Los Hombres Calientes, New Orleans
"one foot in 2000 BC and one foot in 2000 AD"

African roots bind Cuba and New Orleans, and now five New Orleans musicians have become the first African American group to join a privileged Yoruban fraternity of ceremonial drummers and own a "family" of sacred drums.

"We’ve linked the African chain from Africa to Cuba to the United States," said well-known New Orleans drummer Bill Summers. "To me, as an African American, that is a big deal." The drums were created and consecrated in ceremonies over a period of two years by Cuban Esteban "Cha Chá" Vega, who Summers said is "revered as the man, the high priest of drummers on the island."  Cha Chá also officiated at the initiation of the New Orleans musicians into the Yoruba fraternity while Cuban master drummer Pancho Quinto, who visited New Orleans last year, participated in the ceremony.

Summers was on his fourth visit to the island, furthering a musical and spiritual relationship spanning 35 years. The innovative drummer of the local Latin jazz group "Los Hombres Calientes" participated in the Havana events of the January cultural trip, but said the trip to the Afro Cuban heartland of Matanzas was his primary motivation in traveling to the island.

Summers said he has fought a long time to preserve the strong cultural, musical, and African heritage connections that unite Cuba and the Crescent City, and rejected the notion that communication and cultural ties between the two places suffered after the Cuban Revolution. Many African Americans from New Orleans have defied political obstacles and traveled to the island through third countries, he said. New Orleans’ black residents "refuse to let political issues deter them from discovering their heritage," Summers said. "It is important to me that what we did is understood."

Cuba was the second-largest port of call of the colonial slave trade, after Brazil. African influences percolate through Cuban culture, from rhythm to religion, and Afro-Cubans are known for maintaining their African cultural traditions. That’s why Summers took students Kito Johnson, 12, his brother Rashidi Johnson, 15, Southern University law school graduate Gino Thomas, and his brother, UNO student Mashona Thomas, to be initiated into the African Aña fraternity of drummers by the master of Cuban master drummers, Cha chá.  [Chachá is on tour in the US this fall with the Matanzas All Stars.]

The Aña fraternity is an African tradition of the Yoruba people, a privileged caste of musicians who are the only ones able to play the sacred family of Bata drums -- the Iya drum, meaning mother in Yoruba; the middle range drum, the Itotele, representing the father; and the Okonkolo, meaning "little one, which plays a basic pattern which holds the family together," Summers explained.

To be initiated, the men had to commit to memory 22 suites of music, featuring about 600 different rhythmic patterns. Two more of Summers’ students, Marcus Guillory and Michawn McKnighten, will travel to Cuba to be initiated in April. The men traveled under the auspices of the Summers Multi-Ethnic Institute of Arts, run by Bill Summers and his musician wife, Yvette Summers.

New Orleans master drummers are scheduled to perform publicly for the first time at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival this spring, opening for Carlos Santana at Lake Front Arena during the first weekend of the festival and performing a Summers composition at the fair grounds with master African drummers from Senegal, Brazil and Cuba.

"We’ve been training people to participate in traditional African ceremonies, things taken away during slavery," Summers said. "Most of the African spiritual practices carried negative connotations that were promoted by those who enslaved Africans. We must evaluate these things ourselves and among our own people. This is really the purpose of my doing this with them."

- reprinted by permission of the author