The main choices on this particular Wednesday night were of a most personal nature.
Had I been thinking first and foremost as a reporter, I would have caught an act with which I was thoroughly unfamiliar. There were, for example, various options for electronic dance music, or I could have gone to Il Boccalino for Ricardo Velásquez’s piano boleros. There were at least three possibilities to hear jazz by musicians with whom I am by and large familiar in combinations with which I am not. There were some cumbia shows by bands with whom I am only familiar from TV, radio or the buses to the Interior around town. And none of this even took into account the larger casinos, which are giving a lot of Panamanian musicians work after several very lean years for national culture in general.
I did take my notebook along, as I almost always do. But this was not a night for me to take notes on the music, but to go out for music I really want to hear --- the sorts of things that I have previously reviewed for in this publication.
Still it was a problem, because at the Balboa Theater they were closing out the Sacred Music Festival with Panama’s national symphony and national chamber choir, both of which I know and really like, with the Coro Camara de Popayan, whom I haven’t heard, performing Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War.” It had been too long since I’d caught one of my friend Lizzie Leigh’s performances, and this was a very special concert for Archbishop Cedeño.
But meanwhile, over at Taco’ntento on the Calle 42 club strip, the central conspirators of the Grupo Tuira --- Rómulo Castro, Luis Arteaga and Valeria Ovando ---- were at it again, and it had been announced that they’ve got a new guitarist (Luis Bonilla) and would be playing.
I ended up catching the latter act, which except for “La Rosa de los Vientos” was a performance of things I hadn’t heard from these folks before. Bonilla is schooled in a classical guitar style, which overlays one more dimension onto the eclectic Grupo Tuira, and on this night they had some pretty good percussion too. (For a band named after the Tuira River, the main drag in the Darien, one might expect some lewd pulsating jungle rhythms. I will skip the semantic debate about which if any of the three adjectives properly applied.) They mostly played stuff from South America and Spain, very well arranged by Rómulo Castro, who sang more than he usually does on these nights. (It’s not that Castro’s a bad singer, or even not a good singer, but when any singer is onstage between Luis Arteaga and Valeria Ovando, usually she or he is outclassed.)
Legislator Balbina Herrera, who will probably occupy a cabinet post come September, made a late grand entry. Considering that Rómulo’s dad, Nils Castro, is one of the PRD’s key strategists, that Rómulo counts himself as a protegé of the late poet, philosopher, playwright and army sergeant Chuchú Martínez (Omar Torrijos’s closest aide), and that Rómulo wrote Martín Torrijos’s main campaign song (which was more often than not performed by Rubén Blades), this was no huge surprise. Ah, but little did she know. These guys start early (about 8:30) and end early (about 10:30). It’s Wednesday night music for people who need to be at work the next morning, so Balbina missed most of the show.
I had a good time, and if the coming change of government means that Grupo Tuira will get some public assistance to tour North America and Europe to promote Panamanian culture and tourism, then maybe some of you who live away from the isthmus will be able to catch this act in your home town and have a good time too.
Or maybe you might want to pay us a visit, fortified with the knowledge that you, too, may be faced with some agonizing choices between very good musical acts staged at the same time. There are many, many fun nights here, but unless you can find a way to repeal those inconvenient laws of physics, you can’t enjoy them all at once.
Also in this section:
Proyecto Bolivar schedule
Another version of Grupo Tuira
