A new attitude
T is in the final days of finishing her book and was out watching one last film. So I had an evening to myself and started reading a new book – Ned Sublette’s Cuba and its music from the first drums to the mambo. I was instantly hooked as this is my own history he is writing about as well as my own soul stirrings. When I went to Cuba in 1999, on my 40th birthday year, I was struck by the music of Cuba. I had grown up with it all my life since my father was born in Havana and he was musically talented. But when I went there music oozed out of every pore of Cuba in ways that were almost surreal. I remember so well sitting next to the Swedish man at a bar who said to me, “Cubans are to music like dolphins to water.” And no truer statement was ever spoken.
When I returned I felt that all of the music I was listening to couldn’t compare to the sounds I had heard there and Ned’s book is a good illustration of how every bit of music I was listening to was a derivation of Cuban music. He says somewhere in the book that Louie Louie was based on a cha cha cha.
This morning when Loca and I were walking (faster) through City Park, I was thinking about growing up with this rich heritage that I inherited. A Sephardic via Turkey, then Cuba, yoked with New Orleans, born to a musical family albeit I’m atrociously tone deaf and can’t carry a single note, and music follows my lineage along that route and at the intersection of my mother and father.
I ran into one of my fellow walkers who has been laid up for a bit. I was asking him how he was doing and he commented you have to fall down to get up. I said well let’s be grateful to have this day. And he said, Amen Rachel. Then I continued walking and thinking about the road that led me here, almost the spice trail that led me here, paved by drums and horns and dancing, and I thought to myself, “Damn straight I’m grateful.”