This is one of the most eagerly awaited albums of the year, at least in world music circles. And for impeccable reasons. It is brilliantly produced and joyously sung; it swings with a rare soulfulness and conveys a sense of the Garifuna community. When Andy Palacio died tragically young at the age of 48 in 2008, he’d managed to put the Garifuna on the cultural map with one of the great albums of the last decade, Watina, and seemed destined for great things – when he was called “the new Bob Marley”, it didn’t sound completely ridiculous.
The Garifuna are a marginalised community descended from slaves who escaped and mixed with the local indigenous Indians and are scattered throughout Central America, notably in Honduras and Belize. Palacio’s mission may have been brutally cut short, but here his friend Aurelio Martinez takes up the Garifuna baton with powerful and inspiring results. Watina and this album share the producer and co-creator Ivan Duran - he also produced the wonderfully evocative Umalali, an album of Garifuna women’s voices- and contributes guitar, sinuous bass and co-arranges the material with Martinez. Duran is a rare producer with remarkable ears that would spot a duff note, however buried, but would most likely leave it in because he’s thankfully not afraid of a bit of dirt.
As a sound painting, there are remarkable colours and the freshness of the Garifuna elements are continually surprising. What complicates the album is that this was a product of the adventurous Rolex mentoring scheme where Martinez was put with the great Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour for a year. The album was not just recorded in a beach hut in Honduras, but also in Dakar, and Youssou N'Dour guests on a couple of tracks, as do members of Orchestre Boabob. Martinez also got to trace his African roots, as Palacio intended to do, as well as working with and learning from one of the great singers.
While the mix of Senegal and Garifuna is always interesting sonically, I actually preferred the more Garifuna-heavy tracks which seem clearer and more thrilling such as the vocally rich “Mayahuahua”, a song dedicated to an orphan whose parents have died of Aids, “Tio Sam”, about the plights of migrants with a Texan twang to the guitar sound and a tremendous female choir, and Martinez’s glorious tribute to Palacio “Wamada”, which imagines Palacio in his hammock at ease in the afterlife among the honoured ancestors.
The Garifuna elements are still totally fresh to outsiders, especially with such rich and soulful arrangements. All of which suggests that Martinez, while he doesn’t quite have Palacio’s weight and authority yet, has the ability to continue Palacio’s work in bringing the Garifuna culture further to the world’s attention, and actually doesn’t need guest stars or trips to foreign parts to excel. The material recorded in the beach hut in Honduras is the most potent music here.
Watch a video on the making of Laru Beya
