There is a radiance to Walter Zanetti’s guitar on Cantos Yoruba de Cuba, which sounds sun-kissed to the extent that light appears to be thinning out and permeating his strings, a quality of both incandescence and brittleness or spareness. After spending a month in Cuba, studying under the local guitarist and composer José Angel Navarro in a small town south of Havana, the Italian musician sought to follow in his teacher’s footsteps and set down on wax a recreation of sacred Afro-Cuban batá drum songs using only his six-string.
The fifteen pieces which comprise his album are made up of six Navarro originals and the nine Cantos Yoruba de Cuba of Héctor Angulo, who drew extensively from Cuban folklore as he composed avant-garde works for orchestras, choirs, theatre, piano and solo guitar after returning from his studies at the Manhattan School of Music in the early sixties, where he taught Pete Seeger how to play ‘Guantanamera’.
While the Cantos Yoruba de Cuba of Angulo were the wellspring of the project, Zanetti during his month in Cuba got to listen to local ceremonial percussionists and Santería rites as Navarro kept him busy by dictating a string of original compositions, each defined by his complex technique which strives to recreate the batá drum’s polyrhythms and timbres on the guitar while maintaining a line of melody.
Zanetti also listened to the famous Afro-Cuban singer Lázaro Ros as he delved deeper into Santería, a syncretic blend of the Yoruba religion of West Africa and Catholic practises which conflates Yoruba orishas with the Catholic saints and developed over the course of centuries as the transatlantic slave trade reshaped the region’s culture. The central ritual of Santería is the toque de santo, where consecrated batá drums are played for hours on end, in an endeavour to summon the orishas as the drum’s rhythms are accompanied by singing and dancing.
The result – which Zanetti recorded after returning home to Italy, at an old Benedictine monastery in the town of Ganna – bridges the plucked pointillism of ‘Sumu Gaga’ with the more languorous and flowing legato passages of ‘Oñi’, as the guitarist attests the influence of Spanish forms on Cuban music, like flamenco with its rasgueado style of finger strumming. In fact Cantos Yoruba de Cuba during its more airy and romantic moments reminds me of the new album Pag-ibig Ko, Vol. 1 by the saxophonist Matthew Muñeses and harpist Riza Printup, which explores the beauty and versatility of kundiman, a genre of Filipino love songs which are characterised by their flowing rhythms and emotionally heightened intervals. Cuba and the Philippines share a Spanish colonial past and both Santería and kundiman came of age in the late nineteenth century as the two countries waged increasingly fierce battles for their independence.
After the sustained themes and variations of the first side with its long pieces like the exquisite album opener ‘Guaguanco, Conga, Columbia’ and another standout in ‘Oñi’, the back side of Cantos Yoruba de Cuba turns more plaintive. At times Zanetti’s movements, as he shifts to and fro in his chair, imbue the songs with a percussive wash like the dredging of silt or lapping of waves on sandy beaches. The countryfied ‘Borotiti’ echoes everything from the African American spiritual ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ to Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s iconic ‘Ballad of High Noon’ with its refrain ‘Do not forsake me, oh my darlin”, as Zanetti unfurls a sequence of teasers or vignettes, brief evocations which are slender but still shapely.
Walter Zanetti has featured on several works by Eyvind Kang, and in 2020 starred alongside the violinist Gianfranco Iannetta on a recording of Niccolò Paganini’s Centone di sonate. His album Cantos Yoruba de Cuba arrives on Caterina Barbieri’s light-years as the independent label’s seventh release and its first beyond the realm of electronic music.
