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.

This anthology comprises the triumphant sounds of those ageold traditions finally making it to wax thanks to the still relatively technology of audio recording. Here’s the real-folk deal, native plenas, danzas, boleros, decimas, and aguinaldos, as well as several fascinating pieces that show the influences of American, South American, and Cuban pop and dance styles. And these 23 buoyant, torrid feet-movers just about boil over with revved-up, impossibly locomotive string runs, their itchy rhythms driven by maracas and guiro (a notched, hollow gourd played with a scraping stick).

The thick accompanying booklet includes notes by Ruth Glasser (author of the definitive genre study, My Music is My Flag) and translations of the original Spanish lyrics. The highly emphatic singers here sound like they have something they really need to tell us—whether it’s to recommend a lady friend that makes the best coffee in town (“Café Colao [Strained Coffee]”) or just to let loose with some macho posturing (“Se La Voy A Decoser [I’m Going to Rip It Up]”). But the strangest piece has to be “Jala La Cadena (Pull the Toilet’s Chain),” about the need to flush one’s toilet to avoid “poisoning” the house: “You must be very careful / to avoid eating eggplant / so as not to spend the day / right beside the chain.” Yes, weird. But definitely good weird.