"Rapture": Afro-Caribbean Ritual Music in New York's Post-Punk, World Beat Avant-Garde

MUSICS ABROAD

SPEAKER: Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Boston University

As the site of encounter between various populations of African descent (African-American, Anglophone Caribbean, Hispanophone Caribbean), New York City has long been a crucible of intra-diasporic musical encounter. As a center of the global culture industry, it is also a node for the metabolization of those encounters into both experimental and commercial music.

This presentation follows Afro-Cuban ritual drumming (batá) in New York in the 1980s to trace the participation of Afro-Caribbean ritual music and musicians (such as Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, Daniel Ponce, and Milton Cardona) in a variety of seminal musical experiments of the time, as  the city’s mostly white downtown experimentalists (like David Byrne, Malcolm McLaren, Bill Laswell, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Blondie, Herbie Hancock, and Verna Gillis) found in Black popular culture, including hip hop, "salsa," and Afro-Cuban sacred music important and often ethically fraught raw materials for the creation of avant-pop genres such as no-wave and world beat in the post-punk era. 

By tracing their connections with Afro-Cuban sacred music and musicians, I demonstrate a considerable Afro-Caribbean stream in post-punk and no-wave music and offer a vision of the 1980s "World Music" phenomenon as, at least in its beginnings, something more akin to "Uptown Music": downtown explorations of New York City's Black and especially Afro-Latino communities and their music. While familiar questions of cultural appropriation and the aesthetics of primitivist modernism arise in these projects, I also explore the ways in which spaces of collaboration emerged for Afro-Caribbean ritual musicians to engage in their own, often quite experimental, projects. 

About the Speaker

Michael Birenbaum Quintero is Associate Professor of Music at Boston University, author of a monograph on musical constructions of Blackness in Colombia, Rites, Rights & Rhythms (Oxford UP, 2018) and co-editor of La cultura es una lucha politica (Universidad del Valle, 2024), the autobiography of the Afro-Colombian dancer, singer-songwriter, leftist, and Muslim Alicia Camacho Garcés. He has also published on loudness and urban space, Black vernacular sound technologies, and the affect of music streaming. He is currently researching ritual drumming and sound cosmologies in the US and Nigeria and editing a film about the homecoming of a Cuban master drummer. In Colombia, he has collaborated with the Black social movement, directed a community music archive, and designed state cultural policy. In Massachusetts, he makes music with Cuban and Dominican culture-bearers, works on community music projects, and is active in neighborhood grassroots organizations.