Afro-America Project - Venezuela comes to London

UPDATE: Tonight 10 May at 7:30 p.m. - Free Concert by Wilmer Sifontes & his Afro-American Project at the Venezuelan Cultural Centre in Bolivar Hall - 54-56 Grafton Way London, W1T 5DL

There was a time in the UK when it was impossible to find Venezuelan folk music, either live or on CD, and you had to rely on friends to burn off some tracks for you or travel to Venezuela to hear it for yourself somewhere warm and exotic like Choroni.

Thankfully, those days are over with the arrival on the scene of an exciting new band led by the Venezuelan master percussionist Wilmer Sifontes.

Called the "Afro-American Project", the group is made up of professional musicians and talented newcomers who are determined to bring the full-on experience of a Venezuelan folk fiesta to the people of the UK.

The clip shows Wilmer and his group playing a medley of Afro-Venezuelan songs, including calypsos from the southern gold-mining town of El Callao, and the kind of tambores from the coast that you can hear in Choroni on a typical Friday night.

If you want to know how true tambores is danced in these small fishing villages watch the girl with the curls swinging her hips at the end of the video.

Wilmer is already well-known on the Latin-London music scene as the percussionist for Conjunto Sabroso and the The Charlys Orchestra.

But now he is determined to spread the news about Venezuelan music to a wider audience and sees the Afro-American Project as a way to get more musicians interested in learning and performing Venezuela's rich legacy of African and Afro-Caribbean roots music.

For more information about the band or to book them for a Venezuelan, South American, or Caribbean themed event contact Wilmer Sifontes

How to dance Venezuelan salsa

A short video showing yours truly trying to dance salsa in a Venezuelan style. The majority of people who go to salsa dance classes in Europe and the USA learn to dance forwards and backwards using a basic Mambo step, but this won't help you in Venezuela where the dancing is on all four beats and the focus is on getting up close to your partner and doing turns in a very small space.

For the ladies this isn't such a problem, as they just follow the lead of the man they're dancing with, but guys will have to ditch the Mambo steps for something looser, going from four steps side to side, into the open step and initiating turns from there.

Salsa music is still massive in Venezuela, with a strong presence of salsa dura or salsa vieja, the classic 1970s tunes produced under the Fania label in New York by artists such as Willie Colon, Hector Lavoe, Ruben Blades and the Fania All Stars.

Homegrown Venezuelan salsa stars include Oscar D'Leon and Federico Betancourt and his Combo Latino.

The video was shot "camera secreta" style by Jorge Franca, a Venezuelan expat and pana mio.

Venezuelan fiesta in London- 13/03/2010

Vamos a rumbear! The Venezuelan community in England will be congregating at London's Abacus Bar on Saturday, 13 March, for the second big, sweaty fiesta of the year.

With DJ Hernan Atencio spinning the hottest tropical tunes, Ron Santa Teresa providing the rum cocktails and Arepa & Co serving up typical snacks like arepitas and tequeños, Venezuelan partygoers can look forward to a big night out.

The party is being organized by Venenin (Venezolanos en Inglaterra), a social group that caters for Venezuelan expatriates in the UK, and a big crowd is expected.

Doors open at 9 p.m. and hardcore revellers can dance their way thru to 4 a.m. Admission is £7 before 11 p.m. and £10 after.

Abacus Bar is located in the City of London at 24 Cornhill (EC3V 3ND), a short stroll from Bank tube station.

For more information go to http://www.venenin.co.uk or check out the Venenin page on Facebook.

Venezuelan fiesta in London- 30/01/2010

Vamos a rumbear! The Venezuelan community in England will be fleeing from the chilly weather and heading off to London's Abbey Bar on Saturday, 30 January, for the first big, sweaty fiesta of the year.

With DJ Hernan Atencio spinning the hottest tropical tunes, Ron Santa Teresa providing the rum cocktails and Arepa & Co serving up typical snacks like arepitas and tequeños, Venezuelan partygoers can look forward to a big night out.

