London-Havana: Crisis and Healing in Urban Music.
Report by Pablo Herrera and Geoff Baker
UK’s experience in the development of popular music will be of great aid to Cuba’s understanding and entrance to the realm of urban Latin American music. The idea behind our project is to provide musicians and music producers from London and Havana with a space where they can share their experience (critical and successful moments) in urban music; we hope to provide them with a space where they can observe and devise of a stronger sense of agency on the course/roll of urban music in Cuban popular culture.
We chose DJ Pogo for his prestige as a UK Hip Hop artist and as for his profound skills as an educator with many successful workshops in Africa and Asia under sponsorship of The British Council. The Cuban musicians we chose are all young leading artists in their own right:
Thommy Garcia – Trumpet- AfroCuban All-Stars
Wilsandor Orta – Trombone – Pedrito Calvo y La Justicia
Eduardo Veitia (Hijo) – Percussion - Obbara
Osmar Salazar – Bass - Diakara
Abel Calderon- Keyboards – Jorge Reyes Quartet
Edrey Riveri – Vocals - Ogguere
Aldo Rodriguez – Vocals - Aldeanos
Alfredo Hernandez - Vocals – Ogguere
These Cuban musicians provided DJ Pogo with a unique experience of popular Cuban music both in the flavour of their sound and their heated jam sessions.
The project consisted of three principal elements: educational workshops; a studio-based creative laboratory; and a final live performance. The workshops took place under the umbrella of the 3rd Cuban Hip Hop Symposium and entailed a daily morning session of 2-3 hours focusing on enhancing the skills of local DJs and music producers. The performance was included in one of the evening concerts of the symposium and thereby reached an audience numbering around 500. The afternoon sessions brought DJ Pogo together with producer Pablo Herrera and the group of leading young Cuban musicians for 4 hours each day in Abdala Studios.
The workshops seemed to be an unqualified success. Participants were brought into contact with high-level DJ and production skills, as well as the latest technological resources, and for most (if not all) this was a unique experience. DJ Pogo succeeded in both demonstrating the highest reaches of his art and introducing the participants to its most elementary components, and he left the attendees with a desire to find out more: as one put it, the workshops were like ‘a snack which leaves you starving for more.’ There was a clear sense that DJ Pogo inspired a marked shift in the participants’ understanding of DJing and production and motivated them to work at their skills after his departure. A key point in the exchange was that Pogo also inspired a sense of self-sufficiency necessary to undertake any professional task within in urban music. His specific observation on how important was to know and devise means for promotion provoked in the participants greater awareness of a wholesome approach to urban culture. The participants understood that if they don’t know how to promote themselves and are only concerned with making music they will need to take time out from work and strategise with someone else on how to be heard beyond their bedrooms. This particular argument allowed them to see the importance of seeking help within and outside their community and how to define accurate rolls for those who can do something other than being the artists.
If we had been able to provide all team members with enough resources to learn and practice the skills Pogo shared with them the workshop would have worked better. They had the opportunity to work collaboratively and use the sampler/ drum machine AKAI MPC 2000, Apple’s software Logic Pro Audio and Technics 1210 turntables to make a few pieces of music, but that was not enough not sufficient. The practical workshops should have had more time to really assess the learning process and its outcomes. However, Pogo achieved presenting the participants with his views on the general practice and philosophy behind music making.
The studio sessions also produced some excellent results, though this part of the project was the most complex and thus both process and outputs require further analysis. This will be facilitated by the large amount of film footage which will serve as a document of the creative process. There were also two academic observers - Geoff Baker and Yey Diaz deVillalvilla present in the studio, who analyzed the musical developments as they occurred. The sessions were led by Pablo Herrera and DJ Pogo, but input from the musicians was encouraged at all times. Many of the musical ideas that emerged during the week came out of unstructured and even unplanned jam sessions. The first session was devoted to the musicians getting to know each other both socially and musically; the second and third sessions saw the crystallization of the musical goals for the week; and the fourth and fifth sessions were used to put two songs together in performable form.
The atmosphere in the studio sessions was very positive and a large quantity of exciting material was generated in a short space of time. A number of useful lessons can be learnt from observing the process. For example, there is a need to define more precisely the overall goal of the project: is the aim to create experimental music or music with wide popular appeal? It seemed that the studio sessions produced a lot of good music-making but a more limited amount of creativity. This derived largely from the fact that the participants fell almost immediately into long-established ways of working, which produced somewhat predictable working relationships and musical results. The Cuban musicians knew each other’s styles well and fell quickly into step with each other, which made for the rapid generation of a large quantity of coherent and appealing ideas, but within quite well-defined stylistic boundaries. DJ Pogo saw his role primarily as taking the musical materials produced in the studio and taking them away and working on them on his own, which made him something of an outsider in the creative process in the studio. The transferability of creative ideas thus worked most effectively between people who had worked together previously or who played similar styles of music
There are various possible ways to address these issues. One would be to include musicians from a more diverse range of musical backgrounds, and thus disrupt habitual processes of music-making. This would also enhance the exploration of creativity as problem solving, one of the key research questions of the project. To take a Cuban example, rather than talking about the divisions in urban popular music (above all, between reggaetón and hip hop) in theoretical events such as the Hip Hop Symposium where one side is almost invariably absent, bringing the warring factions together in the studio to make music would oblige participants to think outside the box and might thereby lead to new creative ideas through conflict and conciliation. This could also involve selecting musicians from different generations, forcing participants to address inter-generational issues and diverse artistic philosophies within their own cultural spheres. Another route would be to give a more prominent role to the directors of the project, who might impose their own experimental ideas more explicitly on the musicians and thus bring their research to bear on the creative process, rather than simply observing it. It would seem to be worth exploring different working methodologies and differing amounts of directorial control in any future project.
The live performance on the last night of the project was the only problematic element of the project. While it served as a focus for the creative process and brought the results to a sizeable audience, the performance conditions and organizational problems within the Hip Hop Symposium led to a performance that fell short of the standards achieved in the studio. Any future project would have to take careful account of the degree of planning and resources required to put on a convincing live concert in Havana. There is also a question-mark over whether working towards a final performance encourages the measurement of creativity according to the end result rather than the process that led to it.
The project was a success in terms of networking, as it brought DJ Pogo together with key figures in the Cuban hip hop scene along with some of the most talented young musicians in Havana. DJ Pogo collected a large number of CDs by local artists and made it clear that he intends to promote this work outside the island. As an artist who works extensively in Brazil, DJ Pogo will also serve as a key bridge between the Brazilian and Cuban hip hop scenes, two of the most vibrant in the region.
The survival crisis of UK Hip Hop vs Grime can help Cuban popular music in its understanding of Reggaeton as homogenised Latin urban music, but also as necessary musical genre linked to the recycle and healing of cultural knowledge and the experience acquired in critical moments.
In order to give more impetus to the creative process, it is felt that a future project should aim at an even higher level of musicians and producers, and should devote more time at the start of the project to high-level discussion among the creative participants. This would entail more emphasis on the research and philosophical aspects of the project in the early stages - a kind of musical think-tank - and a delaying of the music-making. This might take place in a musical space, such as a studio, and might involve musical demonstrations, but would not involve communal music-making at this stage. Requiring participants to communicate about music through language first, and only later through musical means, may produce more radical results, and with musicians and producers of the highest level involved, the reverberations might be felt across the region.
