Habana / Harlem®

Happy Holidays

2011-12-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

Habana/Harlem® would like to thank all of our friends and fans for their support throughout 2011, from ¡Si Cuba! to the Harlem Jazz Shrines festival.

2012 has many surprises in store. Keep up with us through facebook, twitter and our new continually updated site . From Neyda and Onel we wish you all a festive holidays season filled with Love, Health and Happiness.

Dr. Ivor Miller at The Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington D.C.

2011-11-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

Ivor Miller, Senior Fellow, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art presents:

A Cultural History of Cross River Civilization, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC

After recreating African institutions of governance in the Caribbean during the colonial era, African descendants also documented large portions of their cultural history in 19th century manuscripts. Hidden from outsiders until recently, this little-known story has been shared with West African cultural leaders who are using it to understand their own pre-colonial traditional institutions and arts. With reference to photographs and objects in the NMAfA collections, Ivor Miller will present key themes of this story with the support of musicians and dancers from Cameroon and Cuba. The focus will be the Ekpè ‘leopard’ society of the Cross River region in southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon, and the historically related Cuban Abakuá society. Dr. Miller will be accompanied by Cuban musicians Roman Diaz and Onel Mulet.Traditional chiefs from Cameroon who live in the Washington DC region will participate.

Time

Monday, November 28 @ 4 p.m.

Place

National Museum of African Art

Lecture Hall, sublevel 2

950 Independence Avenue, SW

Take Metro to Smithsonian Station

Habana/Harlem® LES Mural

2011-10-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Habana/Harlem has a place on an historic NYC block at the corner of Houston and avenue B on the Lower East Side. The LES like East Harlem continue to promote and maintain community mural projects. Despite the disappearance of iconic Williamsburg murals South Brooklyn's mural projects continue to thrive, in the Bronx as well.We want to thank Mike at 848 Enterprises for making this possible.

Links to Mural artists and Organizations in NY.

Manuel Acevedo

Maria Dominguez

Carlos Mateu

Groundswell Mural Project

Big Hands

From Cuba for an Exclusive NY Engagement Orquesta Aragon

2011-10-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

This is an Exclusive engagement. The only 2 NY shows!!!

Featuring DJ Broadway and DJ ASHO!!

Miles Davis 20th Anniversary

2011-09-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991)

Miles Davis Marathon

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Miles Davis' death. This playlist represents but a slice of his genius. It includes music videos as well as interviews and shoots of live recordings documentaries and film. I hope you enjoy the music.

Latin American Art Preview at Sotheby's

2010-11-16T16:39:00.000-08:00

Thank you Julia Herzberg for a wonderful evening last night at Sotheby's where we toured a preview of the Latin American art collection featuring, as it's centerpiece; Wilfredo Lam's(1902-1982) "Les Abalochas Dansent Pour Dahmbala, Dieu de l'Unite".Painted in 1970. Photo courtesy of Sotheby's catalogue 2010.

Catalogue Notes:

Wifredo Lam

(1902-1982)

The art of Wifredo Lam communicates transcultural beliefs rooted in the African diaspora not only in Cuba and the Caribbean but many other countries around the world. During his long prolific career as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and ceramist, he contributed to Modernism in very special ways. As an insider, Lam embraced Afro-Cuban subjects at a time when few artists in the western world were engaged in dialogues addressing cross-cultural, ethnic, and spiritual themes.i His practice slowly but undeniably changed the direction and understanding of Modernism. Master of line, form, and color, the artist absorbed the lessons of cubism, expanded the parameters of surrealism, and mediated the fine line between figuration and abstraction. His work, which expresses human emotions—pain, suffering, loss—and references war, independence movements, and spirituality, became a paradigm for future generations of artists who have expressed their socio-politico-spiritual histories in visual form.ii

Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité (The Abalochas Dance for Dhambala, the God of Unity), one of Lam’s most ambitious paintings, caps a decade of extraordinary work in which he also produced Tropic of Capricorn (1961) and The Third World (1965-1966). Each in turn represents a crowning achievement in his artistic practice.iii The Tropic of Capricorn or the Southern Tropic marks the most southerly latitude at which the sun appears directly overhead at noon. Given Lam’s interest in colonial history and the more recent decolonizing movements, Tropic of Capricorn embraces many countries in the southern temperate zone including Africa, the Caribbean,

Latin America, and Asia, countries with diverse political, religious, and ethnic cultures that had experienced colonization. Two years after completing this work, Lam visited Cuba for the first time since the revolution and painted The Third World. Commissioned for the Presidential Palace, the large painting commemorates, if in title only, the nonaligned nations, an alliance of African, Asian, and Latin American countries that were meeting in Cuba at the time of Lam’s visit.iv

The word Abalochas in the title Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité is most likely a phonetic variant of the more common babalochas,v or priests of a deity in the Afro-Cuban religion known alternately in Cuba as Lucumí, Regla de Ocha, Santería, or Orisha worship. Lam seems to have used the form abalocha in two other works, Abalocha of 1951 and 1964, which feature a femme-cheval surrounded by spirits. His reference to Damballah (the more usual spelling of the name), the deity being honored, appears in only two of his paintings: Reflets de Dhambala (Reflections of Dhambala) of 1968 and the painting under discussion here. Damballah is the creole name in Haiti for the rainbow-serpent, whose consort, Ayida Whedo, is also a serpent of the sky. In worship the intermingling of Damballah’s body with that of Ayida in the form of two snakes is a sign of union and ecstasy,vi a spiritual state suggested in part through the title and hinted at in the iconography of the painting. Lam may also have known that Obatalá, the creator of mankind in Lucumí, is the Dahomeyan counterpart, Damballa.

During Lam’s early upbringing, his godmother, Mantonica Wilson, a Changó priestess in Lucumí, spiritually guided him.vii He became acquainted with the Vodou worship of Haitians living and working in Cuba and also attended celebrations in that neighboring country from December 1945 through April 1946. During that time, Lam

had an exhibition and attended Vodou ceremonies with André Breton and Pierre Mabille. It seems that Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité, as well as the smaller 1968 painting, were, on one level, an acknowledgment of the importance of Vodou, which, as Robert Farris Thompson asserts “is one of the signal achievements of people of African descent in the western hemisphere: a vibrant, sophisticated synthesis of the traditional religions of Dahomey, Yorubaland and Kongo with an infusion of Roman Catholicism.”viii And, on another level, Lam mixed the words in the title to signify the reblending of practices that define Afro-Caribbean religions.

Lam used poetic license in both his naming of Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité and his iconographic interpretation of the religious scene, choreographed so brilliantly. Were we to look at documentation of a Vodou temple, with an altar, pole, flags, and offerings, we would find a scene very different from the one rendered by Lam.ix As was characteristic of the artist’s form and style, he improvised in expressing the intricacies of a ceremonial dance. From the perspectives of formal unity, innovative comminglings, and content, this painting looks back on the compositional structure, fluid line, and planar figures of earlier work. The figures, surely but delicately outlined, seem to advance and recede into the dark forest-green background in continuous movement. Lam’s consummate draftsmanship created lines that flowed from one anatomical part to another without seeming to separate being from being. Several of the gendered figures, some identified in part by their skirts, another by a phallus, are visible from the side, back, and full front, producing a sense of constant movement. We recognize heads that are moon shaped, others in the form of Africanizing masks, still others, as Lowery Sims suggests, crocodile-like. All the figures are connected to each

other as if sharing the same energy source. The little round heads, a bedrock motif in the artist’s vocabulary since the early 1940s, are sometimes intended to be Elegguas; here they are manifestations of cosmic energy or life force (also known as ashé) and offer a sense of mystery as they hover in the background. As the abalochas dance, we decipher the large figure in the foreground in a reclining position, similar to the one in the foreground in The Third World. That figure (a devotee), whose head is configured by a horse mask, is experiencing spirit possession, a spiritual state further signaled by the yellow-bodied fragment with hooves that conflates with the worshiper, indicating a metaphorical union. Never interested in straightforward narrations of magico-religious practices, Lam intuits them with his inventive morphologies. Although no drums are depicted in this painting, one can hear them. They have been beating (in spite of intermittent prohibitions) since the 1500s in religious ceremonies in Cuba, and their invisible presence resounds herein as well.x