The party is being organized by Venenin (Venezolanos en Inglaterra), a social group that caters for Venezuelan expatriates in the UK, and a big crowd is expected.

Doors open at 9 p.m. and hardcore revellers can dance their way thru to 4 a.m. Admission is £7 before 11 p.m. and £10 after.

Abbey Bar is located in the City of London at 30-33 Minories, a short stroll from Tower Hill or Aldgate tube stations.

For more information go to http://www.venenin.co.uk or check out the Venenin page on Facebook.

CD Review: Fiesta - Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra

"Fiesta" (Deutsche Grammophon) is one of those rare CDs that is so good you play it till it wears out - a classical music feast of Latin American compositions that ends with a rip-roaring rendition of Leonard Bernstein's "Mambo" from the musical "West Side Story".

The 190-strong Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (SBYOV), led by the charismatic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, has electrified the usually staid world of classical music in the last few years, with sold out performances in all the major concert halls of Europe.

An appearance at the 2007 Proms at the Albert Hall in London, when the band came on dressed in Venezuela's national colours of blue, yellow, red and white ended with a 10 minute standing ovation.

The concert was a revelation for classical music fans in the UK and a huge boost for Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, who recorded "Fiesta" as a way of capturing the experience of listening to the orchestra live and give their fans who couldn't get tickets a taste of what it was like to be at the Albert Hall concert.

Fiesta is exactly the right word to describe the eight upbeat works which appear on the album, which all celebrate the vibrant energy of Latin America, the vast geography of the region, the legacy of conquest and some of the many dance rhythms that bring people across the divided continents together.

The best-known track on the CD is undoubtedly "Mambo", US composer Leonard Bernstein's evocation of the Puerto Rican migrant experience in the tenements of mid-1950s Harlem. Classical music fans will also have heard works by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera and Mexico's Silvestre Revuelatas.

But the revelation for most listeners will be the works by the Venezuelans Inocente Carreno, Antonio Estevez, Aldemaro Romero and Evencio Castellanos.

Many of these compositions evoke the folk music of Venezuela's vast seasonally flooded plains, known as Los Llanos, where barefoot cowboys herd cattle past small lakes filled with caymans and piranas, and where white ibis share the water holes with capybaras.

Romero's "Fuga con Pajarillo", for example, interweaves a classical fugue with the galloping rhythms of the "pajarillo" folk dance, while Estevez's "Melodia en el Llano" is slower and more nostalgic.

Dudamel has said of the piece: "It's very impressionistic, influenced by Debussy, slow, with beautiful melodies inside different colours."

The CD comes out at a good time for the SBYOV, who have just begun their five-day residency at the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre in London. The excitement around the orchestra is close to fever pitch and tickets for all the concerts sold out immediately, even for the rehearsals and the shows by the brass section.

The first reviews of the Royal Festival Hall shows have been gushing:

"Never was an invading army more welcome," said Michael Church, writing in the Independent newspaper.

"Is this the best orchestra in the world? No. But the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra is classical music's hottest ticket, and with good reason," said Erica Jeal who gave the concert five stars in The Guardian.

"... there is a symbiosis here between conductor and ensemble that is quite electric," she concluded.

The youth orchestra's ability to affect social change in extremely deprived areas has not gone unnoticed either.

Gustavo Dudamel, speaking to the BBC, said the aims of the youth orchestra went beyond making magnificent music: "When you have around your life, drugs, crime, the best that you can give to a kid is an instrument. Then they can change their lives."

That philosophy looks set to spread. Projects in both developed and developing nations are currently underway to set up similar youth orchestras based on the incredibly succesful El Sistema model created by Venezuelan economist and philanthropist Jose Antonio Abreu in the 1970s.

Abreu realized that putting classical instruments into the hands of young children from the poorest shantytowns and teaching them to work together in a large orchestra gave them a sense of worth and the opportunity to change their lives.

Listen to "Fiesta" and you can hear that hope for a better future come alive.

