Driving from here to
there on a sunny day. The first day all
year to merit rolling the window down for.
A random mix on and up popped the Fania All Stars: “Ponte Duro”
featuring Roberto Roena on bongos. Live
at the Cheetah there on 53rd Street in 1971. I haven’t heard this in years. Man, this music was written by sun
lovers. Even more urgently people of the
sun who were in exile in the New York winter.
Puerto Rican history intertwined, overshadowed and then
effectively cut with that of Cuba. My
mind considered our president off in Havana, for the first time in seventy
years or so. Among all the other
implications of the sixty plus years of the embargo is the effect on
music. The jazz love affair with Cuban
rhythms, interrupted suddenly. And
surely this yielded an unintended boon for the Borinquen in New York. Salsa in New York was an opportunity for
Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to inherit the popularization and indeed the stewardship
and of the tradition.
Some deep reserve of gratitude fills me too that it is Obama
who is engaging frankly with the Cuban citizenry. Someone with the stature and diplomatic savvy
to navigate such a visit with grace.
Someone who not only intimates listening, but actually ingests and
considers new ideas. Someone who has put
the time into the complicated history and speaks with all the more gravity, as
a result.
I pull up at a light with my windows rolled down and salsa
blaring. Words like “cool” and “fool”
come to mind, grooving on the locked-down bass and considering myself behind
the wheel of a station wagon, wearing a bland, blue baseball jacket, the object
of eyeballs. Who cares? I know this solo ends right now, just as the
light turned green.
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