2023-08-10 14:00:00
Music is the most beautiful form of beauty.
Jose Marti.
It does not exhibit a luxurious car or tinsel or bargains of any kind. There is no need for him, the Spanish writer Menéndez Pelayo would have said. At midnight, and sometimes after 12, you can see this Laudist in a corner of Bauta with his instrument slung over one shoulder and waiting for some miraculous transport to Corralillo, the town where he has always lived and which he loves dearly.
Perhaps because he is too close, because it is easy to stop him and talk to him like one more of this world, without bodyguards or buffoonish “representatives”, few imagine that Erdwin Vichot Blanco, President of the UNEAC Music Association in Artemisa, he is a chair of his instrument, a virtuoso who was once called The Jimmy Hendrix of the lute, capable of facing any kind of stage, large or small, and of leaving his mark on the not inconsiderable number of 44 discs, recorded inside and outside of Cuba together with artists of respectable stature.
Vichot, erroneously classified as a “representative of country music” or as “the guajirito who plays on the program” palms and reeds¨ – which in this case does not make much difference-, with his chords, his permanent study and his intelligence he surpasses this flat doubly erroneous classification, because not only country music reveals and recognizes Vichot’s talent, but also because the lute is not – never was- an instrument of peasant origin.
To what extent does the lute surpass the classification of “country music instrument”, as it has been baptized in a very superficial way?
That is a wrong definition. The lute is not a country music instrument. Its origin dates back to the 3rd century in the region of Persia and Mesopotamia and it seems that it entered the Arab world in the 7th century. Lutenists also existed in China and Japan. Years later, in the 10th century, it arrived in Spain and several centuries later in Cuba.
Proof that it far exceeds that ¨rural classification¨ is that Bach came to compose for 40 lutes and Beethoveen wrote for mandolin, one of the derivations of the lute.
The North American banjo and the Russian balalaika are also other derivations. There is a huge family of lutes: tenor, contralto, baritone, bass, soprano… A simply endless list.
With him you can play everything, the most varied genres in the world: tango, son, chachachá, flamenco, rumba… Whatever. I have a very well-defined opinion on the matter: the instruments are not the limited ones, but the instrumentalists.
To what extent is country music viewed in Cuba from a simplistic and caricatured perspective?
Many people think that palms and reeds it is the most accurate portrait of country music in Cuba. Big mistake. That television program is not the measure of anything. It classifies peasant music greatly. But it comes to form states of opinion that are strongly rooted among us.
So much so that we recorded a very beautiful album with Ovidio González, called I am guajiro and it was not approved to participate in the CubaDisco within this genre, because, according to certain “critics” -not at all reliable, by the way- “it was not peasant music”. They continue to think of the guajiro point with the same mentality of the 19th century, that is, they see a guitarist, a lutenist and two impromptu poets…period.
The peasant repertoire is fabulous, but it is not used. Add to these problems that there were 14 country music groups in the Antonio María Roméu Company and today there are none. The famous “profitability” of the centers has been deadly for them.
When you don’t know deeply about a subject, this kind of blunders and many others occur. Most people don’t even know who Guillermo Portavales was, the initiator of the guajira in Cuba, or who María Teresa Vera was. We are really short of real music critics.
However, the work of reggaeton groups and other liars of the insular pentagram is promoted through the media and other spaces, supposedly cultural.
I don’t discriminate against any gender, but in most reggaeton there are no lyrics or music. However, it is what they hire because it sells. Bauta musicians are not hired in our municipality. The Antonio María Roméu Company has been passive before the needs of true musicians.
I look for my activities and performances myself. And it’s not just about reggaeton, other balloons are also inflated that no one lowers afterwards, figures without any talent turned into great characters, and you know that a repeated lie becomes a truth.
Today genre and style are not defined, they talk about ¨fusion¨, anything is ¨fusion¨. The most contemporary Cuban music does not have its own identity, it has lost a lot in this race, and today it has terrible diffusion among us. The musicians themselves do not know what a changüí, a nengón, a sucu-sucu is…
Erdwin Vichot never stops walking around the staff / Photo: Otoniel Márquez
In addition to constantly going on stage, I also know that you are attracted to teaching and teaching your instrument to younger figures.
