Black Rhythms of Peru, Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific

by Heidi Carolyn Feldman,
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 2006
328 pp., illus. b/w. Trade, $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-8195-6814-4.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@gmail.com



In the shadow of the planes on a sun-baked pavement café in Montpellier, France, two young men are making music. One is singing and playing a straight guitar. The other is sitting on some kind of wooden box, about as big as a medium-sized suitcase. He is the rhythm section of the band. Slapping the box at different spots and with his hand in varying positions, he manages to create a wide variety of sounds, much like a tabla player in Indian druphad would. After the performance, quietly dropping half a Euro in his hat, I ask him where and why he learned to play the instrument. “I’m from Peru,“ he proudly says, “and I taught myself to play the cajón by listening to records.”

This anecdote nicely illustrates one of the main points of Heidi Carolyn Feldman’s book ‘Black Rhythms of Peru’: what was once a marginal musical practice from an almost forgotten and all but invisible minority in Peru evolved into a somewhat fashionable element of so-called ‘world music’ and is continuously reinvented by Peruvians in the diaspora. Enchanted by Afro-Peruvian singers (at concerts in Los Angeles in the USA), Heidi Feldman undertook a quest for the origins of this energetic music. It took her from Peru’s early 20th century and the situation of its black population to David Byrne’s early 21st century sponsorship of Susana Baca.

The narrative steers quietly between personal memoir, historical description and ethnographic analysis. Feldman shows how the music of the isolated black communities on the Pacific coast was “discovered” and recuperated in the fifties by white criollo folklorist José Durand. His largely folkloristic stagings where transformed by black theatre and dance director Victoria Santa Cruz. Trying to keep the tradition alive, she reinvented some of the rhythms and dances, while her brother Nicomedes Santo Cruz added new poems to the repertoire – some in an invented language that later generations deemed to be derived from ancient African dialects. In the early years of the Peruvian military ‘revolution’ (1968-1980), there was wide support for local folklore, but as usual this stifled the living tradition rather than giving it a boost. Officially supported groups canonized a selected number of dances and toured internationally. On the other hand, even if the music itself didn’t undergo substantial changes, it started to play an important role in the revalorization of Black Culture. From the late 1970s till today, new generations of Afro-Peruvians have kept the tradition alive, going back, time and again, to the villages where the locals are presumed still to have memories of the original songs and dances. Ironically, a lot of these ‘original sources’ have been widely influenced by what has been presented as Black Peruvian music by mass media.

Heidi Feldman has succeeded in writing a lively history of a little known part of our world’s musical heritage. Moreover, she offers interesting reflections on questions about ethnic identity, the role of culture (music and dance) in the formation of that identity, the relationship between folklore and tradition, and the dangers and benefits of the integration of a tradition in the world music business. Seeping through at every single page, her enthusiasm for the cajón and the alcatraz (a somewhat salubrious dance) and the love for the people who made Black Peruvian music to what it is today make this book a very good read indeed.