Afropop's Danny Silva sat down with Quimbombo members Nick Herman and David Oquendo on the eve of their River to River performance on July 29. They spoke about their rich musical histories, how Quimbombo came to be, and why you should bring your dancing shoes to any Quimbombo show...

Danny Silva: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with Afropop today. It’s great to be promoting another one of your shows again—your CD release party last year was lots of fun. So, let’s start off with introductions. 

Nick Herman: My name is Nick Herman and I am the founder and director of Quimbombo. I also play percussion, mainly bongos as well as other percussion instruments, and we’re going to be performing next week, next Wednesday, at the River To River festival. Mainly doing material from our latest CD, Conga Electrica, which came out last year. And David, I’ll let him talk a little about himself but introduce him by saying he is one of the leading singers and guitarists interpreting Cuban music, and he’s been singing with us since 2001.

David Oquendo: I’m David Oquendo. For me, it’s a pleasure to perform with Nick. This is our second album. The first was self-titled, Quimbombo; this one is Conga Electrica. I love to perform this type of music because it’s the pure form of Cuban són. It’s the fundamental style that was created in the 30’s and 40’s with a new flavor without losing the sense of the rhythm and with great musicians and good repertoire and a very energetic performance. The main thing is that I love to perform with Quimbombo.

DS: Quimbombo has been described as a groove band, but also plays traditional Cuban són. Is the band more about preserving a tradition or bring something new?

DO: It’s a combination of the traditional thing and the new flavor. In the brass section, we use the trumpet and sax--not typical for the traditional són--and in the band we don’t include piano, it’s just strings and guitar--that’s typical from the sextet that was created in 1912; that sound. And the bongos, instead of timbales, are very typical in the Cuban sound. The format that we use is the format was created in the Cuban conjuntos--that is bongos and conga.

DS: That format started around 1912?

DO: Yeah, the format of sexteto.

NH: What we try to do is maintain the tradition and add our own flavor to it. And one of the ways that we are bringing modern influences into the music is with the harmony. David has an interesting way of playing guitar so that he can add more complex harmonies to the són style. The very traditional Són tends to have more simple harmonies. David’s way of playing brings some new harmonies, some jazz influenced harmony, into the music in a way that works well and makes sense and also still maintains the danceability. And the other thing I wanted to add, on the latest album we added some extra percussion. Mainly, on a few tunes we added Brazilian instruments (not really Brazilian rhythms), with the exception of one song. But we added instruments from the Brazilian street parades incorporating that into the Cuban rhythm with some sort of hybrid rhythms. But at all times we are trying to maintain the music’s danceability, and work within the clave, which is the most important rhythm in Cuban music. The clave is an instrument. It’s also a rhythm, normally the claves would play [CLAPS RHYTHM] and everything in the són and all the styles that derive són come from that.

DS: Són has been popular in New York for a long time. Having been part of the Afro-Cuban/Afro-Latin scene in New York for a while now how have you seen it change over the years?

NH: I think New York is always getting more interesting. It’s always getting enriched because there are always new musicians coming here. It seems to me that Cuban music in general has gotten a bit more popular in the past 15 years in New York City. The music scene I think has gotten--from a musical standpoint, not necessarily from a business standpoint--but just in terms of the amount of influence from newer Cuban music that can be heard. That’s partially due to more Cuban musicians arriving here and availability of recordings from Cuba. What do you think David?

DO: I think it’s been a big change, because when I came to this country in the 90’s, the movement that I saw in New York was more the music that they call salsa; the foundation of that music is Cuban music, totally. But for more than 5 or 6 years, approximately, in New York City the number of Cuban musicians that are performing in different styles of Cuban music has doubled. And the performances are more pure in form, and include American musicians. You know that in New York there is no one nationality, we’re from all around the world and everybody can understand each other through different styles. I saw a big difference from this moment in comparison to the 90’s. Nick, you can answer that question better than me!

NH: Yeah, yeah, it’s true. I’m happy to be able to bring together some great musicians from different countries and hopefully the result will be something unprecedented in the gig next week on the 29^th. One of the guest percussionists is Zé Maurício, who is a great percussionist from Brazil, from Rio, who has been in New York for a while. One of the ideas behind this album was to see how I can bring together my experiences with Brazilian music and Cuban music and do it in a way that makes sense. That’s one of the things I’m hoping to achieve with the new album.

DS: How did you get all of these great musicians together? When did the Quimbombo spark occur, that you found the right group of musicians that had this sound you wanted to bring out?

NH: Well, the band started in the 1990’s. A friend of a friend offered me a gig at a party and asked me to put a band together and I had been thinking about doing this for a while, so that’s how we first got started. And originally, the concept of the band was a little more towards Latin jazz. We had some vocals but it was mostly interpreting different jazz numbers and a few of my originals with afro-Cuban rhythms. But I’ve always loved són since I discovered Cuban music and as the years went by I started to focus more on the són repertoire, and eventually I met David and I added him as a singer. So for the past, about, 10-12 years we’ve been focusing on the són, the dance music, and music with vocals as opposed to Latin jazz.

DS: You’ve both studied under prominent musicians. Who are your influences? Both in the past and today.

