“A sound full of country funk and spiritual joy” | Introducing Changüí, the music from Cuba’s sugarcane fields

Cultural synergies can work in wonderful ways. Just as the 25th anniversary of the release of the album Buena Vista Social Club was being celebrated – so ensuring much reminiscing about the mid-1990s when Cuban music was shaking the world – a new release from the Caribbean island appeared. Changüí: The Sound of Guantánamo (Petaluma Records) is stunning in every sense; the music gorgeous, and it is quite possibly the most beautifully packaged new music release of 2021, with three CDs and a hardback book in a box set.

I first heard of the release’s existence via Huey Morgan’s 6Music show. While celebrating Buena Vista’s anniversary, he played tunes from Changüí alongside the classic BVSC Havana recordings. Morgan then spoke with Gianluca Tramontana, a NYC-based Italian who is the producer of the set. Tramontana mentioned that he had spent considerable time in Cuba since 2017, recording local musicians and compiling almost four hours of Cuban music at its most earthy and vital from these sessions. He also emphasised that where BVSC was a gathering of veteran musicians and vocalists revisiting a lost golden age, Changüí documents a thriving music tradition rooted in the Guantánamo region.

Tramontana recording Las Flores del Changüí and a street party

For those of us not deeply engaged in Cuba’s regional music, the mention of Guantánamo likely brings to mind thoughts not of music but of the notorious US prison (located on a US naval base that has occupied Guantánamo Bay on the tip of eastern Cuba since 1903 – much to the frustration of Cuba’s revolutionary government). Moving past news headlines, the album’s accompanying book makes it clear that Guantánamo is a large region of east Cuba and the prison is an aberration. There is Guantánamo City (a small metropolis), but most of the area is rural with agriculture being the main employer. Changüí music is played across the region, in fields and on streets; it is party music for all generations, a true soundtrack to the region where festivities can last an entire weekend. Ensembles employ a small generator to blast their music at a volume sufficient for all to hear (and dance to – it is very much a dance music).

Changüí is music of the African diaspora, one that encourages participants to engage in something akin to a trance as they lose themselves in the rhythmic bliss offered. “Changüí is a rural, riff-based, mostly improvised dance music that came out of the plantations around the mid-1800s,” says Tramontana. “It was homemade music that gravitated around a riffing tres player who improvises a call-and-response. The whole community participated, [playing] on whatever was lying around that could make music, whether it was two bamboo stalks for a bass-y marímbula sound, a horse or cow skull whose teeth rattled, or scraping a machete with a sharpening file for a guaio.”

The term changüí likely comes from a mashing of two Congolese words that translate as ‘jump for joy.’ Having previously explored Mississippi’s blues traditions, Tramontana found that, on experiencing changüí parties in Guantánamo, he instinctively made connections with African-American vernacular music traditions. Changüí music can be made by a single tres player/vocalist – similar to a country blues musician – as well as larger ensembles including marímbula, congas, maracas, bongos, one or more tres players and several vocalists. The music has the same elemental Cuban rhythm that is found in son, but it is looser, more improvised, a sound full of country funk and spiritual joy. “The music is phenomenal,” says Tramontana. “Incredibly hip with syncopated rhythms that get your feet a-tapping along with catchy choruses that burrow deep inside and stay there.”

That changüí had not been widely recorded or publicised meant Tramontana felt both very excited about what he was experiencing – “there was something so fresh and alive in changüí” – and determined to share the genre with music lovers across the globe. “I’ve only ever wanted to be involved in music from the time I was eight. I’ve been a music journalist for a couple of decades and I’ve also written, produced and narrated pieces for NPR and the BBC. I also host the show Sitting with Gianluca, where I interview musicians on Radio Free Brooklyn and Resonance FM.”

“I’ve been travelling through Cuba since the ‘Período Especial’ in the early 90s.” This was the era when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Cuba found itself economically and politically isolated: the end of subsidised Soviet oil meant the country came to a virtual standstill. “And to this day,” he continues, “Cuba still holds the sense of romance and mystery that it did the first time I went. For such a tiny island it’s full of so many cultural and musical micro-climates. In fact, the first ever NPR piece I did was on the hand-crank organ tradition in the rural, dust-swept towns of the Granma Province. As a music journalist, I’m attracted to untold stories and traditional changüí – as opposed to the modern, urban changüí of Los Van Van or Elio and his son Elito Reve – is one of those stories.”

Armando ‘Yu’ Rey Leliebre at his home

While Cuban music has enjoyed a huge rebirth in worldwide popularity since Buena Vista Social Club’s breakthrough, changüí musicians have never been given the same prominence that the country’s son, mambo, bolero, Afro-jazz and rappers have all received. Yet the music gathered across the box set is full of appeal – melodic, lively, joyous, danceable – classic Cuba, really, if much more lo-fi and elemental. The sound of changüí is raw rather than lush, standing in contrast to the Buena Vista recordings.

“Changüí has been unfairly overlooked,” notes Tramontana, “largely because it’s a rural music in a nation where the urban music of nightclubs and casinos has become world famous. It’s hard to believe that changüí music is over 150 years old. Not only are most Cubaphiles not familiar with it, but most Cubans outside of Guantánamo City and the mountains around it are not familiar with it either. It’s a culture and tradition that has lived pretty much in the shadows since the mid-1800s but is far from being in mothballs. It’s a living, breathing and joyful tradition. Popó – one of the oldest and most traditional singers [who has just retired from working the sugarcane fields] – sings the way he heard his grandparents sing as a boy while performing a song about ecology that mentions the climate change summit in Copenhagen. This juxtaposition says it all.”

The eastern region of Cuba has long been identified as a hotbed of musical talent. Tramontana uses the US as a comparison, noting how pretty much all black urban music has its roots in New Orleans while, in Cuba, if you trace much of the modern sounds you hear back to the original source, you will (more often than not) land in the eastern region. Even the tres guitar – Cuba’s only national instrument – is assumed to come from Guantánamo.

Tramontana mentions that the recordings on the release are more like jams than professional recording sessions – “in the true communal good-vibe, party spirit of changüí.” In Guantánamo a changüí would kick off on Friday evening as labourers returned from working the fields and, often enough, the music continued (revellers and musicians coming and going) until Monday morning. Then it would be time to go back to the sugarcane plantations.

“What compelled me to document changüí,” says Tramontana, “is that it’s the way all music was like before it moved behind closed doors and became ‘art music.’ Traditional changüí has remained real-time ‘air music,’ played by whoever, with whatever, for whoever, in an open circle for anyone to join in and revel in. If you’re within earshot of a changüí and want to leap in – go right ahead. If you want to blow into a bottle, go for it. If you have a call, you’ll get a response. Sometimes my name pops out in a song – and that is a testament to the all-inclusiveness of the genre.”

Tramontana emphasises that he engaged with the changüí community as fully as possible. “I wasn’t a parachute journalist who ran around with a recorder and then disappeared into the mist. I lived in Guantánamo City on-and-off for over two years. Very quickly the changüí community became my friends: we ate, drank and danced together. The whole process was organic. Cubans are very generous and welcoming, and all musicians were well compensated.”

While the Changüí box set coincided with the 25th anniversary celebrations of Buena Vista Social Club, Tramontana doesn’t see himself as a musical revolutionary intent on overthrowing the old regime. “I love Buena Vista, it’s a super-important record. In fact, it was the album’s executive producer, Nick Gold, who told me I was not crazy for wanting to embark on this journey, even writing an introductory paragraph for the box set’s book.”

Read the review: Changüí – The Sound of Guantánamo

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today