Simon Broughton gets to grips with Colombia's marimba music: “absolutely exhilarating and liberating for the soul”

Playa del Morro is the beauty spot of Tumaco: a natural stone arch graces the beach and the Pacific brushes beneath it. It’s in this striking landscape that a few members of Bejuco, one of the best groups in town, appear with a marimba and various drums, plus a couple of dancers. It’s an introduction to the building blocks of the music of the south Pacific coast of Colombia – the guasá shakers, the upright cununo drums, the barrel-shaped bombo drums and the xylophone-like marimba. It’s all these ingredients that contribute to the sounds and textures of traditional Afro-Colombian music, currulao, which is the rhythmic lifeblood of the south Pacific region.

Simon Broughton (right) plays a marimba duet (photo: Carlos Valencia)

Tumaco gets its name from an indigenous tribe – now gone – and the population is 89% Afro-Colombian. It’s one of the more economically-deprived areas of the country and was, until three years ago, the centre for coca growing and the drug crime that accompanies it. But things are changing, and music is one of the dynamic forces behind that.

I’ve come to do a four-day marimba workshop organised by Marimbea, an organisation supporting people in Tumaco and spreading the word about Pacific Coast music to the wider world. “There are three elements involved,” explains Adrian Sabogal, the director of Marimbea. “There’s [Marimbea] in the middle, there are the people from outside who want to learn and then [there are] the local communities. We make sure we can pay for the logistics — musicians, cooks, accommodation and all the people involved.”

The process begins hands-on at the Tumac Foundation – not playing the music, but instead participants are shown how to construct an instrument. In the centre of town there’s a workshop where they make marimbas and drums downstairs, and a hot upstairs room where they teach.

Our task is to make a guasá (pronounced ‘wassa’), the shaker that is ever-present in the music and is the easiest instrument to play – and make. First you block one end of a bamboo-like tube with a wooden stopper and fix it with glue. Then you take a handful of peppercorn-like achira (canna edulis) seeds. You put in enough to give a satisfying shaking sound and then seal the other end. Then you hammer wooden spikes into the tube, so that there’s a lattice of sticks inside, against which the seeds strike.

I give my guasá a few shakes and am pleased with the sound. Not only is it the foundation of the music, but it is also dead easy to play. When the other instruments get a bit too much, you can relax for a few minutes with the guasá.

Tumaco is called ‘The Pearl of the Pacific,’ but it’s hard to understand why. Away from the beach and a massive military base, the town of 220,000 people is a confusion of new and old, crumbling buildings; many of them are fishermen’s houses built on stilts positioned over the Rosario river before it disgorges into the sea. Thankfully, the residential workshop is in a more tranquil location – a speedy boat ride away towards the sea, winding down a river through the mangrove swamps and finally a short walk through the mangroves. These mangroves aren’t very appealing: lots of silty mud teaming with little crabs and burrowing shellfish and an impenetrable barrier of intertwined roots and branches. But we should learn to love the mangroves because they are super-efficient at absorbing carbon and mitigating climate change. I even see a rare hummingbird, a particular variety that likes mangroves, hovering among the trees.

Accommodation is at the Hotel Maria del Mar, which is also an association that engages local people, with a friendly restaurant terrace and wooden beachside accommodation. Simple, but clean. Behind it is the mangrove, in front the beach and the Pacific Ocean. There are only a few hours of electricity a day, meaning that there is precious little internet and plenty of time to concentrate on music, food and the environment. As well as the marimba music, the other almost constant sound is the rain drumming on the roof or splashing through the palms. It probably rains 70% of the time during our visit, though mainly at night. Like the bubbling of the marimba, it is part of the region’s soundscape.

The dining terrace is also the workshop space. Sabogal gives us Spanish phrases to help us learn the rhythms: ‘venda la vuelta’ (come and turn around) struck with the hands on the cununo; ‘papa con yuca’ (potato with yuca – quite a lot of them involve food) played with sticks on the bombo; and ‘patacón, patacón, yo quiero mi patacón’ (plantain, I want my plantain). Plantain is served with virtually every meal here.