DO: First of all, I’m self-taught and I grew up in a poor neighborhood in Havana. My first influence was the rumba, the more pure form of the Afro-Cuban folklore. And then I passed on to rock ‘n’ roll. Yeah, my influence was Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton. And then there was bolero, a movement that started in Cuba around the late 40’s into the 50’s with Jose Antonio Mendez, César Portillo de la Luz, and Elena Burke. And after that was the traditional són, and I started with Compay Segundo from the Buena Vista Social Club. I was part of the Compay Segundo Trio and Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the director of the Buena Vista Social Club, was my friend. We had almost the same background—he came from my neighborhood and we played together at the beginning in Sierra Meastra. And many different bands, and after that I created my own band with a combination of great percussionists like the late Miguel 'Angá', one of the greatest percussionists ever in Cuba, Mayra May, Puntia Son, and all the great musicians. And for me it was a great pleasure to work with legendary Elena Burke, Roy Masecada, Bene Solis, Marco Gales, great Cuban singers of romantic music. And following that when I came out from Cuba and worked with Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, among others; Johnny Ventura, Lucio Patica, Chico Fabrico, Chao, Candido, Camero, Patato and many others. They taught me a lot about the different styles of Cuban music and jazz, and everything. In a few words, those are my influences. For me it is an honor to have worked with all of them. And beside that it’s an honor to perform with young musicians because they absorb a lot of the experience, and you can get that from them—many good things like the energy, new point of view. In my opinion, musicians, and everyone, have to have an open mind always. The only thing I know is that I don’t know nothing, I have to learn until the last day of my life. That is my point of view, my philosophy.

NH: I started as a rock drummer, and then I began to study jazz drumming, drum set drumming, when I was in college. And through my teacher at the time I was exposed to some Afro Cuban rhythms in a fairly superficial way as patterns at first. I became exposed songo, guaguancó and through jazz I also began to hear music like Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and “Manteca,” and got interested in it. But it was really in the early 90’s that I got interested in Latin music, especially Cuban music. I had a roommate who played congas a little bit and I was already playing drums and I decided to take some lessons on bongos. Bongos were my first instrument of the Afro-Cuban instruments. And you know in New York City it’s not hard to find Cuban music and Latin music, so I started studying at that time with Roland Guerrero, who is a great conga player and percussionist who is teaching at Jazz Mobile in Harlem. And began learning afro-cuban music and eventually I went to Cuba to study in 1999 and 2000, and had the opportunity to learn from some great masters in Cuba like Changuito, Roberto Vizcaino. And Felix Navarro, who is one of the master percussionist from a group called Cutumba, which is a folkloric group in Santiago de Cuba in Eastern Cuba, in Oriente, which plays the traditional music from that part of Cuba which is something not that often heard in New York. Most of the Cuban music in New York is through Havana, especially the folkloric music, but Santiago has a whole other thing going on. I should also say another big influence for me and great teacher was Bobby Sanabria who I studied with for several years in the mid 1990’s and I had the opportunity to watch him direct his band and to play in the Mannes College and the New School Afro-Cuban Big Band playing mainly mambo style music from the 1950’s, mainly from New York. And that was a great experience in terms of percussion but also in terms of learning about what we call, “wataca.” One way to translate that is improvisation and, not necessarily soloing, but making up an arrangement on the spot and that was when I was studying with him and playing music with Bobby. That was really like the first time I saw somebody make an arrangement spontaneously, there was nothing written down but it completely sounded as if we had rehearsed this and we hadn’t so it was a really profound influence on me to see somebody make an arrangement as they go.

DS: And you brought this spirit of spontaneous arrangements and new combinations of sounds to Quimbombo?

NH: Yes, yes. We try to combine new sounds and we also like to improvise a lot. We have set arrangements but every time we play a song we play differently, we try to always breathe new life into the music. There are some songs, from the first album, that we’ve been playing for probably…I guess it’s about 7 years already. But every time we do it a little bit differently and it maintains energy in the music. And that’s what’s most exciting for me, when something new and different happens on stage, something unplanned.

DS: So, David I know you were used to play at Esquina Habanera. What was that like?

DO: We created that in 1996, it was a spontaneous rumba. The first rumba was like that, it was a spontaneous reunion in my house with Maestro Vicente Sanchez, one of the greatest percussionists from Cuba, from the old School. And Tony Sequiera was the owner of Esquina Habanera. At that moment it wasn’t a nightclub, it was a small cafeteria on a corner in a poor neighborhood in Union City. Union City in New Jersey is like a second Havana in United States and that was a great success because the main reason we created that rumba was for nostalgia, from the bottom of our heart and we needed to play it together to bring the original rumba to this country, our new homeland. And the rumba is not only a way to play, it’s a way of life. In Cuba, it was the family reunion every Sunday in the poor neighborhood, when you bring all your family, your kids, all the people too, and that’s the way I learned the rumba because in Cuba we receive the legacy of our ancestors in that way, not in the school.  We learn the languages from our African ancestors in the same way you learn a language when you’re born--“mommy I need milk,” “mommy I’m hungry.” In that same way we learned the language, singing, playing, having a fun and getting together. And that was the way that Esquina Habanera was created. And immediately we had to transform the place because the place was packed! The capacity of the place-- according to the rules and the policy of the fire department--was 100 people; and we had more than 400 people. And we were concerned not to break the law. We had to create a new space--we took down one wall, and made a stage. And little by little, Esquina Habanera became famous around the world. And the band that we created, Raices Habaneira, recorded an album that was Grammy nominated for best folkloric album. People from all around the world came to that poor neighborhood to be at Esquina Habanera. And a great filmmaker from Holland, Heddy Honigmann, made a movie around Esquina Habanera, Dame la Mano (“Give Me Your Hand”). It was awarded at many festivals around the world and the film-maker Ivana Costa made “How to Play the Rumba” in that place too. And many other things…unfortunately that place closed.

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