Tambora: Baile cantado en Colombia (review)

During the last fifteen years, important social and political changes have deeply transformed the position of Afro-Colombian cultural traditions within the Colombian milieu. The new Constitution Charter of 1991 declared Colombia a multicultural and pluriethnic nation, granting (at least in theory) particular protection and special rights to the country's ethnic minorities. In this context, African-rooted musical traditions have awakened the interest of scholars, activists, and musicians alike. Since the beginning of the new century, audiences in the country's largest cities have begun to listen to previously unknown types of African-derived folk music original from both the Caribbean and the Pacific coasts. The juncture has brought to light research like Guillermo Carbó's work on the tambora tradition from the upper Magdalena River, a region nearby the Caribbean coast. This record includes several of Carbó's field recordings recorded in situ between 1990 and 1996 during the field research for his dissertation—recently published in France (Carbó 2003) and unfortunately still unavailable in Colombia. Interestingly enough, Carbó's liner notes on the recording make no reference to the issue of racial politics, neither as an important part of the musical tradition itself nor as the backdrop for this recording's commercial release. Given the emphasis placed on mestizaje (racial mixture) and blackness by other authors who have also analyzed musical traditions from the Colombian Caribbean coast, namely George List (1983) and especially Peter Wade, with his recent book on música tropical's racial politics (2000), Carbó's disregard of race seems rather striking. Not moving too much away from quite outdated romantic discourses of folklorists like Guillermo Abadía Morales (1983) about mestizaje as a non-conflictive tri-ethnic national cultural heritage, Carbó fails to examine in depth an important side of the tambora's social context.

Despite shortcomings in the tradition's sociopolitical contextualization, Carbó gives a very detailed description of the different aspects that come together in tambora, a polysemous label denoting the event, the music, the dance, the ensemble, the rhythmic pattern, and one of the percussion instruments. The medium of the sound recording, of course, can only give us a glimpse of the aural aspect of this multifaceted event, and indeed this compact disc does it remarkably well. The quality of the sound is great, most of the time achieving a good balance between the percussion ensemble and the call-and-response exchange between the leader and the singing group. Being a field recording, I imagine such a good outcome might entail some obtrusiveness into the performance due to the presence of microphones and wires, since some of the music takes place on a parade through the streets. Whatever the case, we are not informed in the notes of the particular circumstances surrounding the recording process, although the dates, places, and performers are appropriately identified at the end of the text. This last aspect brings me back again to the problem I mentioned before, the lack of a complete and adequate contextualization, which becomes evident once more when looking at the illustrations accompanying the recording. Because of the emphasis Carbó puts on tambora's multilayered nature as a festivity that includes prominently song and dance (note the term in the subtitle: baile cantado), I was expecting to see actual photographs of the celebrations depicting dancing and merriment in the streets of the towns. However, the record cover displays a beautiful though highly stereotyped drawing. The colorful scene portrays a dancing couple and the musicians in the forefront, all dressed in the traditional costeño outfit, while spectators stay very orderly in the background (there is another peculiar detail: the imaginary scene takes place at the colonial plaza of Mompox, undoubtedly the region's most important town, but not one of the smaller and poorer locations where the recordings...