kind of music, this is OUR music.
I started to learn more facts about bomba with my father, for example that Puerto Rico has a lot of different styles of bomba: we have bomba from Santurce, from Loíza, from Ponce, the south of Puerto Rico, from Mayagüez, and all of them are different and have different influences. Mayagüez has influence from France because of the French port so many of the songs are in French. Loíza is a maroon town so they don’t have so much influence from the spaniards so their bomba only has two rhythms and sounds very African. Everything about it is pretty African, from the songs to the dance style. Santurce has Spanish influence so everything about it, like the dancing, has the Spanish touch. Ponce has a giant drum, literally barrels of rum, so big that you have to mount it to play it so the sound is very strong and only the women sing and the men play drums and dance . The women have to follow the man but the women do very little movement while the man does the dancing. This is kind of a roulette. So people take turns while the women sing and it’s very beautiful.
I started studying and learning about that sort of stuff and I was amazed. There is a lot about bomba. It’s not just what I learned while being raised, there are many more styles and I joined a group from the South of Puerto Rico called “Paracumbé”. They have two or three recordings and they sing beautifully, you should listen to them. I started learning the different styles of drumming and dancing and finally I made my own group and I kept playing and teaching and it became a big part of my life. I grew up with bomba.
My father also had a reggae band and we made a CD with them mixing bomba with reggae. I began to listen and learn more about the kind of hip hop in Jamaica, called ragamuffin, and started doing that style in my father’s reggae band.
A lot of stuff I went through. When I started learning these afro roots in my culture, I learned more about afro descendents, like Peruvian music (I have two cajones), or capoeira and samba. All of this music is part of my life.
Q: Wow you have a very great background in music.
A: Yes I love it. I keep learning.
Q: You told me in the past that you worked at La Escuelita. Have you learned anything from your students there?
A: After a year working in Puerto Rico, the system kept changing and making poor people more poor while the rich get richer and they controlled all the factories and closed a lot of them because of politics, and if you don’t follow the politics you get kicked out( fired). My friends got into that unemployment a lot and I got into it a little bit. I worked at the airport putting the luggage in the belly of the plane, breathing the fumes of the airplane, and I have asthma so it wasn’t safe for me. I didn’t stay because they wouldn’t let me work with my asthma, I could pass out because of the fumes. They got mad at me and said “you didn’t tell us you had asthma! You can’t work here!” and I tried to explain that I could not tell them because I needed the work but I ended up searching for jobs for a year. I got the blessing that every year I managed to come to Seattle to the sea fair and festival to make lots of workshops so in one of them I made a connection with Marisol from La Escuelita and another person from Bellevue Puesta del Sol
(another bilingual school). So I left everything and moved with my wife from puerto rico and we have lived in seattle for 8 years working as a teacher and an artist at la escuelita and now we are in charge of the curriculum at la escuelita working at the office.
I teach the kids how their bodies sound. While playing drums the kids bounce around and it’s kind of a game in which they are expressing the happiness that the drums give. Some are scared and eventually they get more comfortable and like to touch and hit the drums, smiling and getting very excited. I do this in both schools. I also met Farin who works at Seattle Amistad School and I started to do the same work at her school. In the Bellevue school I make choreographies with the kids and I put all of them to play “The Cua and the Maracas” and I just sing. We have an international festival and the kids present their music and it’s very cool.
Q: You said that usually women are supposed to sing and men are playing and dancing so when you teach your kids do you have them in those specific roles or does everyone just get to play every part?
A: Now, because the kids are interested, I teach them everything but I ask them what they want to learn and I teach them that. If they wanna learn drums then I teach them drums and if they wanna learn something else I teach them something else. In Bellevue I had one day dedicated to percussion and another day to choreography. One day we just mixed music with art and some kids played drums and we told them to take what they hear and express it with colors, so the kids started playing and created some paintings where some imagined a beach, some a forest, or a farm and yeah it was beautiful.
