Photo: Kathleen Dooher

Fascinating Rhythm

A sax player gets into the Colombian groove
By Ben Roseth, A08/NEC

The five-o’clock traffic was worse than New York’s—with BMWs, semi trucks, and horse-drawn carriages sharing the highway—but I braved it gladly, several times a week, not even bothering to change out of the slacks and button-down shirt from my office job. After all, I was getting together with Colombian musicians, at their houses or at gigs around town. What could be better?

Technically I had come to Bogotá for an internship with a multinational executive recruiting firm, but as soon as my saxophone and I hit the ground, I was pursuing music. My first discovery, unearthed during an impromptu rehearsal with some friends of friends, was that Colombia’s internal division is also the source of its musical richness. Colombia is a country of regions, each with an independent musical evolution. Suddenly I knew that an “understanding” of Colombian music would be like a “solution” to Colombia’s political hardships: chimerical.

My second discovery was that none of Colombia’s many musical styles would be easy for me to master. In fact, I was totally lost at first, because the rhythms seemed to have no downbeat. The bambuco, from the interior plains, emphasizes beats two and three of a three-beat cycle. Porro and cumbia, from the Atlantic coast, emphasize all the upbeats. As a jazz-trained saxophonist, I was used to a strong “one” and constant downbeats. I was forever tapping my foot, counting like a madman, trying to keep track of rhythms that seemed to have no start and no end.

Yet the group of 15 or 20 musicians I had found were exploring exactly what I myself most wanted to explore: the fusion of traditional Colombian music with jazz. They were playing everything from saxophone to accordion to marimba to traditional drums and flutes, led by a Bogotá- born saxophonist, Antonio Arnedo, who had attended the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. Jazz, for these musicians, is a way to incorporate new kinds of improvisation and harmonic complexity into their traditional music.

Fortunately for me, Arnedo has a deep interest in jazz and saxophone technique, so we became good friends. He broke down the rhythms for me, compared them to jazz rhythms, and allowed me to pick his brain. He related jazz and Colombian music to their common African roots. “The deeper you look, the more similarities you’ll see,” he said.

So I tried to look deep, but I still needed help from fellow musicians—not just Arnedo but also Túpac on percussion, Juan Andrés on piano, and Julián on bass. I would play a tune of mine for them on the piano, and they would discuss it: “Sounds like a bambuco, with a bit of festejo on the bridge,” or “It’s basically a baiao with a little salsa flavor.” We’d talk and play, fine-tune the styles.

At the end of my three-month stay in Bogotá, I got to play a concert of my original music with three of my new friends. The night was mine, but it was just as much Bogotá’s. First, the schedule. I arrived at the venue—Café El Anónimo, a noisy, dark nightclub regularly used for reggae parties—at 7 p.m., an hour and a half before our advertised start time. The bass player showed up at 8:45, most of the audience at 10, and we finally began to play at 10:15. South America, man. Bogotá also shaped the music itself. All of my six tunes had been Colombianized in one way or another, incorporating different rhythms or melodies. Also, it was Bogotá and its people that had inspired my new compositions.

I am inescapably American. I cannot and will not deny my origins. Nevertheless, international influences are part of me, and I’ve come to understand that I can make them part of my music. The fine musicians I met in Bogotá were gracious enough to show me how it’s done.

BEN ROSETH, A08/NEC, is in the final year of his double-degree program. At Tufts, he is majoring in international relations, with a focus on Latin America. At the New England Conservatory, he studies jazz performance. A veteran of international festivals, he leads a quintet, The Here and Now.