COLOMBIA IN ALL ITS COLOURS
▶ Totó La Momposina talks to Saeed Saeed about an extraordinary career that took her from the hills of her homeland to being sampled by Jay-Z and tonight’s performance at Louvre Abu Dhabi
Totó La Momposina wants to go outside. We are seated in the lobby of a Abu Dhabi hotel for our interview when she abruptly stands up and strides to the outdoor patio. Once the gentle sunrise hits her face she breaks out into a wide nostalgic grin. “It reminds me of Colombia,” she says. “The weather is really beautiful and it makes me think of home. This is a good feeling to have before the show. It is like a premonition.”
For the past five decades, La Momposina has been taking a piece of Colombia with her on tours of Australia, Europe, North and South America.
It is a fascinating journey which took the 77-year-old from the villages of Colombia to the bright lights of New York City and, tonight, Louvre Abu Dhabi, where she will perform a career retrospective of the various folk songs and dances of her homeland.
“I don’t really approach the shows differently,” she says. “And that’s because everything about the music is very interconnected. All I do is perform the best that I can and I hope the people will enjoy it.”
Chances are they will as La Momposina’s show is more than a mere cultural showcase. Performed with her eight-piece band, the material stems from intensive deep research into her homeland’s indigenous culture, with its mix of African, Caribbean and native Indian influences. Born on the island of Mompos in Colombia’s mountainous Bolivar region, her father was a shoemaker by day and an in-demand percussionist at night; while her mother was an accomplished singer and dancer. Determined to instill pride in the family’s African-indigenous ancestry, jam nights with local musicians were hosted every weekend which often ended at dawn.
The approach worked; from her teenage years La Momposina dedicated herself to reviving Colombia’s indigenous songs and dances after decades of neglect.
“A lot of it has to do with colonisation,” she says. “And then there were the governments in Colombia who never acknowledged them as actual dances. It was viewed like something from the past and not relevant today.”
La Momposina’s career started in an almost year-long trek across the mountains and coastal villages of Colombia in the early 1970’s, as part of a study group researching the way of life of indigenous communities.
It was an odd crew, she recalls, with a laugh. “There was a researcher, a photographer, a filmmaker, some students and then there was me, this dancer.”
But La Momposina’s appearance served a purpose; she would go to each village and learn their songs and dances. In return, she would teach the cultural traditions of the previous area she had visited. But when asked to explain the key characteristics of some of the unique songs and dance of Colombian villages, La Momposina is hesitant.
“It’s not really as simple, in that you [can] explain it in words. You can tell the difference in the sounds and sight,” she says. “For example, some of the drum rhythms change from village to village, which makes people dance in a different way, but still they are linked together. There is no point where you say, yes, this is clearly African influence there. It is like many of our faces. I mean, if you look at mine you will see African, Indian and even Chinese parts. It all comes together.”
Taking all that knowledge, coupled with La Momposina’s skill in performing bailes cantados
– a form of music made of heavy drum patterns, palm claps, repetitive choruses and every day lyrics – she took her performance abroad. The first stop was none other than the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
“This was the late seventies and we had a residency at Radio City [Music] Hall,” La Momposina recalls, with excitement.
“Colombia’s coffee federation sponsored our show as a way to show our culture, and we would play four shows a day over a couple of months. It was really interesting because people never really saw anything like what we did before. They really enjoyed it and it was the same for us.” With the Colombian government still not fully acknowledging the cultural practices of its indigenous communities during that period, it was up to one of its biggest cultural exports to showcase it on the world stage. La Momposina remembers receiving a phone call from author Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s management with an invite to accompany him to Stockholm to receive the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“He was a very deep thinker,” she says. “Gabriel was humble and easy-going. What he wrote in his books, if you notice, is that he often writes about the daily lives in the villages. That’s why, when he wanted that prize, he wanted to show people the things he was writing about.”
La Momposina’s increasingly acclaimed international tours dovetailed nicely with the emergence of world music as a bona fide music genre. In 1991, she played countries such as the UK, Japan, Germany, Spain and Finland with the Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance) Festival. After the trek she recorded her debut international album La Candela Viva (The Living Candle) at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios in the UK.
The association didn’t hurt and the 1993 album reached high in the world music charts. It still remains a distillation of La Momposina’s work. El Pescador (The Fisherman), a fisherman’s tune, is propelled by incessant percussion and passionate vocals. La Sombra Negra (Black Shadow), which pays tribute to the music brought over to the Colombian villages by black Cubans, is a heaving mass of rhythm, while La Acabación (The Finishing) is a funeral song with a swaying rhythm used by villagers from San Basilio de Palenque to accompany the dead to the grave.
With the album receiving a re-release, under the title of Tambolero, La Momposina is excited that a younger generation is discovering her work, among which are a legion of DJs and hip-hop producers who have laced some of the heady rhythms into their own work.
The latest artist dabbling with La Momposino’s work is none other than Jay-Z. The American hip-hop titan sampled La Momposina’s song La Verdolaga (Purslane) for Blue’s Freestyle/We Family, a bonus track on this year’s acclaimed album 4:44.
“I haven’t heard it,” says La Momposino, with a laugh. “But I will tell you something. I had this dream once where I am in a big club and I was dancing in one of the cages before I slide down this pole and into the dance floor. Well, I will not be doing that now, but maybe someone else will. The dream could have been a premonition.”
I had this dream once where I am in a big club and I was dancing in one of the cages before I slide down this pole and into the dance floor
Toto La Momposina will perform at Louvre Abu Dhabi at 9pm today. Tickets, at Dh200, are available from www.louvreabudhabi.ae