Artist Bio:
Madly infectious Venezuelan drumming, vocal and dancing collective Huracan de Fuego, sings songs of colonization and slavery.
Huracan de Fuego is reviving the village-based Angola and Congo drumming traditions of coastal Venezuela. Venezuela is largely overlooked among African-Latin American roots drumming, whose traditions show strong musical and spiritual affinity with styles of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Brazil, Panama and the Caribbean coast of Central America.
Huracan de Fuego's members apply their considerable talent in these various traditions, as well as in Venezuela's popular sangueo and parrandas araguena styles.
Huracán de Fuego was born in Venezuela on the Caribbean for the sole purpose of singing and dancing to the drum. The drum, or to be more precise, an array of drums of all shapes, sizes and timbres were brought to the Maracaibo area and the regions near the coast by black slaves who came from what is today Angola, the Congo and Zaire.
Long after many of these places have lost their traditional forms of drums and drumming, a group of young men thousands of miles away and an ocean apart have undertaken the task of recovering these lost instruments.
They are chimbangueles and cumacos, enormous drums played lying on their sides with the musician sitting on their wooden shells and using the heel of his foot against the drumskin to get the right tone.
In their release, Agua 'e Coco, we find a very open group, wanting to connect more intensively with the audience without compromising their original intentions. The playing of melodic instruments, like the cuatro, orumo flute, or the marimbula, incorporated with other percussion, enrich the timbre of the cumacos. And with the proximity of the neighboring musical environments — Columbia, Brazil, and the Antilles Islands, from Cuba to Trinidad — rumba, calypso and samba gently sneak in from time to time through Huracan's dense fiery atmosphere. —Courtesy Calabash Music
