Ethnomusicologist Amanda Villepastour and Cuban producer
(Sendero Music) Luis Bran have teamed up to tell the unlikely story of the
spirit of music in a small Cuban town through the heartbeat of a set of
multi-generational religious drums named Ilú Keké. The 21-track album, titled
Transmisión en la Eritá Meta, is available now digitally worldwide under
exclusive license to Music Works NYC.
When the late Justiliano Pelladito visited the small Cuban
town of Cidra in the 1950s as a teenage drumming apprentice, he was awestruck
by three sacred batá drums hanging on a wall. In this tradition, batá drums are
not merely musical instruments but are sacred vessels that host the deity of
drumming called Añá within Santería, an Afrocuban spiritual tradition which
developed in slave communities. Inspired by hearing Pelladito reminisce about
his elders’ pilgrimages to see the drums sixty years earlier, ethnomusicologist
Amanda Villepastour and local ritual musician and producer Luis Bran teamed up
to excavate the old man’s memories from the Cidra community. On their first
journey to the town in 2012, it emerged that another drummer in the car,
Idalberto Berriel Pérez “Puchito”, was caretaking and playing the drums in
Matanzas yet knew little of their deep history. Known as Ilú Keké, these drums
endured a perilous, unwritten history and are likely one of the oldest
remaining sets in the Matanzas region and are among Cuba’s most archaic batá.
The surviving Matanzas drummers who played Ilú Keké in the
1950s insist that the drums were carved and consecrated during slavery times in
one of the sugar mills on the outskirts of Cidra, yet following two generations
of neglect these batá had virtually disappeared into obscurity. The three
elderly brothers in Cidra, who had inherited Ilú Keké from their father, were
neither drummers nor Santería devotees and in the early 2000s were on the verge
of removing the drums from the wall and souveniring one each. For believers
batá drums are ritually birthed and humanized, and this brutal separation would
signal death. As the uncles discussed tearing apart the family of drums, one of
their nephews was troubled by dreams about his grandfather’s drums and would be
woken in the small hours by their thunderous sound. After seeking divination,
several nephews rescued the decaying relics and sought help from some
drummer-priests who knew how to restore them. Ilú Keké was reborn in the hands
of Puchito and some of the fiercest young drummers in Matanzas, yet the
musicians were unaware of their profound history before the 2012 research.
Bran and Villepastour assembled three generations of
musicians around Pelladito sixty years after his initial encounters with the
Cidra drums. Drifting between gritty field recordings and pristine studio
production, Ilú Keké’s deep-rooted spiritual meaning is captured through
powerful drumming, heart-felt utterances, detailed liner notes, and evocative
photographs. This transmission of sacred knowledge and beauty from the elders
to following generations has ensured that Ilú Keké takes its rightful place in
Cuba’s history of batá drumming.
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