11. Sabu - Palo Congo (1957)

Tracks: El Cumbanchero//Billumba Palo Congo//Choferito Plena//Asabache//Simba//Rhapsodia del Maravilloso//Aggo Elegua//Tribilin Cantore

Review:

Voodoo! Freaky swampland shit! Witchdoctors crouched in the entrails of knackered goats chanting madly to evoke the gods of old Africa! Dead men hanging plague-addled from the trees as a yellow fire descends on the jungles of Haiti! The best rhythm section this side of Circadia swirling around itself like a Charley Chaplin drunk aching for a fight! New Yorker Sabu Martinez had played with some of the biggest names in Afro-Cuban music, and taken-over as conga player in Dizzy Gillespie’s band after Chanu Pazo got shot. This is the sound of a man at the fore-front of musical development in the mid-50s sitting down, looking around at the rock, jazz, and the Afro-Cuban up swell going on around him and thinking: “Where did it all come from?” And so he showed us.

Of course, that’s not strictly true. The stylistic innovations here are actually quite subtle and clever. Sabu Martinez has stripped Afro-Cuban-based music down to, well, Afro-Cuban folk music. And what’s the one core element of African music? The beat! There are drums, bass and guitar on this album, but the bass is largely unobtrusive, while the guitar is for the most part a snarling, distorted, chugging thing that sounds twenty years ahead of its time, standing grinning proudly right down in the guts of Latin rock. And when it’s clean, it forms spiralling arpeggios planted firmly mid-Atlantic. Over all this, everyone chants in a deeply syncopated style, with only the simplest melodies to be heard.

The genius of this is that Sabu then applies his virtuoso abilities in jazz percussion and his deep knowledge of Afro-Cuban music almost exclusively to the construction and deconstruction of grooves. This album is for the most part just one big, shifting mass of polyrhythm. This is, in a strange way, a jazz album (it was released on Blue Note, after all) – but with all the European elements stripped. And, from this primal framework, Sabu then proceeds to rather smart-arsedly cover Latin big band standard “El Cumbanchero”. It’s great! Going back to the start, and then working forward again with a fresh perspective. It probably helps that Martinez was recovering from a pretty bad heroin addiction at the time – this doesn’t sound like the work of a man in his right mind.

I should say, though, that even though this album is pretty marvellous (the guitar work, especially, is amazingly funky – it is god-damned funky!), not all the tracks are equal in their qualities. “El Cumbanchero” is pretty neat, benefiting from a catchy melody, but is a little thin and gets old quick. “Bilumba Palo Congo” is also just sort of... flaccid? Especially following the gruff, cackling vocal introduction that sets it up. It’s not bad, just not as good as the other songs on here. However, this speaks to wisdom on the part of whoever sequenced this – the other songs are all solid gold and as a consequence you grow more interested as the album progresses, rather than less so as is usual in a pop album with all the singles at the front.

I’ll also mention the production before I go. This album is mostly improvisational, and recorded live. This gives the entire thing a wonderfully echoed effect as the sounds bounce back from the walls of the recording space, which is magnified by the fact that the crowd, for some reason, sounds less like people than a distant, eerie wave jammed down in the back of the mix – another, bizarre component of the rhythm section.

And another thing – this album could not have worked in mono. It’s polyrhythm, man! Sabu and Co work absolute wonders by spacing the drums out across the two channels. It gives the grooves a very modern dimension and a whole other level of complexity. On the other hand, the intriguing production is kind of frustrating. You want to pump it on the stereo, but the complexity of the rhythms and the sheer sound of it kind of beg for headphones. In this way, I suppose this gives the album a nice extra layer of interest to keep you digging into what is, while fascinating, something of a one-trick pony.

So, yeah, this is great. Latin rock. African tribal chants. Proto-funk and Ur-trance. Even more laid-back forms of folk in the figure of “Rhapsodia del Maravilloso”, with its wonderful, sunny guitar work by Arsenio Rodriguez (see also: “Choferito Plena” for something a bit rougher). What more could you ask for? I will admit that I got my bongos out and tapped along – but damn it man, this is not an album to sit by and quietly nod at! The complexity of the thing is marvellous – the lack of any real central “One” beat means that there’s nothing – literally nothing – but syncopation and cross-rhythms. Thus, amazing grooves.

The album is also noteworthy, I suppose, in that it continues the fine tradition of naming jazz albums with elaborate puns. According to my research, “Palo” is a both a Cuban religion originating with the slaves, and a Spanish term meaning “type of music”. As a consequence, the album title “Palo Congo” means, if I’m not mistaken, both “Congo Style”, referring to both the Congo or sokous style of music and the place, and “Congolese Palo” in the religious sense. And add to this that “palo” also means “stick”! However, I should qualify all this with the fact that I don’t actually speak Spanish, and that at time of writing it is currently five in the morning and I have more coffee than blood in me.

So, damned fun. It’s just so unusual, especially for 1957. Bring on Tito Puente!

8/10

Download: Sabu Martinez - Choferito Plena Mp3

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