Just as we were easing into 2008 news came in that Andy Palacio had lost his fight for life and had been flown to his home country of Belize where he died on January 19th. The news was even more difficult to comprehend as he had such an extraordinary year in 2007 with so many awards an accolades.
GondwanaSound first broadcast this tribute on January 2008 and you can read the full script below.
Listen to the GondwanaSound Andy Palacio tribute.
Tributes continue to pour in from around the world for Andy Palacio who died on 19th January in his homeland of Belize.
People have been moved to leave messages on his record label blog and comments on his my space profile, demonstrating the impact that Andy Palacio's life and work has had.
One such tribute was a poem posted by Cheryl Noralez the last lines read
"We are neither American, Belizean,
Honduran nor Guatemalan…
We are only Garifuna.
When I die, bury me in my gudu
and tie my musue around my head.
When I die, let the drums beat loud,
so my ancestors will know that I'm coming home.
When I die,
lay my Garifuna flag over my casket
so those who did not know that I was a Garifuna when I was alive,
will know that I am Garifuna when I die."
A national hero in Belize, loved for both his his music and for his activism and advocacy of the Garifuna language and culture.
He first suffered seizures on 16th January and was rushed into a local hospital.
News of his health crisis sent shockwaves throughout the country, where Garifuna spiritual leaders held ceremonies to help his recovery. People also gathered in prayer at a public service in Belize City.
His condition worsened and a day later he was being transported in an air ambulance to Chicago to receive treatment at one of the leading neurological facilities. En route the plane had to stop at Mobile in Alabama to clear US immigration. At this stage Andy had fallen into a coma and he was too ill to continue and was instead put on a life support system in a hospital in Mobile.
After suffering a heart attack and a stroke doctors advised that the damage to his brain was too severe and that chances of recovery would be slim.
On January the 18th his family requested that he be flown back to Belize so that he might die in his homeland.
20007 was a year of tremendous achievement for Andy Palacio, who had entered another level with the release of his album Watina, in March. His third studio but his first international release with Stonetree and the Cumbancha label.
Described personally as his masterpiece, Watina received huge critical acclaim, arriving in many critics top 10 of 2007 as well as those of retailers around the globe.
Andy Palacio appeared at festivals across the world including African Oye festival held every year in Liverpool in June.
In October at the annual WOMEX, the World Music expo and trade fair, Andy Palacio and his producer and friend Ivan Duran of Stonetree Records were awarded a "Wommie" for the Best World Music cd of the year. Watina was also one of the final four contenders for the BBC 3 World Music Awards Best album of 2007. As an artist he remains a nominee in the BBC 3 World Music
Awards 2008 for the Best Artist of the America's category, the results to be announced in April.
2007 was also the year in which Andy Palacio was named a UNESCO artist for peace and the year in which he received the Order of Meritorious Service in September from the Prime Minister of Belize.
As Charlie Gillet writes on his Sound of the World Forum,
" The sequence of events would be hard to bear at any time. But it is all the more poignant after everything that has happened for Andy over the past twelve months. Far from the unbalanced, ego-tripper that so many successful artists
become, Andy is an even-tempered man who has interpreted any personal acclaim as being recognition for the Garifuna people of Belize, whose music and culture he has done so much to champion. For Ivan Duran, the producer who has worked with Andy since the early 1990s, the anguish must indeed be indescribable."
The Garifuna people originally came for the island of St Vincent. Andy Palacio, grew up in a Garifuna community in the small village of Barranco, in Belize near the Guatamalan border, a direct descendant of the expelled Garifuna. He tells the story of his people in an interview with Afropop's Banning Eyre.
"On St. Vincent there is one account of a ship coming from Africa loaded with Africans bound for slavery. And that a shipwreck occurred, and the Africans made their way to the shore –supposedly with the assistance of the Caribs and Arawaks who inhabited the island at the time. What it was, was a Carib-Arawak mix, because these two groups where already mixing even before the Europeans came. So, the Africans were welcomed into this community. And that's the reason why even today the Garifuna take pride in the fact that we as Black people were never enslaved by the Europeans."
The Europeans did come to the island of St Vincent and as a consequence of British colonialism, the Garifuna were expelled, they were taken ashore to Central America where they established coastal villages throughout Honduras, Guatamala, Belize, and Nicaragua. According to records the arrival of the Garifuna People in Central America is documented as November 1802 and celebrated every year.
In the same interview Andy Palacio talks about the struggle to Express Garifuna culture and language as they were required to speak English during school time, their culture at worst wasn't recognised and at best seemingly worthless.
The coastal communities in the 20th century were also facing being broken up by the wealth interests of property developers and tourist hotels.
Andy Palacio's music and the struggle of the Garifuna are Inextricable.
Apart from a short while when he was an elementary school teacher he has been absorbed in making music most of his life, it is perhaps the shrinking of the globe with technology and all the hard work that has given an international platform to his music.
Growing up he was exposed to all the sounds of the Caribbean as well as sounds from Europe and the US playing on Radio Belize.
Again in the Banning Eyre interview he says :
"I was trying to compose reggae songs, I was trying to compose pop songs, ballads, but the advent of punta rock in the 80's allowed me to focus on making my mark using Garifuna music. So I decided to divert and compose songs in Garifuna, patterned on what had been started by Pen Kayetano and the Turtle Shell Band."
He continues :
"In the early 80's (around 1984 or '85) I actually did my own recording using a cassette deck with a stereo microphone I did a recording of my Garifuna compositions with one Garifuna drummer, myself on the acoustic guitar, and two guys playing maracas and a little bits of percussion. We positioned ourselves in front of the microphone and just played and pressed record."
