Los
Jardineros— The Best of Los Jardineros
Yazo Records
Reviewed
by Peter Aaron
Early
ethnic music recordings are weird. To the sheltered listener, impenetrably
so—and often far too confusing to bother with. To those of
us who delight in the ephemeral and exotic, however, such recordings
add up to a case of “good weird, not bad weird.” But,
of course, when taken in context such music isn’t really weird
at all. Every culture has its parallels to our own folk traditions,
and keeping that in mind makes it far easier to appreciate them.
Take
the rural jibaro style of Puerto Rico. In the native argot, jibaro
basically means “hillbilly” and, like its American equivalent,
it’s the sometimes derogatory name of an ethnographic subculture
as well as that of a string band-dominated folk-music style. Made
in the island’s most remote mountain regions by bands of peasant
farmers, usually with guitars, mandolins, and cuatros (similar to
a ukulele), the music originally served not only as entertainment
at social gatherings but as a kind of singing newspaper—jibaro
musicians would chronicle current local and world events in their
songs, “broadcasting” them at the dances they traveled
to perform at.
Curiously,
Los Jardineros (The Gardeners), regarded as the greatest traditional
Puerto Rican band to ever record, and chronicled here from scarce
78s made mainly for the Okeh label between 1929 and 1932, represent
something of a paradox: They weren’t a “real”
band and they didn’t even record in Puerto Rico. A protean,
New York-based group of rural musicians who had emigrated to the
U.S., the unit was started primarily to make records for impresario
Arturo Catala’s San Juan store, the Jardin del Arte (Garden
of Art). But despite the commercially driven circumstances under
which theses sides were made, they remain the real thing nonetheless;
yes, conceived under corporate direction, but by authentic rural
musicians who had been playing these same styles in their home villages
for generations. CONTINUE...
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