Daymé Arocena, Cuba's Latin Jazz Revelation

September 26, 2018

Singer-songwriter Daymé Arocena, a revelation of Cuban Latin jazz, embraces this genre as a "philosophy of life" that got into her "veins" and allows her the "creative freedom" to fuse it with rhythms from the island to interpret them with a renewed perspective.

"Jazz invites dialogue, it is freedom of expression above all, it is like having a conversation with the person playing with you. It feels so rich to me, it is a solution of concepts beyond a genre and I don't feel bound to the idea that music has to be one way," Arocena said in an interview with Efe.

Daughter of the "orisha" Yemayá, deity of the sea in the pantheon of Afro-Cuban Santería, this interpreter is at 26 years old a woman full of nuances, expressive, spontaneous, owner of a powerful voice and contagious ivory smile, who sings barefoot and dressed in white a jazz crossed with the musical mestizaje of her native island.

And thus she identifies her vision of jazz, as "the mama, the beginning, a genre that within its jealousy when you decide to do it you sell your soul to the devil, you make a blood pact, you sing it" and from another perspective she interprets bolero, salsa, reggaeton, timba and guaguancó.

She says that jazz chose her to sing because "it was a matter of destiny" and remembers her first encounter with it when she was studying choral direction and the Big Band from the Amadeo Roldán conservatory invited her to perform it.

"That is where I faced for the first time the cold sheet music of two jazz songs and my way of interpreting that music was so innocent that it turned out to be unusual and they proposed that I stay as the main singer," she recalls.

After listening to references like Americans Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald, she was fascinated by the chameleonic Nina Simone, another queen of rhythm and blues and soul, whose "energy" she wanted to emulate and from then on jazz got into her "veins".

Arocena learned piano and other instruments but singing was her "natural vocation" coupled with composition which she focused on since adolescence, and with the dream of bringing her songs to a stage she formed a band made up of girls.

Now she composes more based on the good international reception of her music, which has generated requests for film, something she enjoys "very much" because she feels "super connected" with the visual arts.

For this young woman the song "is in the air, it arrives at any moment" and that is why she has composed so much on airplanes, especially on the subject that inspires her most, that of "romantic disappointments that all of us humans experience," she says laughing.

Facing "the challenge" of performing music created by Americans, she is convinced that her songs have opened doors for her because when singing her compositions the margin to question is "very narrow."

Five albums back her trajectory: "El profundo sonido de las piedras," marked by feminine presence; "Habana Cultura Sessions," the preamble to "Nueva Era" (2015); and a documentary about Cuban rumba converted into the album "Canciones de una toma" by Brownswood Recording, the English record label that signed her four years ago.

"Cubafonía" appears in 2017 and is, she affirms, "the child" that she has "planned" the most and it still gives her "joy" like that of the song "Mambo Na'Má," recently selected by the American National Public Radio as one of the 200 best songs of the 21st century written by women.

Arocena appears in place 167 alongside great international stars like Beyoncé, Adele, Concha Buika and Amy Winehouse.

These days, the singer is recording in Havana her next album, "more conceptual" and "jazzistically dark," to illustrate that Cuban folk music is her "backbone" and to pay homage to Cuban musicians like Arsenio Rodríguez, Emiliano Salvador and singer La Lupe who are her "school."

Arocena affirms that her "greatest" religion is music and believes that expressing her beliefs "freely" through it makes her work "spicier and more flavorful."

The singer aspires to create a space in Cuba where she can present the music bands she has discovered in countries like Australia and Turkey.

In the end, she explains the enigma of going barefoot on stage as an "act of rebellion" with which she left behind "stigmas and codes" of beauty that have nothing to do with her to feel "comfortable" because with heels "I couldn't concentrate."

Daymé Arocena believes that the world is waiting for "more sincere people, who love themselves as they are, more presidents who cry in public over a song" and people who "are as they are and their success they achieve by being who they are."