Chocolate: Peru's Master Percussionist

 Among the most impactful aspects of "world music" is the syncretic nature of so much of it, with influences from one or more places transmuting the music of another.  An excellent example is that of Chocolate (Choco-LAH-tay), the nickname of Julio Algendones (1934-2004), a percussionist of great skill and high renown in Peru.  The descendant of Africans brought to work in the horrific conditions in the silver and hold mines of the Andes Mountains of Peru and later on haciendas where cotton and sugar cane were grown, Chocolate devoted his musical life to maintaining the traditions of African drumming in the context of the Cincha area of the southern part of the country or in El Carmen a suburb of the capital Lima, both being areas predominantly inhabited by Afro-Peruvians.

Chocolate, the liner notes tell us, was born in a poor black farming community, where his mother picked cotton, but his talent led him to perform in the capital, where he achieved fame as "the most faithful representative of the cajon [a wood box-shaped drum] and this tradition of ritual drumming which a very people in Pery have maintained and kept alive in its purest form."  The religious elements of santeria and makumba, events like baptisms, weddings and funerals, and everyday opportunities for music and dance permeate the music, with percussionists like Chocolate "seen as a short of shaman who calls or evokes the spirits" and who "is a mediator between heaven and earth since the spirits are expressed through his rhythms."  It is this aspect, the core of rhythm in human life (the heartbeat most fundamentally) and its most basic accessibility to even the poorest of people for "a music for which all that was needed was your body and the nearest objects from which to make sounds," that comes through in the hands of a master like Julio "Chocolate" Algendones, who performed the three pieces on this album, released by Lyrichord in 1993, in 1990 under the auspices of producer J. Blue Sheppard.