The master of ceremonies is Juan Carlos Mindinero Satizabal, known as Cankita, the musical director of the group Bejuco. He’s great at demonstrating, spotting when someone needs help and adjusting their rhythms as required. The music is built up in layers with repeated interlocking rhythms and then the marimba melodies on top. We rotate from instrument to instrument, with a few minutes to relax with some simple shaking on the guasá in between. The marimba is played by two players, one playing a bordon (regular repeated pattern) at the lower end and the other a requinta (the main melody) at the top end, like the tide rising and falling over the keys. At this stage it’s only the bordon that we gringos manage. We also practice some call-and-response singing.

During this first workshop we only learn the basic patterns of two pieces, but it’s a thrill to be playing as part of a group, responding to what everybody else is doing. It’s clear that this is community music; everybody plays their role and fits in with the others. It’s about collaboration and bringing the different sounds and rhythms together into a coherent whole.

Cankita, a native of Tumaco, learned music from his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a bombo player and his grandmother a traditional singer. He describes the customary process of learning music. It begins with dancing for three or four years and playing the cununo, which “has a dialogue with the zapateo rhythm of the dancer’s feet, which matches the cununo. When you’re about 16 you can progress to the bombo – it demands a lot of responsibility – and then finally the marimba,” he says.

Cankita started playing when he was seven years old. He’s now 33, and feels he only started to really understand the music after about 20 years. That’s when the master players in the community started to invite him to join them and bless him into the confraternity by making a cross on his forehead with saliva to protect him from the envy of others.

“We are careful not to tell them how to teach their music. They have been doing it for hundreds of years,” Sabogal explains. “Our method is meant for teaching people who only have a few hours to learn.”

Sabogal (with roots in Cali and Bogotá) was drawn to the music after hearing the marimba played in the capital. At the Festival de Música del Pacífico Petronio Álvarez, the biggest showcase of Afro-Colombian music, he met musicians who invited him to Guapi, one of the centres of marimba music. “They were humble and poor, but so sharing and welcoming. It was a lesson for me. They had too little, but they shared too much. That was my first lesson before the music.”

Now he has several businesses interested in taking Marimbea workshops as a tool for corporate teambuilding and cooperation. Edgar Helou, general manager of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Colombia, has participated in one of these seminars and says, “in a work team, we all have different roles, and the impact is achieved with the small contributions of everyone. Companies usually evaluate individuals on their performance, but I have conveyed the idea of evaluating the team without the need to evaluate the person as such.”

In a subsequent workshop we are dancing rather than playing. The los negritos dance that we are doing is strangely like a Scottish country dance performed in two rows. We loop back and dance occasionally with the partner facing us. Our teacher, Mairoby, is somebody who has been drawn away from gang culture and into a musical revival. He’s now a member of the Bejuco band, as well as an instructor in these workshops. Cankita explains that Mairoby used to be a campanero (a lookout) for one of the local gangs. “In Tumaco the gangs were a status thing – somewhere to belong, to be seen, have a weapon and status. But music can compete with that. It also brings status and power from being in a musical group, travelling and on TV.”

In my final workshop I receive a ‘masterclass’ on the marimba, which is generally called chonta, a reference to the wood from which it’s made. The chonta (bactris gasipaes) is a scary palm, quite common in these parts, with sharp spikes protruding from the trunk. “All the material comes from the jungle,” says one of the makers at the Tumac Foundation. “You cut the wood when the moon is waning, so it’s drier. We call the marimba ‘the piano of the jungle’.” There are two varieties, the western marimba, tuned like the white keys of a piano [which is what they use in the workshops] and the natural marimba, the tuning of which varies from place to place. Far more interesting.

The lower bordon parts are relatively easy on the marimba, particularly if you can play the piano. And they’re satisfying, because you can feel you are the funky substructure, the rhythmic and sonic bass to the more intricate melodies going on above. It gets trickier when you move on to the requinta, the upper melody. It’s played in octaves and while one hand is easy to manage, both is really difficult if you have to watch where you’re playing. You need time to fix the distance between hands into the muscle memory. But the experience of doing this, and being part of a group like this, is absolutely exhilarating and liberating for the soul.

Juan Carlos Mindinero Satizabal brings the traditional music of the Pacific to London this month, with a live performance at the Hootananny Brixton (Nov 19) and workshops at SOAS (Nov 19-20)

For more information visit en.marimbea.com

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