I have been a teacher and lecturer. I do not charge my classes. Knowledge is to be passed on, not to be collected. Unfortunately, the lute is a deficient instrument, there is no wood to build it or programs to learn to play it. Your future could be in jeopardy.
For you poetry seems to be a daily and familiar event. How much has it “haunted” you throughout your life?
Poetry has “persecuted” me forever. And for good. I grew up in a very poetic family environment. My grandfather, Tomás Blanco, was an illiterate poet, but he was able to bring together with him, every Sunday, figures of the stature of El Indio Naborí, Chanito Isidrón, Ramón Espinosa… They all came to sing and share with my grandfather. I felt like they were my own family.
Later, while studying the classics of the pentagram, I managed to set poems by Naborí himself, José Martí, Guillén, Lola Rodríguez de Tió to music, to which you can add the Spanish Alfonso Camín and the Cuban Antonio Guerrero, one of the Five Heroes, to who musicalize a complete book: I want to be a song of every daywith the decisive contribution of a troubadour like Mario Darias.
I understand that the field of recording, despite your many recordings, has not given you all the happiness you would like.
I believe that an event like CubaDisco is too theoretical a space, the award-winning records don’t have much incentive. I think that record companies like Abdala, EGREM, Bis Music, among others, should look for better ways to market their products within countries that have agreements with Cuba. Many tape recordings have gone bad, others should be digitized before suffering the same fate. If you ask a Cuban musician how the sale of his record is going, he doesn’t know how to answer anything about it.
You told me that you had an extraordinary experience with the works of Camín, El Poeta de Asturias, and that of Jesús Orta Ruiz, El Indio Naborí.
Camín is a very poorly studied poet among us. He lived on the Island for many years and wrote marvelous decimas, with a very tasty, very popular and Cuban language.
As for Naborí, a respectable number of artists participated in the recording of the only album that has been made for him: From the cityin which it is possible to listen to voices like those of Liuba María Hevia and Amaury Pérez and enjoy the contribution of such important painters as Nelson Domínguez, Zaida del Río, Alicia Leal, Ever Fonseca, Leo D´Lázaro, Agustín Villafaña…Unfortunately, neither the Ibero-American House of the Tenth was interested in promoting such a beautiful work.
You confess to being a very demanding artist with yourself and studying every day.
The school provides you with theoretical and practical weapons and teaches you a methodology, but you must continue studying each date on the calendar of your life. Only in this way will you be able to master an art that, like physics and mathematics, is expressed under exact laws, not approximate ones. Either you play it right, or you play it wrong. Half measures do not fit.
I suppose that working with Leo Brouwer, one of the greatest guitarists of all time, has been a true gift from the gods for you.
For me, Leo is the ambassador of Cuban musicians. He innovated the guitar in this country and throughout the world. He made fundamental contributions. He is a conductor, a composer, he has an extraordinary ear and all the most important awards on the planet. Being called to play is a privilege.
That he has composed a work for lute specially dedicated to me is a double privilege. Six times he has invited me to share the stage, to interpret the second movement of the Aranjuez’s concert, Chacona, In memoriam, incidental music (4 movements), bold drume, characteristic dance…
Taking to the stages of the Amadeo Roldán, the Sala Covarrubias, the National Theater, the Basilica of San Francisco de Asís…, under the baton of Leo Brouwer, to a full room, under the most closed applause imaginable, is a simply insurmountable event.
You have already traveled half the world, but you are still gladly installed in a town like Corralillo. What does it mean for Erdwin Vichot to live full time in a place like this?
I have not left Corralillo… nor am I going to leave. In this town is all my family, my parents, my children and all my best memories. Although the issue of transportation is terrible, here I live calmly, independently, I fish in the river, I walk in shorts and flip-flops. The fifteen-day trips out of Corralillo make me cry. Going into Bauta relieves me, getting to Corralillo takes away my fatigue. I’m not interested in fame in any way.
Self-sufficiency is ignorance. This is how I explain it to my children, including the eldest, who is also a lutenist. If one day my smoke rises, hit me with the same lute on the head.
#Lutenist #major #key #Artemis #Diary