Celebrating Puerto Rico

Jazz Fest features everything Puerto Rican from music to food

BY STEVE HOCHMAN

After Puerto Rico was devastated by both Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, plans were made for the island’s rich heritage to be showcased as the Cultural Exchange for the 2020 Jazz Fest. Valerie Guillet, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival’s Cultural Exchange Pavilion coordinator, quickly turned to Puerto Rican musician and educator Tito Matos for guidance and to take a lead role in the events.

Now, after delays due to the pandemic, the planning is coming to fruition with a vast array of PR music, crafts, culture and food woven through Fest this year. And with Puerto Rico hit hard again last September by Hurricane Fiona, the urgency for awareness remains.

But sadly, it will also serve as a tribute to Matos. The beloved figure died last year of a heart attack in his San Juan home at just age 53.

“He had traveled to many countries and many states,” Guillet says of Matos’ tireless advocacy of Puerto Rican music. “But he had never been to New Orleans. So, he was very excited.”

It has turned this into something very personal, as Matos was to have been there, helping oversee the programs and performances, as well as leading parades on the grounds.

“He still is,” Guillet says, pointedly using the present tense. “Definitely. We owe him a whole lot.”

His presence will be there through the two weekends of Fest, vividly in a mural is being done by artist Don Rimx with Matos at the center. And each day there will be parades through the grounds put together by the San Juan cultural institution now known as La Casa de la Plena Tito Matos. Proudly leading those parades now will be percussionist Emanuel Santana.

“Tito was my inspiration,” says Santana, who succeeded Matos as director of La Casa, from his home in San Juan. “He was like my father figure. I called him mi pai, which means my father. He used to call me son.”

The intricately rhythmic plena and its older sibling bomba are core to Puerto Rico’s social and ceremonial life going back to when West Africans were first brought to the Caribbean in the slave trade, comparable to the music that rose from slaves in New Orleans and coalesced in Congo Square.

“Some say it is a song ‘newspaper,’” Santana says.

“It talks about our everyday life. It is the music that we have at parties, that we have at funerals, that we have at protests, that we have in many ways. I’ll be representing La Plena at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, which is a very profound privilege and also a very profound responsibility.”

It’s in those parades that this spirit, and that of the late Matos, will be most profoundly and vibrantly felt. But his impact and presence will be there throughout the programming, a wide variety of sounds and sights representing Puerto Rico and its diaspora on the mainland. Santana himself, in addition to his role with the parades, will be bringing his group Emplegoste, with exuberant contemporary sounds tied to the traditions, appearing several times in the second weekend.

Other artists cover the spectrum, including reggaeton (Farruko), traditional Spanish-rooted jibaro (Conjunto Típico Samratino), bomba both rustic (Tambuye and La Raïz) and urban (Tribu de Abrante). The parades will feature Vejigantes, masked characters from Puerto Rican folklore. And New Orleans-based Alynda Segarra of Hurray For the Rif Raff is planning a special performance in the Cultural Exchange Pavilion highlighting her Puerto Rican roots on the second Friday, while electro-percussion band ÌFÉ, whose leader Otura Mun moved from Puerto Rico to New Orleans a few years ago, plays there the next day.

This sweeping range, too, is in the spirit of Matos, who toured the world with his own bands, including the groundbreaking Viento de Agua, as well as performing with Ricky Martin, Miguel Zenón and Eddie Palmieri, among others.

Puerto Rico of course is having a moment now with the global superstardom of Bad Bunny, following generations of artists taking the island’s sounds around the world, via the New Yorkbased salsa and boogaloo of Tito Puente, Willie Colon and Ray Barretto, the boisterous pop of Ricky Martin, the reggaeton of Daddy Yankee— not to mention Puerto Rican-American J-Lo. Santana hopes to show the foundations of all this, the paths back to where the music came from.

“I think they’ll get a very deep experience of our African heritage,” he says.

This extends beyond the music and beyond the shores of Puerto Rico, Guillet says.

“While we have focused on artists from the island, a majority of artists who live and survive on the island, we have elements of the Puerto Rican diaspora with our local groups and some exhibits,” she says. “We want to give that side of the story as well.”

Exhibits will include bomba workshops and a display of traditional bomba attire, photos of Puerto Rican life in the continental US by Wanda

Benvenutti and a presentation of album covers from Puerto Rican artists that shows the history of the music.

And then there’s the food.

“Ah, food! Of course,” Guillet says.

The main dish that will be served at the stand outside of the Cultural Exchange Pavilion will be trifongo, which she calls an “iconic dish of Puerto Rico,” a descendant of West African dishes with seasoning tied to the island’s Spanish legacy. Basically, it’s plantains mashed with yuca and garlic, fried—and then refried—which can be filled with pork, shrimp or served vegetables. Guillet, who has worked for Fest developing the cultural programs for 20 years, admits that on first experience in Puerto Rico she wasn’t sold.

“I thought it was a little too heavy for my personal taste,” she says. “And then we went to the countryside and stopped in a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and it was amazing. Just out of this world.”

She also notes that the pavilion itself, which will host acts from Africa and other international origins in addition to those from Puerto Rico, has been redesigned to accommodate more people and provide better sight lines than has been the case before. One change is that the crafts displays will now be in a new adjacent area. But it will not lose the special qualities that have made it such a popular feature.

“It’s an intimate stage and there’s a very direct connection with the performers,” she says. “The flip side is that the space is limited.

Puerto Rico, with a population of nearly 3.3 million, sits in the northeastern Caribbean, about 1600 miles from New Orleans. It is the third representative of the region to be featured thus at Jazz Fest, with Haiti and Cuba preceding. But it holds a distinct position in that it is not a country, of course, but officially an unincorporated territory of the U.S. with Commonwealth status. It’s neither this nor that situation that leads to some confusion for many less familiar with it. It’s not independent, but it’s not a state. It had a representative in the U.S. Congress, but without a vote. And yet it sent its own team to the recent World Baseball Classic tournament, as if it was an independent nation.

This has for generations made for political clashes over PR’s status, at times turning violent. Many proposals have been voted on among the Puerto Rican population and in the U.S. Congress, but with no changes are forthcoming. As of 2016, many government functions happen with direct oversight from a federal control board. The most recent referendum there, in the 2020 general election, saw 52 percent of voters favoring statehood.

Officially, Jazz Fest has no political position in the presentations, though many participants clearly will share their views. Santana, who sees the Jazz Fest time as an “opportunity for discussion,” favors independence and does not hesitate to use a strong word to describe PR, politically.

“Colony,” he says, emphatically. “There’s no way around it. That’s what we are. And it is a very sad reality. But by taking our art to the world, representing our music and having a great time with many people, with many different points of view we can have a great time and with our music we are making a statement that we are a country and should be a free country. We are working toward it. We are looking to make a better place, based on love from Puerto Rico.”

This will have a special resonance in New Orleans, with the shared cultural histories, and seems certain to manifest in musical meetings. The idea of getting on stage with some New Orleans musicians or hopping into New Orleans second line parades with Black Masking Indians and brass bands is irresistible to him, as it would have been for Tito Matos.

“We’re looking forward to it,” he says. “It hasn’t been scheduled yet, but I’m sure it will happen. We can’t help ourselves if we see something like that. We’ll play along.” O

Friday April 28 at 3:05 p.m.