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Feature: Palacio uses music to keep Garifuna culture alive
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San Jose Mercury News, Feature: Palacio uses music to keep Garifuna culture alive >>
Palacio uses music to keep Garifuna culture alive
By Andrew Gilbert
"Everybody wants to be cool, especially young people," says Andy Palacio, 45, the moving force behind the Garifuna Collective, a band that's attracting international attention to the endangered, little-known Garifuna culture of Central America.
A native of Belize, the singer and guitarist has assembled a cross-generational cast of leading Garifuna musicians in an ensemble mixing traditional instruments and rhythms with electric guitars, bass and keyboards. The result is a galloping sound built on distinctive Garifuna punta grooves.
With the release in February of the Garifuna Collective's debut album "Watina" on the new label Cumbancha, Palacio is helping to spearhead a cultural renaissance in the Garifuna enclaves of Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, while introducing the world to a people whose origins are as dramatic as their music is soulful.
Palacio and the seven-piece Garifuna Collective make their Bay Area debut Sunday afternoon in San Francisco as part of the Stern Grove Festival on a double bill with the vivacious Haitian star Emeline Michel. The collective returns to Northern California Aug. 5 for a performance at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz.
"The disconnect that Garifuna youth were feeling from their culture about two decades ago really had to do with a loss of self-esteem, which made them want to disassociate themselves from their identity," Palacio says in an interview in his dressing room after a performance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. "Now that we have something they can be proud of, I think it will help reinforce that sense of identity, and the validation of the international community is critical. I think it's cool to be Garifuna right now."
An incredible tale of endurance against all odds, Garifuna origins date back to the mid-17th century, when two ships carrying slaves from West Africa foundered off the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Welcomed by the indigenous Arawak and Carib peoples, the survivors forged a hybrid African-Indian culture. Fiercely independent, they lived in relative peace for decades while absorbing escaped slaves drawn to the free outpost.
Caught between the warring French and British empires at the end of the 18th century, the Garifuna were exiled by the British. About half the Garifuna population, known as Black Caribs to the British, perished in the journey and some 3,000 ended up on the small, inhospitable island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras. Employed by the Spanish as soldiers and looking for better land, the Garifuna spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America, where they maintained a distinct identity with their own traditions and language (an Arawakan dialect). But they never forgot St. Vincent.
"We are a festive people," Palacio says, his voice carrying an unmistakable Caribbean lilt. "Although punta appears to be secular, in many cases the themes are serious, dealing with issues of poverty, death and nostalgia. The nostalgia is for one's own home village and, at a deeper level, for our ancestral homeland, St. Vincent. The British expelled our ancestors in the 1790s, and that remains a theme in the music of the Garifuna."
After surviving for centuries in mostly isolated coastal villages, the Garifuna collided with modernity. Palacio experienced that impact firsthand growing up in the 1970s, when he was exposed to a wide range of sounds. As an ambitious teenage musician, he founded a high school band that reflected Belize's political and cultural ties to the English-speaking Caribbean, and the proximity to Miami, Jamaica and Cuba.
"We were playing everything from reggae, pop and soul to funk, rock, soca and salsa," Palacio says. "I was 16 when I started to compose pop-oriented music, trying to sound like Lionel Richie, Gregory Isaacs or Bob Marley."
For Palacio, the rise in Garifuna consciousness came when he traveled to Nicaragua in the early 1980s as part of a literacy campaign. Assigned to a Garifuna village, he was shocked to discover a community on the brink of assimilation. "Nobody under the age of 50 was able to converse with me in Garifuna," Palacio says. "And for me, that foreshadowed the future of Garifuna culture in my country."
Transformed into a cultural activist, he returned to Belize and became a leading force among a group of young Garifuna artists and writers seeking to forge a contemporary identity. He first gained attention in Central America for punta rock, a pop style based on keyboards and drum machines. But encouraged by his Belizean producer, Ivan Duran, he sought out other leading Garifuna musicians and formed the collective, a band that brings together players of Palacio's generation with elders such as vocalist and composer Paul Nabor, a repository of Garifuna oral tradition.
While Palacio's music gained some attention in North America through the Putumayo label's compilations "Music From the Coffee Lands" and "Caribe! Caribe!," he's now meeting the world from a position of strength. The collective recently joined Fatboy Slim in the studio, collaborating on three tracks for the English beat artist's upcoming album. And Palacio is leading the collective on an international tour, introducing many audiences to Garifuna music.
"Culture is only vital if it's relevant to people, and Andy and Ivan have been very cognizant of finding the balance between the roots and the future, showing that the culture isn't stagnant," says Jacob Edgar, who first heard Palacio while working at Putumayo and was eager to sign him to his new label, Cumbancha. "With international recognition and success in the world music community, Andy is having a huge impact at home, sparking a local revival of Garifuna culture and tradition. The prime minister of Belize has a weekly radio show, and he's been doing a segment called 'Where's Andy?' having Andy call in to talk about where he's performing."
Rather than watching his people disappear, Palacio is using the global music marketplace as a tool in the fight for cultural survival, a struggle in which visibility and coolness might just be an antidote to oblivion. Transformed into a cultural activist, Andy Palacio returned to Belize and became a force among young Garifuna artists and writers seeking to forge a contemporary identity. 07/26/07
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