Daymé Arocena, the strong blocked heartbeats of Cuban jazz

September 9, 2019

Daymé Arocena can feel her heartbeat strongly. With her new album, "Sonocardiogram", the Cuban singer opens a crack in the world to show what a new generation of jazz full of talent but little visibility is doing on the island.

The production of 12 tracks _ an intro, an interlude and 10 songs _ was released on Friday by the British label Brownswood Recordings, created by the French-born presenter and DJ Gilles Peterson. It is her fourth album after "Nueva Era", (2015), One Takes (2016) and "Cubafonía" (2017), and like all of her work it has influences from Afro-Cuban music.

"It's the most sincere album I've made so far", said Arocena, 27 years old, in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday in Havana.

"It's based on personal experiences, on love and heartbreak, on life itself, on the spirituality of the attitudes one takes", added the singer-songwriter, who is preparing for a tour that will begin in Colombia and will take her through the end of the year to New York, London and Paris, among other cities.

Surrounded by images of Afro-Cuban saints in her parents' home Dagoberto and Angela Mercedes _ whose combined names form hers _, with her round face and a wide smile of very white teeth, the simplicity of jeans and a lace blouse and her hair braided in "grelos", she looks more like any young woman in Cuba than the great diva that critics in the United States talk about, where she has even been compared to Celia Cruz and Aretha Franklin for the feeling of her deep and mature voice.

"Cubans have a lot to express, what they don't have is the platform to do it, the industry to produce it; they're full of musically rich ideas. We are a mixture of many things and our music reflects that", she commented.

"Every time I go to concerts by colleagues (in Cuba) I realize how much there is to showcase here and to study, because there are talented people who can do the same or better than what you do", explained Arocena, who now lives between Havana, her hometown, and Toronto, Canada. "I'm very proud of my musical generation, but I'm hurt that there isn't enough visibility for them".

The lack of complete internet access in the country, vital for creators today; the nonexistence of a record industry to channel them and the difficulties that artists encounter in obtaining visas when traveling from Cuba, which is sanctioned by the United States and consularly limited by many nations, are some of the obstacles that Arocena mentioned and that her fellow artists endure.

Born in 1992 in the midst of a profound crisis on the island, Arocena studied at an art school and graduated as a choir director before launching into her own jazz projects, initially with a women's group and eventually as a soloist, in a rising career that has taken her around the world.

Precisely this free institutional musical training that attracts children from public elementary schools _ if they are found to have qualities they are directed to specialized training regardless of their social background _ is one of the factors that the artist attributes to the enormous wealth of musicians on the island and their quality.

"Cuban musicians have a lot of creativity, an infinite imagination, from the danzón, from the changüí, from the bolero, from rumba, but when we think about our predecessors there was a lot of talent, but there was no formal training", reflected the woman who usually takes the stage wearing beautiful turbans. "In my generation musicians are graduates of artistic education, so beyond creativity, they have technique. Everything that passes through their mind they can achieve: if I want my fingers to move like this or to do this scale... I can!".

For Arocena, moreover, love of music runs through her veins. Although there were no professional musicians in her family, her childhood memories place her in her grandmother's house.

"The door was always open, people sang and danced. The furniture worn out from so much rumba on top of it and it was made with a spoon, a bucket or whatever", she recalled laughing. "All family pain was healed with music".

To face these times when records lost their traditional form of commercialization and when people usually buy one song or another online, Arocena sought for "Sonocardiogram" a different structure, more conceptual, where even some songs "stick" to others.

Among them is a trilogy to the deities of the Yoruba pantheon Oyá, Oshún and Yemaya, which can be heard for some weeks as a preview on YouTube, and another dedicated to the "present dead".

"You must work on a concept. People have to feel that if they didn't listen to the entire album they didn't understand anything", she pointed out.

Furthermore, the album was recorded in Havana in an unconventional space: a former painting workshop turned into a rehearsal and concert venue for the López-Nussa family (whose members include established musicians such as jazz pianist Harold López-Nussa) in order to incorporate the ambient sounds of the city that seeped in.

"We wanted to make an album that had the energy of a live concert, when there are people in front of you, who turn to the side, converse, tell you something", said Arocena.