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Band is just plena fun
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Halifax Herald, Band is just plena fun >>
Can you imagine Nova Scotian culture without the presence of Celtic or Acadian music? It's hard to believe, but in Puerto Rico, a keystone of its traditional music fabric was allowed to vanish from the public eye.
Plena music is the sound of the fields, a call-and-response style of worksong with a rhythm that's largely Latin, but with other Caribbean flavours mixed in as well. One of the champions of this sound is San Juan septet Plena Libre, a three-time Grammy Award nominee appearing at the Atlantic Jazz Festival on Friday, in the festival tent at 8 p.m. with Alma Latina.
"After 50 years, Plena Libre was the first plena band to have a hit record in Puerto Rico," says band founder and bassist Gary Nunez. "Somehow it faded away from the mass media - radio, newspapers, television -even though it stayed part of the Puerto Rican personality as a whole.
"It's the music that we used to celebrate in family gatherings, in picket lines, by students at the beach . . . But when we started, there was no commercial market for plena bands, so we brought a new style, a new repertoire for the rhythm, and it worked. And now we can carry out the second part of our mission, which is to share the plena rhythm of Puerto Rico with the rest of the world."
Using the punteador hand drums, vibrant horn parts and joyous vocals, Plena Libre's music moves audiences. but the words based on local history and folklore are just as important.
"Not only does it serve as entertainment and to dance to, and a motive to have joy and happiness, it also pertains to all our traditions as a nation and a people."
07/15/04
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