Track Listing
Sensemaya (Silvestre Revueltas, Mexico)
Margariteña (Inocente Carreno, Venezuela)
Mediodia en el Llano (Antonio Estevez, Venezuela)
Danzon No. 2 (Arturo Marquez, Mexico)
Fuga con Pajarillo (Aldemaro Romero, Venezuela)
Estancia Suite (Alberto Ginastera, Argentina)
1. Los Trabajadores Agricolas
2. Danza del Trigo
3. Los Peones de Hacienda
4. Danza Final (Malambo)
Santa Cruz de Pacairigua (Evencio Castellanos, Venezuela)
Mambo Symphonic Dance from "West Side Story" (Leonard Bernstein, USA)

Video: Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra performing Mambo at the Albert Hall in 2007

Video: Gustavo Dudamel interviewed at the Proms in 2007

To download tracks from the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra's latest album "Fiesta" click here:

Tambores - San Juan Bautista Fiesta in Choroni

Every year on the 24 June coastal towns and villages celebrate the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, described locally as "the saint of the blacks", or the "party saint". This is clearly a syncretic fusion of African traditions brought over by slaves and Catholic iconography. In Choroni and Chuao the statues of Saint John the Baptist are taken down from their places in the church, washed and dressed, offered rum to drink and carried in procession. Devotees carry red flags, the colour associated with San Juan, which adds to the colourful spectacle. Every couple of years there is a "meeting of the saints", when fishing boats take the various statues out to sea to meet and then go in procession to one of the coastal villages for drums, drinks and revelling. A true fusion of the sacred and the profane, folk music does not get more Venezuelan than this. For the drummers, it is a great honour to take part in the exhausting all night, all day celebrations, which generally start on the 23 June and can last up to three days or more.

Musica Llanera: Ta' Pegao

This is a "joropo central", which has a slightly different structure than the better known "joropo llanero", the national music of Venezuela. The best thing about this video clip, taken from a local fiesta in San Sebastian de Los Reyes, an important cattle-ranching town in Aragua State, is it shows the music in context, at a dance, with people of all ages enjoying the festive atmosphere and joining in. The instruments provoking all this merriment are a pair of maracas played by the singer and a steel-stringed harp, known as an "arpa tuyera" or Tuy Valley harp. Give it a few minutes to warm up and check out the footstomping as the dancers start to get jiggy with it.

Tambor Urbano - Tambores

The Afro-Venezuelan drum music of the coast gets a high-energy pop twist in the capable hands of Hector Silvera and his group Tambor Urbano, who tour the country's beaches in this video. The band was formed in 1988 by Silvera and friends from Catia in Caracas who wanted to explore their Afro-Venezuelan roots. It is still one of the best party bands in Caracas and distills the essence of tambores traditions from several places along the coast into a fiesta-friendly cocktail of mad dance beats.

Tambores in Chuao

This is a good introduction to Venezuelan tambores music. The two guys on the ground are playing cumaco drums made from hollowed avocado tree trunks with deer or cowhide skins. Behind them are two other drummers playing on the trunks with hard sticks called "palillos" or "laures" that give the distinctive taca-ta-taca-ta sound that drives the dancing. The singer or cantor is accompanied by a chorus, as is typical with Afro-Caribbean call and response drum music. The male dancers try and get as close as they can to the muchachitas, while the ladies spin away to avoid them. Anybody, male or female, can cut in at any time and take over. Tambores is popular in all the old plantation towns along the coast and harks back to slave days. Chuao is a historic plantation where Venezuela's finest cocoa beans are produced. It is reached by sea from Choroni .

Read the article - Chuao: In Search of World's Finest Cocoa Beans
Read the article - Choroni: Tambores, guarapita and midnight dips

Choroni - Tambores on the malecon

The best party in Venezuela has to be Thursday or Friday night in Puerto Colombia, Choroni, where if you're lucky the Afro-Venezuelan drums will be playing, setting pulses racing on the seafront malecon. Try some of the local hooch - guarapita - a deadly cocktail of passionfruit and cane alcohol. Sweet.

Read my travel article - Choroni: Tambores, guarapita and midnight dips