Gloria Estefan: Sangre Yoruba (A Musical Journey Through Africa, Brazil and Cuba) (Sony Music Latin, PBS, aired July 12, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a quite interesting PBS documentary on singer Gloria Estefan shown under their Great Performances rubric, even though the show was not an actual concert film (which is what most Great Performances have been) but an 85-minute promotional video produced by her record company, Sony Music Latin, to promote her latest album, Brazil305. I must confess I haven’t had that much interest in Gloria Estefan over the years – my late partner John Gabrish, whom I was with from 1985 to his death in the early 1990’s, loved her music but I always thought she was entertaining but hardly at the level of her forefathers and foremothers in Cuban music, especially Machito, Tito Puente and Estefan’s great role model, Célia Cruz. Her backstory is well known but was reviewed in thi’s ms film: she was brought to the U.S. from her native Cuba when she was 2 because her father had been the driver for the wife of Fulgencio Batista, the Right-wing U.S.-friendly dictator overthrown by Fidel Castro and his popular movement (which went on to set up a Left-wing dictatorship). He fled to the U.S. but attempted to join the CIA-backed counterrevolution that led to disaster at the Bay of Pigs and spent two years in a Cuban prison before being extradited back to the U.S., where he enlisted in the U.S. military and got sent to Viet Nam in 1967. Once his tour was over je came back with what later came to be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Gloria’s mom always encouraged her to be a singer – the show included some amateur tapes she made at her mom’s insistence, and when her dad was in Viet Nam he had a 3 ½-inch reel tape recorder and her parents would send taped letters back and forth … and dad always wanted to hear little Gloriadita sing. Gloria originally wanted to go to college and major in psychology, but her mom pressed her into a musical career.

Later she married Emilio Estefan, who has remained both her personal and professional partner throughout her career. She had her commercial breakthrough with a band her husband organized called the Miami Sound Machine, which at first was just what its name suggests – a band that traveled in a camper van and set up for casual gigs, sometimes in association with the professional business her mom set up, cooking authentic Cuban tamales and other foods and setting up shop in parks where Cuban men played sports so they could snack on the foods of their homeland. The main agenda behind this movie was to explore the African rhythms of both Cuban and Brazilian music and to promote the Brazil305 album, which contains covers of Brazilian samba classics (including “It Cuts Both Ways” by Maria Regina, daughter of Brazilian samba singer Elis Regina – a truly remarkable performer who died way too young, at 36, but recorded some classic tunes during her brief career). The script argued that Brazilian and Cuban music have similarities that stem from the common African origins of Brazil’s and Cuba’s Black populations, which were taken as slaves largely from the Yoruba and Bantu people in central Africa and who brought their spiritual traditions with them as well as the rhythms by which they worshiped their gods. The show touched on one of the least understood aspects of Caribbean and Latin American religions, especially the ones practiced by their Black populations: exposed by their captors to Roman Catholicism and its panoply of saints, Blacks fused the gods of their own religion with the Catholic saints to create hybrid gods they could worship while ostensibly being good little Catholics. Thus Laba, the snake god, became identified with St. Patrick because Laba could tame the snakes and St. Patrick had driven them out of Ireland, and a Yoruba warrior god became identified with Santa Barbara because Santa Barbara was depicted holding a sword.

