The Ayler tone is apparent and overwhelmingly so from the very first moment of La Voz de las Cumbres (Music of Guatemala) by the San Lucas Band. With its duelling trumpets and horns which in staccato fashion barely tether to the unbridled march of a military band melody, here accompanied by crashing cadences of percussion and a contrapuntal threnody of strings, the record is strikingly redolent of Albert Ayler’s peak years on ESP-Disk where he played alongside the likes of his brother Donald, Charles Tyler, Gary Peacock and Sonny Murray on the classic albums Spiritual Unity, Bells and Spirits Rejoice, a period which culminated in the clangorous rancour and cosmic affirmations of his Impulse! debut Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village as the saxophonist reached the summit on ‘Change Has Come’ and ‘Truth Is Marching In’.
In fact the music caught on these cult 1974 recordings of the San Lucas Band stretched back some five decades, all the way to their founding in the mountain village of San Lucas Tolimán in 1922. Situated on the southeastern shore of Lake Atitlán, the village is home to a significant population of Kaqchikel, one of the indigenous Maya peoples of the Guatemalan highlands. A brass band which by 1974 was being led by the violinist Bernardo Meija, on La Voz de las Cumbres (Music of Guatemala) the San Lucas Band played funeral dirges and popular songs which chafe at rhythmic constraints and ramble outside the confines of Western scales, the marked similarities with the free jazz of Ayler on ‘marchas’ cuatro, tres and seis giving way to a broader and more lyrical palette which shows the influence of Italian opera, the local culture of military band music, the invention and development of the chromatic marimba, Semana Santa ceremonies and the other assorted spiritual practises of the Kaqchikel. Drawing from such a wide and longstanding repertoire, for the album Meija was joined by Guiellmo Campo Mendoza on the cornet, Alejandro Cos Coquix on the euphonium, Manúel Meija Mucia on the alto saxophone, Jesús Garcia Hernandez on the snare drum, Alberto Campa on the bass drum and Ermerjildo Cos Murcia on cymbals.
Recorded in 1974 by Kathryn King and Linda O’Brien, the album by the San Lucas Band captured a fast disappearing musical tradition and was nominated for a Grammy following its release in 1975, ultimately losing out to Muddy Waters in the best ethnic or folk category. The fourth world trumpeter Jon Hassell and the double bassist Charlie Haden, who played alongside Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane and founded the Liberation Music Orchestra, subsequently named Music of Guatemala as one of their favourite records. Now for the first time the album is being reissued by the Geneva seeker and stalwart Les Disques Bongo Joe, in a package which includes the original liner notes and insert photographs.
