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• Music
• 04 / 24 / 2010

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Cuban, Irish, Canadian Celts share music and dance traditions at 10-day festival

"People were getting lost in the trance of the Irish music. We were bringing some of that cloud of our dream time here. And we in turn were getting lost by some of the music that was here." Irish singer and bodhran player Liam Ó Maonlaí.

This was at a cozy upstairs Cuban bar seemingly unchanged since Hemingway drank mojitos there 75 years ago. It was one of several Hemingway haunts along a CeltFest Cuba pub crawl through Old Havana.

My fiddle was on the table. My system was gurgling awkwardly this day with a squirt of Tropicoco revenge. I couldn't sit long enough to make music. So I missed my chance at bragging rights as part of probably the first trad session ever booted out of this bar.

We thought the excited, quick-talking uniformed official, rapidly slapping two fingers against his shoulders to indicate authority, had a request.

He did. Stop the music, it's disturbing guests at the adjacent museum, he indicated. That there did not appear to be any such guests, or anyone else, really, at the museum then was not discussed.

I chuckle now as I picture Lisa Butchart, CeltFest Cuba's instigator and tireless prime organizer. Her confusion changed slowly to befuddled amusement.

It was just one of many, many unexpected curves and glitches Butchart and her Cuban and Irish organizational counterparts negotiated during what, despite all the setbacks, was an astounding, thoroughly entertaining, and, for the Cuban, Irish and Canadian musicians, an important and exceptional 10-days sharing music and cultures.

With Lynda and her concertina, our son Connor, our friend Maureen Keating and her accordion, and my fiddle, we took in a week of Celt Fest Cuba at Havana and the nearby Tropicoco Resort along with Lisa and Chuck Butchart and some of their friends and fellow music makers from Saugeen Shores, where they live, and Cape Breton and P.E.I.

It was our first time in Cuba, and I can't wait until next year's festival.

There's an audio slideshow up now on our www.owensoundsuntimes.com website, with dozens of photographs and some samples of the sounds we heard.

CeltFest Cuba featured long, varied Celtic music and dance concerts in astonishing settings, including la Casa de Poesia, with its restored, colonial courtyard.

Pipers and drummers and dancers from Cuban Galician and Asturian traditions performed there, along with Scottish Highland pipers from Canada and Cuba, Cape Breton, P.E.I. and Irish fiddlers, singers and accordion players.

There were parades of musicians and costumed dancers winding through narrow, cobblestone passageways, outdoor dance and piping and drumming demonstrations in ancient squares.

Gleaming, newly rejuvenated buildings stood next to vacant, long-neglected, crumbling, grey, stone and concrete edifices waiting for their own facelifts.

There were fiddling, piping, tin whistle, Irish bodhran, Gaelic singing and Cape Breton step dancing workshops, along with informal music gatherings, where players from both cultures mixed their musics.

Familiar fiddle tunes pulsed with Afro-Cuban-influenced percussion and always people danced and laughed.

I liked that informal aspect best.

I loved seeing Lynda in a crowded square sharing tunes with Cuban Asturian musicians.

I loved seeing her quickly share her music, too, with a crowd of grinning cab drivers who asked what was in the little box.

There was a performance at a Canadian Embassy social gathering, and two moving, musical graveside memorials in the head-squeezing heat one afternoon at the expansive Colon Cemetery.

One was for Eduardo Gomez, known as the last Cuban piper, the other for Mary McCarthy Gomez Cueto, a Newfoundlander who married a Cuban, remained in Havana after the 1959 revolution and became a well-known, lifelong supporter and hostess in Havana to many artists and musicians and events. She died a year ago at the age of 108.

After that one halted spontaneous session, there were tunes aplenty upstairs at the immensely welcoming O'Reilly Café later that day, and throughout the festival.

Lisa Butchart, of Southampton, is a consistent and generous devotee of Canadian Celtic fiddle music, as her role in all of this clearly demonstrates.

She especially supports and promotes young artists like the McCarrel sisters of Port Elgin, whom she managed and for whom she produced a CD several years ago.

Butchart now manages fiddler Chrissy Crowley, 20, who was among several East Coast musicians she helped bring to Celt Fest Cuba.

Butchart and Crowley, with guitarist Tim Chaisson, of P.E.I. and Maureen Keating, of Owen Sound, were just nicely finding some tunes together when their session was squelched. She's actually pretty tickled about that, now. It makes a good story.

But Butchart has much more to be proud and pleased about over CeltFest Cuba.

It was her idea and could not have happened without her dogged persistence, seeking and eventually achieving approvals required to finally make it happen, just weeks before the event. She kept at "because I know it's a good idea."

"I was naïve about the myriad of permissions that I would have to get to do a festival in Cuba," Butchart said in an interview during the week there. "That's probably just as well. I probably would never have attempted it had I known the
difficulties."

Despite complications, it worked.

"I find Cuba fascinating," said Butchart, who with an expanded team plans another festival in Cuba next year. "It's a surreal country. It's so interesting. I love the Cuban people.

