More on Etelvina

Damn, still can't find a picture of Etelvina anywhere, but I'll take one this next weekend. We went to the beach Sunday, with a bunch of musicians that included Etelvina and her husband. The beach was a 15-minute bus ride from the Old City, at a place called the Boquilla, which is much less touristy than the Cartagena beaches, but still full of restaurants and vendors. I came to this beach once before, with my friend Sarah McGill, about 3.5 years ago, and we came on a Tuesday when the beach was completely empty. This time a lot of people were out, and we ate fried fish and coconut rice, and we swam in the almost-too-warm Caribbean.

I spent much of the afternoon talking to Etelvina (the 75-year-old singer I wrote about a couple posts below). Etelvina's style of music is called Bullerenque, which features one or more female singers accompanied by nothing more than a bunch of percussion. Someone mentioned that the music originated from pregnant women who composed these songs to entertain themselves while they couldn't dance with the rest of the crowd. Maybe that also helps to explain why these songs have such a bluesy feel to them. Etelvina estimates she's composed 60 songs. "Por què me pegas," which I mentioned earlier is my favorite of all the ones I've heard, she composed 22 years ago. Her neighbor across the street was a single mother with four children, and their house was always a mess and her kids out of control. One day she came home and found the house in a particularly worse state of disarray, and out of frustration and because she did not know whom to blame, she started hitting her oldest child--who cried back to her, "Why are you hitting me, mom?" or, "Mamà, ¿por què me pegas?" Etelvina said that all of her songs begin with simple observations of her life.

The saddest thing of all, though, is that Etelvina lives somewhere on the border between poverty and misery. Her house is in the worst of Cartagena's neighborhoods. Saturday night when she saw that there was leftover rice at the party where she was singing, she asked for a plastic bag to take the rice home. Sunday when we were about to leave the beach, she asked if i could cover the $0.40 bus fare for her and her husband, because she didn't have any money. Keep in mind: this is a woman who has performed concerts all over Europe, who is flying to Mexico this week to perform, and who has recorded three of her own songs on a CD that is sold in record stores all over this country. And it's not like she's blowing her money on wasteful things--she just doesn't have any.

I think about what an audience she could find in the States and Canada and Europe. This woman is like the rawest blues singer you've ever seen. I'd love to play her for Jack White. I'd love to see her play a little club like Tonic, because she is rock'n'roll. This is the whole idea of our festival, I guess--that there's a whole lot in common between jazz music and colombian folkloric music. Watching these musicians perform is like being in Louisiana or Mississippi almost 100 years ago. It really blows your mind.

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Last night was Gisele's goodbye dinner; she's off to Bogota for a little while, then Rome. I had the pleasure of meeting a woman named Jane Chaplin, who is Charlie Chaplin's daughter. She lives here in Cartagena (although she's still learning spanish), where she's writing a book. Before that I met with Raimundo Angulo, who is the president of the Miss Colombia Pageant, which is by far the biggest annual event in this country. It's kind of like being the owner of the Super Bowl, but only if the Super Bowl were played by some of the most beautiful women in the world. Dr. Angulo is also the president of the Teatro Heredia, and so he's very excited about the festival, and he's going to be lending his organization's public relations department to help us with publicity. Believe me, that's a lot of help.