Lam—the world traveler—befriended artists, writers, and musicians with his worldly nature, curious and open disposition, and capacity for embracing difference as a wellspring of the human condition. His dialogue with people, reclamations of place, critiques and, at times, affirmations of world events, and recognition of spiritual traditions were the cornerstones of his art.xi

Julia P. Herzberg, Ph.D.

i Lam, brought up in both Catholic and Afro-Atlantic traditions of Orisha worship, did not practice any formal religion as an adult. His life’s work, however, honors the spiritual beings in polytheistic Afro-Cuban worldviews.

ii In this context I recall NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, an exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2008 which brought together an intergenerational group of artists who address ritual and the wider implications of spirituality in contemporary art—drawing from the shamans and oral historians. Lam’s painting, in the permanent collection, was not included in this exhibition, but the artist was certainly an ombudsman for many contemporary artists, some of whom included David Hammons, Robert Gober, Jimmie Durham, Ana Mendieta, José Bedia, and Magdelena Campos-Pons. Franklin Sirmans, ed., NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2008). Essayists: Franklin Sirmans, Jen Budney, Arthur C. Danto, Julia P. Herzberg, Greg Tate, Robert Farris Thompson, Quincy Troupe.

iii The 1961 painting was awarded the Guggenheim International Prize in 1964. This painting and The Third World have had extensive exhibition histories.

iv In elaborating the larger context in which this painting was created, Lowery S. Sims notes that Lam’s trip coincided with the first meeting of the Tri-Continental Congress, an alliance of African, Asian, and Latin American countries. See Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde. 1923–1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 154.

v I am grateful to Onel Mulet, scholar, musician, composer, and producer of Habana/Harlem™, for having pointed me to several sources that have enriched my understanding of this word in the titling of this painting. Thanks also to Neyda Martínez and Dowoti Désir for their generous assistance.

vi Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), pp. 176, 177, 187.

vii Wilson gave Lam an amulet, a good luck charm, which he kept all his life as a tangible memory of her. The charm is now in the Lam archive in Paris. Julia P. Herzberg, "Wifredo Lam: Development of a Style and Worldview, The Havana Years 1941–1952," in Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992), p. 31.

viii Farris Thompson, p. 163.

ix A comparison can be found in Farris Thompson, plate 119, p. 190: Vodou flags, swords, and a pole simulating the tree in which Dhambala and Aiyda Hwedo are wrapped in an embrace.

x “Music was a vehicle for the conservation of the culture of Africa in Cuba, and, in return, the strength of the transplanted culture was a vehicle for maintaining the music.” See Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Press Review, 2004), p. 89.

xi Since Lam’s death in 1982, his work has traveled throughout the world: in Europe, to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, and Yugoslavia; in North America, to the United States, Mexico, and Canada; in the Caribbean, to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Martinique; in South America, to Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil; in Asia, to China and Japan.

Enyenison Enkama CD release Party Sept 5th 9:30PM Joes Pub

2009-08-29T11:37:00.000-07:00

Enyenison Enkama CD Release party

Joes Pub Sept 5th 9:30PM

Following in the footsteps of Chano Pozo and Arsenio Rodriguez, Enyenison Enkama heralds in a new chapter in New York City’s rich musical history, one in which the secret Abakuá or Ekpé society unveil their melodic and rhythmic mysteries, depicting universal themes in their symbols, dances and songs. Full of tales of heroic deeds and anthems to long fallen warriors, and divine ancestors.