We're starting something that I believe in, and the friendships I've made with these Cuban people. That's very special."

Irish and Canadian musicians said they found new joy in their music through sharing with eager and interested Cubans, who come into the Celtic tradition through roots in Galicia and Asturia in Northern Spain, both founding nations who sent emigrants to Cuba.

"The biggest inspiring thing is how eager the Cubans are to learn," Crowley said.

"They wanted to learn everything as fast as they could, and the second the instruments were out they would join in and they would just catch on like that. I feel like everyone in Cuba is a natural musician.

They don't need to hear anything before hand. They just hop on and it's fantastic," she said.

"In Cuba it's just this big ocean of music and everybody can go swimming in it."

The Cuban musicians said they found new freedom in their music and learned tunes and techniques through contact with foreign musicians who shared their music so freely. No one was paid to play or teach, and in a country where no one has any money to spare, there were no ticket prices.

Luis Gutierrez, a Cuban piper and percussionist, said the festival indicates recognition of "the serious work we are doing to keep our tradition of the Celtic, in this case Spanish Celtic, music alive here in Havana."

His grandfather was a republican army captain who fought against fascism. He fled Spain after the 1939 civil war, bringing his Galician bagpipes and his Celtic music to Cuba.

With a degree in business and a Masters in finance, Gutierrez said he's among young Cubans finding his soul through his cultural roots and through "respectful" connections to other Celtic music cultures in Ireland and Cape Breton.

"One thing that the old men tell us is that music is like water. We have to flow," Gutierrez said. "We have to keep the tradition alive, but you have to write new music, not written in Galicia, but respecting the old ways.

We want to flow into a new era of the Celtic Cuban music and we need to learn other ideas, other instruments, other kinds of stuff and this festival is very important for that."

Anjelica Gongora trains as a classical violinist in the Russian-influenced music education system in Havana. After she also learned Asturian music on bagpipes, she transferred repertoire to her fiddle and now leads the Havana Fiddle Club.

"We are trying to rescue this music of Northern Spain," she said.

She said she finds freedom in her traditional music.

"I like classical music but it's full of rules," Gongora said. "In Celtic music I can play whatever I want.

That's what I need now, freedom to express what I want to play and feel what I play. In an orchestra, all the violins have to play the same way, but every fiddler I've met, they play whatever they want, the same tune, they play a different way. That's what I want."

This new connection between Cuban, Canadian and Irish musicians began a little more than a year ago. Butchart and Crowley went to Havana for Butchart's birthday.

Through Marcel Nazabal, a Cuban piper connected in Havana to the Galician and
Asturian communities she got to know through Facebook, Butchart organized a small, informal, promotional concert for Crowley at a Havana hotel venue.

Nazabal has been to Celtic Colours, a huge international Celtic festival held in Nova Scotia each year, and was familiar with many Cape Breton musicians.

Talk since that concert over a year ago led the new friends to form the Canadian-Cuban Celtic Society, which began as a Facebook group, and eventually led to Celt Fest Cuba this year. It was organized over the phone and by e-mail and promoted mostly through Facebook and a web page.

With Butchart as media relations director, Nazabal took the role of marketing director and brought in Irish piper Cillín Ó Cinneide as artistic director.

They met several years ago while Ó Cinneide was in Cuba for several months, where he was surprised to find pipers and eventually "a rich, hidden vein of Celtic music in Cuba."

All three organizers brought in musicians willing to play the event for no fee other than a chance to connect with Cuban players and also have a beach vacation as part of the package.

And a few of us Canadian traditional and Celtic music fans, intrigued by both the cultural and musical possibilities and the reasonable package price, along with the beach options, came along for the fun of it.

All of us now have plenty to remember about this first-time cultural event, the crazy, fantastic, confused, unpredictable, sun-soaked, colourful country and especially the engaging, receptive, appreciative and sharing Cuban musicians we all befriended there.

Culture Ireland provided funding for transportation and accommodation for several Irish musicians, including fiddle and concertina player Niamh Ni Charra, the fiddler with touring Riverdance for eight years, the Begley family from County Kerry, and Liam Ó Maonlaí, a traditional Irish musician and singer from Dublin known mostly as a member of the Irish rock band Hothouse Flowers.

He sees more than musical similarities in the histories of all three islands of Ireland, Cape Breton and Cuba, and relishes the connections made, culture shared and the opportunities presented by Celt Fest Cuba.

"The music speaks. Music gives you images of what is possible with people," he said.

"I was allowed to bring my personality in music to a flamboyant level that isn't always easy in other countries. I was allowed to exercise certain musical muscles in myself. It was fertile ground for me to improve my craft," Ó Maonlaí said.

A highlight for him was an informal pub session where Cubans added their percussion to fiddle tunes and danced freely to a long set of Irish music, using their newfound Cape Breton step dancing skills.

"I think the big thing is that people were getting lost in the trance of the Irish music. That was happening. We were bringing some of that cloud of our dream time here. And we in turn were getting lost by some of the music that was here."

By BILL HENRY/Sun Times staff

Source: www.owensoundsuntimes.com/