Q: What do you hope the kids that you are teaching will do in the future with what you have taught them?
A: Yeah, I learned that when I’m teaching bomba I am opening a window to each person to search who they are, and that’s what I love. In one of my classes in La escuelita I made a carnival dedicated to all families culture and two students learned that their culture has drums from India and they started asking their parents who they were, what their culture was and these were just kids in pre k (only 4-5 years old) and their parents started explaining their culture and traditions. Kids had to talk about the theme of the month (“who am I?”) so they needed to research about their culture and find their story from the elders, find their culture from the families. Their parents were amazed. For example, a kid wanted to dress like an Indian woman so I brought an Indian dress and she was so happy. Another child knew that the grandma from her dad’s side was related to India too so she had an Indian family line and both were dressed like Indian women and singing songs in their language. That is what I wanted: kids learning more about who they are and making research. I never wanted other kids to just know my culture, I also want them to know about their own and to connect with their people so they can get to know themselves better. I connect kids within the same culture to create one big family.
Q: I wish I had you as my teacher while I was at La Escuelita, that would have been so much fun!
A: Yes I love the kids and they love me. I always have fun with them. We watch videos, play music, do choreographies and more.
Q: Cool. Speaking of elders and grandparents, do you know what your family background is? Like your grandfather and great grandparents.
A: My father was a photographer and I kinda say that I am a photographer but I didn’t study it as a profession although I have loved photography since I was a kid and I have a collection of vintage cameras in my house.
I love cameras. I love the beauty of the machine. My grandfather was also a photographer. He loved bicycles too. He used to travel by bicycle in New York, get on a train and get off and keep bicycling, and my father also loved bicycles so it’s like this connection from my elders. My grandfather loved to tell stories and he used to speak a lot with my dad.
When I was a kid, my dad used to put me in the bathtub and make a show for me: he had two different characters and played changing one to another one, changing voices and playing with me… I like stories. One of my projects is to make a story book about storytelling. In the classroom I created a story about something that we need to teach the kids: don’t throw tantrums, don’t push, don’t fight, so I made stories right away in circle time with the white board and drawing and everything. I want to do it for everybody.
Q: Can you talk more about the different styles of Bomba?
A: In Santurce we have four basic rhythms: Sicá, Cuembé, Yubá and Holandé. They are the same rhythms in Mayagüez, and the only difference is that we sing in Spanish in the south and they sing in French in the north west. One of the popular song in Mayaguez that I learn is : Sepulate
Yubá rhythm is a 6/8, the most Afrodescendent rhythms. In the South, Ponce, Guayama, Arroyo, we have Leró, Cunyá and Cuembé, but it is pronounced with “G” Güembé. For me the most interesting thing is that on the entire island the buleador drum do the same thing, it keeps the rhythm and pattern but when they play they mute some of the sound. Technically there is the same rhythm but when you play it sounds different.
Another instrument, the cuá, consists of two sticks. When I started to learn bomba I realized that cuá is the one keeping the pattern and you have to learn how to mute it.
In the south you need to learn how to play the cuá and then the drums. In the South everything is not so technical as in Santurce. The maracas are the instrument that the singer plays but you need to learn them all, so when you play the buleador you have already passed through the basic steps, and know how to play the maracas and how they sound on each rhythm, to be synchronized.
Q: In the process of learning bomba, did you also learn music theory?
A: My first instrument was piano. I learned to play piano and used to read music, but now it is like Chinese for me. I would like to re-learn again. I used to have a piano and when I moved to Seattle I gave it to the school for the kids. I have a lot of instruments in my house like a cello, ceramic drums, and a guitar and I want to learn how to play all of them.
Q: Have you ever lost the motivation to play music?
A: I will never lose the motivation to play music.
Yoooo whatsup my name is Carmela Stewart and I am a 17 year old trans gay man who has a mixed race of Black and Afro Peruvian… More
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