Andy Palacio had made a conscious act and a decision to use music as the vehicle to promote and preserve Garifuna culture.
He was made all the more determined while working with a literacy project on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast in 1980 and discovering that the Garifuna language and culture was steadily dying in that country.
"I definitely had to react to that reality." He went on to say " I saw it as a way of maintaining cultural pride and self esteem, especially in young people."
His first commercial recordings were made in 1987 under the guidance of St Vincent producer Lenny Hadaway , who was intrigued with some of Andy's Garufina recordings and material he had composed whilst in London on invitation from the Cultural Partnerships Ltd a community arts organisaton. Selling some 1,000 copies in Belize it was sufficient to bring him to the attention not only
of Belizeans at home but also those living outside the country and one in particular, Patrick Barrow.
1988 – 1994 saw Andy travelling back and forth from Belize to Los Angeles cutting a single every year for Patrick Barrow's Key Record Label .
At the same time he helped found Sunrise, an organization dedicated to preserving, documenting and distributing Belizean music.
Towards the end of his Key Record period, he came to the attention of Ivan Duran who was setting up Stonetree Records in Belize. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship which also resulted in the production of two studio albums on the Stonetree label, Kaimoun in 1995 and In Da Mawnin in 1996.
It was also a time of great collaboration and experimentation with Garifuna music. Andy Palacio introduced Ivan to Paul Nabor and his paranda music. Ivan reciprocated and brought musicians over from neighbouring countries to work on fusion projects producing some hard driving dance rythms.
Stonetree records celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2007 and would undoubtedly credit Andy Palacio with a lot of their success.
So this brings us full circle to the release of his current album with Cumbancha, Watina , which translates as "I Call Out". It continues the exploration of Garifuna rythms, and continues to promote Garifuna culture. Whilst is loses none of its advocacy for Garifuna culture , it is perhaps gentler than his last two
albums incorporating a strong spiritual dimension.
Andy describes this album as his personal masterpeice and on asking Jacob Edgar, president of Cumbancha records, whether Andy had a favourite track, I was told that:
" it would be like asking a mother to pick their favourite child"
But there was one that was he was particularly fond of Jacob says :
"The song Ámuñegü A MOO N EY GAY (In Times To Come).
He says : The lyrics to the song are especially aproppriate at the moment, as the loss of such an important figure only increases the urgency of the questions asked by the song:
I wonder who will bake cassava* bread for us in times to come
I wonder who will speak with me in Garifuna in times to come
I wonder who will sing Aruúmahaní** songs with me in times to come
I wonder who will heal us with the dügü** in times to come
The time has come for it to be preserved
The time has come for it to be taught
The time has come for it to be preserved
Lest we lose it altogether
Our ancestors fought to remain Garifuna
Why must we be the ones to lose our culture?
Let's not do it
Parents, please listen to me. Teach the children
Our language and our songs; our beliefs and our dances
The time has come for it to be preserved
The time has come for it to be taught
The time has come for it to be preserved
Lest we lose it altogether
Lest we lose it altogether
Footnotes:
* Cassava bread is the staple food of the Garifuna and it is derived from the manioc root.
** Aruúmahani is a genre of Garifuna music in which men link their hands and sing a capella. It is a dying art form.
*** The dügü is the traditional Garifuna healing ceremony in which the extended family comes together to make offerings of food, drinks, music and dance to the ancestral spirits. It is presided over by a spiritual healer (buyei)and lasts for a few days.
We can only imagine what Andy could have gone on to produce.
He was working on new material and indeed Fat Boy Slim made some recordings with him earlier in 2007, which have yet to be released. Cumbancha said that they always wanted him to explore collaborations and work with African musicians, perhaps I wonder, bringing the story of the Garifuna full circle, back to their roots with the Africans taken as slaves .
Before his death Stonetree records had already planned a release from Andy Palacio and the all star band featuring Paul Nabor and rising star Aurelio Martinez.
A big tour was planned by Cumbancha for April 2008 with his Garifuna Collective and special guests Umalali, after consideration by all involved it has been decided that Andy would not want this to be stopped and as a way to continue the exposure of Garifuna music and culture, more artists will be added to the bill.
Hopefully Andy Palacio will continue to inspire and guide others.
In thanks for his life and music , there will be a tribute concert at the Bliss Center for the Performing Arts in Belize City on Friday morning The funeral ceremony will take place on Saturday in Barranco, the small village in southern Belize where Andy was born and raised. His body will be brought by boat (weather permitting) to Barranco, where there will be a traditional Garifuna wake as well as a Catholic service.
Andy is survived by his mother, his sister and brother, five children,
Kami, Uani, Nita, Tara, Kamou and two granddaughters.
Andy retained an eclectic musical taste in a recent visit to Belize in November, Jacob Edgar president of Cumbancha records, recalls "I was poking around in his Zune. He had some pretty cheesy stuff in there, which we were laughing about. His musical taste was really eclectic. As a young man, he was really into old school soul groups like the O'Jays, Marving Gaye, etc. Nowadays he had some Prince, Nas, and actually a fair amount of country music on his playlists."
Lets play out with .......
My thanks to Jacob and Anna for their help with this tribute.
Footnote........whilst we were broadcasting a bulletin came through announcing that the BBC had in an unprecedented move revealed that Andy Palacio was indeed the winner of the Best Artist in the Americas category of the BBC Rado 3 World Music Awards, although the panel meets to decide the winners in December the results are not normally revealed until April 10th. The BBC felt that they wanted as many people to know the depth of appreciation for his music in the world music community ..........a full transcript of the statement can be found
at