The Yorubans brought the clavé rhythm that became the basis for the Brazilian samba and also for the rhythms of Cuban music – though I’ve long thought there was a difference between the harder-edged Cuban sound and the softer, subtler music of Brazil. I’ve read attempts to explain the softness of Brazilian music relative to other Latin American musics as stemming from Brazil’s Black population – yet Cuba also had a large Black population and it evolved a more forceful music. I think to the extent there’s a difference between Cuban and Brazilian music it has to do with the sound of the languages they’re sung in: Brazil ended up a colony of Portugal before it became independent, and Portuguese remains the national language of Brazil the way English is the language of the U.S. The sound of Portuguese is simply softer and more sibilant than Spanish (Portuguese has sometimes been described as “Castilian Spanish spoken with a lisp”), and it led to a softer, subtler sound. Interestingly, Estefan’s documentary makes no mention of the bossa nova, the Brazilian sound that emerged there in the 1960’s and conquered the world – I remember when the album Getz/Gilberto, uniting white American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz with Brazilian singers João and Astrud Gilberto, was literally inescapable on the airwaves – mainly, I suspect, because Gloria Estefan was more interested in the harder-edged Brazilian music that both preceded and followed bossa nova. She was especially strong in documenting the tradition of the so-called “samba schools” (escolas de Samba) which would participate in street parades with . The their drums strapped across their chests so they could play them marching-band styles, and often the groups had no instruments other than drums and vocals.

In 1930 Brazil was taken over by a military dictator named Gétulio Vargas, who decided to make samba music Brazil’s national culture – and to tame it, including having samba schools write songs glorifying Pedro Alvárez Cabrál, the Portuguese conquistador who had discovered and conquered Brazil. Vargas was driven from power in 1945 but regained the Brazilian presidency through election in 1951, though further demonstrations against his regime led to his suicide in 1954. Among the most interesting parts of this documentary were interviews with grand old men of Cuban music like Israel Lopez, who invented the mambo (it’s hard to believe that the creator of a dance craze from the 1950’s would still be around to be interviewed about it!) and Candido Camero, the explosive conga player who frequently appeared on 52nd Street in the jazz clubs of New York City in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, who according to his Wikipedia page passed on November 7, 2020 but got interviewed for this show and demonstrated how the congas could be a melody instrument by playing the theme from Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz original “Manteca.” (I was hoping that I’d discovered a third living person who recorded with Charlie Parker – Candido shows up on some of his live broadcasts from New York nightclubs in the early 1950’s – alongside the two I already knew about, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and drummer Roy Haynes. Darn.) The show featured clips from the Brazil305 sessions including such previous Estefan hits as “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You,” “Where There Is Love,” “Get On Your Feet” and “Conga” – the last done first in the original Cuban-American version and then retitled “Samba” to fit it in to Brazilian culture.

Among the songs Gloria had especially fond memories for was a song she recorded and made the title of one of her albums, “Mi Tierra,” originally a lament that though Cuban to her roots she’s been exiled from her homeland and longs to go back there one day (it was certainly ironic to see this show as some of the biggest demonstrations against the Cuban Communist regime in the 62 years it’s been in power are going on now, and right after the MS-NBC coverage of them presented in the predictable light of portraying the demonstrators as pro-democracy “freedom fighters” against a regime that can’t even provide them food or health care – ironically, one of the strongest aspects of Cuba during Fldel Castro’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s was their ability to extend literacy and health care to their population, which at least according to the U.S. media – who aren’t exactly the world’s most accurate or unbiased sources on Cuba the current Cuban president, Miguel Diáz-Canel, hasn’t been able to do, and he’s blamed his failures on the continuing U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, which was instituted in 1961 even though it wasn’t enshrined into U.S. law until 1996, and which has been spectacularly counterproductive in its stated purpose of bringing the Cuban Communist regime to its knees and encouraging the Cuban people to rise up and get rid of it). The most moving anecdote on this show was at the end, in which Gloria Estefan mentioned that she completed the instrumental backing tracks for Brazil305 and then brought home a tape of them and sang the songs “live” over her tracks for her mother – who got fatally ill and died just a few weeks later. Gloria found herself unable to get back into the studio to record the tracks because she was so overcome by the loss of her mom, and it took her nearly a year before she was in the right head space to record the vocals for Brazil305. This show was at once a fascinating documentary on the shared history of Brazilian and Cuban music and an insight into the artistry of Gloria Estefan, and if its purpose was to get people to buy her new album, it may well have that effect on me (sorry, Charles!).