Fronted by Roman Diaz, Angel Guerrero and Pedro Martinez, the group employs the talents of special guest artist legendary trombonist and conch shell virtuoso Steve Turré, percussionist and vocalist Philbert Armenteros, drummer Rafael Monteagudo, pianist Axel Tosca, bassist Alvaro Benavides, trombonist/violinist Eddie Venegas, and saxophonist/flutist Onel Mulet. Inspired by the work of Dr.Ivor Miller (African Studies Center Boston University) author of the book Voice of The Leopard. His research, scholarship and dedication are primarily responsible for reuniting the Ekpé (leopard society) of Calabar Nigeria with the Abakuá of Cuba after a 200 year separation. These artists have produced a masterpiece worthy of their ancestors praise entitled Ecobio Enyenison. Released on the new independent label Habana|Harlem™.

"Oda a la Piña" Dir. Laimir Fano (Cuba) Special Jury Mention 2009 Tribeca Film festival.

2009-04-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

The Mulata is the cultural symbol of Cuba. The perfect marriage of Africa and Europe, and the high watermark for beauty in Cuba. Maria La O, most infamous of Cubas "Mulata" heroines, has been on my mind lately . Maria Belen Chacon, Cecilia Valdes even Rita Montaner one of many who embodied the archetype, are part of the Cuban cultural landscape. Coincidentally during this time of reflection on the Socio-cultural and historical significance of the idyllic Cuban hottie, I was called upon to translate for a Cuban director at the Tribeca film festival in the Short film program "Means to an end".

So there I am watching this short film about a Cuban Mulata who loses her rhythm. Title montage rolls and the narrator in this film lyrically articulates the famous 18th century poem Oda a La Piña written by Manuel de Zequeira y Arango, which incidentally is tightly woven into the fabric of Cuba's cultural identity. Chaos ensues when the protagonist, a beautiful Mulata cabaret dancer playing the part of the pineapple in a cabaret revue, loses her sense of rhythm in the midst of an audition for a much anticipated European tour. There is even a cameo by the late Rita Montaner in the form of an old movie poster in the cabaret dancers dressing room.

Fano brilliantly strips away the Cuban stereotype to reveal the humanity of his characters; bringing us face to face with the reality. Few people like a pineapple void of it's tangy flavor, or a Mulata that can't shake her lovely tight round ass to an up tempo Mambo rhythm. In Oda a La Piña Cuban director Laimir Fano challenges Cuban stereotypes.

During the Q and A I find out that Laimir Fano of course is a brilliant but very low key guy with a great sense of humor that transcends the language barrier. Life imitates art.

Oda a La Piña is a shining example of Cuban music, dance, art, literature, and film. In eleven minutes you get a true a sense of what makes the pineapple a fruit for all the senses.

----------Onel Mulet Habana|Harlem™

Joe Bataan @ BAM Café live

2009-04-04T09:42:00.000-07:00

Friday April 3rd Joe Bataan @ BAM Café live Latin Soul 9PM

Joe Bataan can wax poetic on being confronted with his own mortality, and the impact that God has had on his life and indelibly on his music as witnessed tonight in his soulful rendition of the Our Father. He seemed as if he was at the pulpit. Maybe it was the acoustics there tonight, but the arches of the BAM Café seemed to turn from vaulted steel structures to gothic cathedral ceilings. There is no mistaking that his music hearkens back to the good old days, dearly departed friends, and love lost. Corny, he confesses. However, the phrase family values comes to mind. No it's not due to the fact that his wife, and his best friend are in his fabulous band or that his daughters come to his shows. All that aside, when you go to a Roy Ayers show, a Joe Bataan concert, or Orquesta Broadway show you'll see what the people of Veracruz take for granted on any given day when entire families turn out to dance in the town square as the Danzón orchestras play. Observe what the faithful at a Sunday morning gospel service already know. Music is a catalyst for community, and a vehicle with which to pass on language, culture and values to future generations.

-----Onel Mulet Habana|Harlem™