Continuum / The Western Wind TANIA LEÓN Indígena

This recording features five works by one of the most powerful and imaginative composers of her generation. Tania León, educated in the Western European tradition, was born and raised in Cuba and is of French, Spanish, Chinese and African ancestry. Her music clearly reflects the extraordinary mixture of cultural influences to which she was exposed. As León has said, "My upbringing facilitated an open ear for everything. I had never had anybody to teach me how to dislike something because it was not appropriate. So I enjoyed everything from the music of the peasants to music from other countries to music of tremendous complexity, like Boulez and Stockhausen." This wonderful recording reveals her to be equally at home in the musical languages of her Afro-Cuban heritage and of the mainstream new music community.

 The centerpiece of the recording, and the most unusual of the five works, is Batéy, a nearly half-hour piece for vocal ensemble and percussion, "co-composed" with Dominican-born composer/pianist Michel Camilo. Written in 1989, it calls for six singers and five percussionists who play a battery of traditional and non-traditional instruments including batá drums, claves, chékeres, tom-toms, congas, crotales, marimba, caxixi, rain stick and a variety of bells. Batéy refers to the villages built for the West African slaves brought to the New World to labor on the sugar cane plantations; the composition celebrates the survival of a people torn from their homeland and forced to toil in physically and spiritually demeaning servitude. 

This is an extraordinary work teeming with the languages, rhythms and harmonies of Africa and the Caribbean but also showing the angular melodic writing and dissonances of American contemporary music. The text is mostly in Spanish, but parts are also in English, a Cuban dialect which León says "imitates the dialect of Africanos," Yoruban, nonsense syllables and even jazz "scat" syllables. Somehow, it all works, and the result is a large-scale composition of haunting effect and great emotional power. León and Camilo composed various sections of Batéy individually and then bridged them together afterwards. Their styles can be distinguished-Camilo's is more tonal and springs out of native folk traditions while León's is more dissonant, more polyrhythmic and denser in texture-but I will leave it to interested listeners to ponder who wrote which sections. (Myrna Nachman)