New Music: Andy Palacio & the Garifuna Collective: "Wátina" [Stream, Video]
Pop quiz: How many languages are spoken south of the U.S. border? If you just said Spanish, you got less than one percent. The Garifuna people of Central America speak one of the hundreds of unique and endangered languages of the Western hemisphere, and Garifuna musician Andy Palacio has designs on keeping his people's tongue in circulation. Globalization and the fact that they're scattered up and down the coasts of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua make that difficult these days, but there's a growing core of musicians who are trying to bring their local rhythms and language out of obscurity and onto the world stage. Palacio has played with fusions of the punta rhythm with various pan-Caribbean styles in the past, and here he brings the distinctive hand drumming and fluid guitar style (here demonstrated by Eduardo "Guayo" Cedeño) of his people into sonic harmony with modern r&b, with potent traces of African and Cuban music. The video is pretty self-explanatory: Scenes of life in a Garifuna town.