Max Goldemberg y Odilon Juarez Con el Grupo Malpais Downloads
get started about help search
 

Genres

From: North America > Central America, Costa Rica

Genres: Folk

Max Goldemberg y Odilon Juarez Con el Grupo Malpais

Max Goldenberg and Odilón Juárez come from families with a deep-rooted musical tradition. Not only do they interpret the anonymous tunes that circulate in serenades, cantinas and town fairs, but they are also heirs to the best traditions of Guanacaste, a land where Costa Rica’s Central American soul—tied to the marimba, pre-Columbian times and the Spanish colonial legacy—is condensed, and still maintains a great affinity with their Northern neighbor,  Nicaragua.
Son of a Russian immigrant and a Guanacaste woman, Max Goldenberg grew up listening to the a cappella songs of his grandmother Isolina. Uncle Adan Guevara, poet and primary school teacher, put her songs to music. With this exercise, he became one of the peninsula’s most important folklorists.
Bonifacia, Odilón Juárez’s mother, had twelve children, and in her scarce free time, learned to play the marimba and guitar. She used to entertain with duets performed with her husband or her brother Blas Obando. In Guanacaste, the guitar is like a campfire that draws several generations together around it, and music is the teaching method that works best.
[ more ]


Max Goldemberg y Odilon Juarez Con el Grupo Malpais

Buy Cd's from Max Goldemberg y Odilon Juarez Con el Grupo Malpais

Downloads from Max Goldemberg y Odilon Juarez Con el Grupo Malpais

Tierra Seca

When we Costa Ricans think of music from Guanacaste, we tend to recall certain standard songs typical of school functions, all having the same rhythm and seasoned with a measure of marimba and someone breaking in at intervals to shout, “Bomba!”

It will thus be no surprise that, hearing these songs of Max Goldenberg and Odilón Juárez, most Ticos outside the province imagine they come from anywhere in the world except Guanacaste.
Behind the song of the bulls come a pasillo, then a little waltz, and then a “retahíla” (a tune that connects many seemingly unrelated ideas, producing images with a double meaning.) Farther along in the material, there is a bolero, then a corrido, followed by a kind of foxtrot and even a danzón with Brazilian touches.

It’s as if the guitars of Max and Odilón have absorbed something from all the music passing through those tawny meadows over the past hundred years. They have followed in the footsteps of Adán Guevara, José Ramírez Saizar, Arístides Baltodano and so many other songsters who inherited the Guanacaste (and universal) way of interweaving their identity with others. The music of Guanacaste has drunk from so many springs that no single source can now be recognized.

From the Indians they took the ocarina, the
dance of La Yegüita (a very rustic dance dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe) with a style that differs from the Nicaraguan song. From the Africans who traveled the Guanacaste pampas centuries before settling in Limón, they took the marimba, the quijongo and the base of the bull song.  From the Spaniards they adopted the contradance, the guitar and, of course, the language.

Then the 20th century brought the victrola and the radio, the Charleston, the tango, the Mexican ranchera, the bolero. And so, the custom of borrowing the foreign and sharing one’s own became a tradition and everything possible was absorbed, until arriving at Max’s cheese works. There, during long hours of watching the white cheese thicken and solidify as he strained it in the way his father had taught him, Max Goldemberg composed a large part of the songs making up this CD.

The cheese works have since been turned into a library and no longer exist, but they inspired such great harmonic treasures as “La cofradía” (“The Brotherhood”) and  “El vals del coyote” (Waltz of the Coyote”), a lovely metaphor against loneliness.

The Tierra Seca concert was like sitting in front of the campfire, singing along with Uncle Adán’s songs: “Tengo mi hamaca tendida” (“My Hammock’s Hung Up”), a small masterpiece of Guanacaste folklore, and “Fiestas en Santa Cruz,” extolling the valor of the man who risks his life riding a bull to impress his sweetheart; or “La coyolera,” an anonymous song that recreates an old tradition: getting together around a recently cut palm (coyol) to drink the juice flowing out of its trunk. As the hours pass, the fermenting juice takes effect and everybody gets “juma.”     
The disc includes “Rasgos de un corcel” (“Features of a Steed”), one of the most celebrated themes of Odilón Juárez, carrying on the tradition of the Caballito Nicoyano. Two instrumentals, Fidel Gamboa’s “El zapateao” and Goldemberg’s  “El portoncito,” showcase the skill of the musicians and the dialogue attained between tradition and improvisation.

Indicates Most Popular Song

Title

Length

Sample

La Caceria

1:52

La Coyolera

2:07

Fiestas En Santa Cruz

3:05

Tengo Mi Hamaca Tendida

1:38

Bienvenido y el Barroso

1:49

Rasgos de un Corcel

3:54

Ausencia

2:54

El Portoncito

4:33

A Mi Pueblo

3:08

Nayuribe

2:43

Vals del Coyote

2:23

Pueblo Mio

3:38

La Cofradia

3:17

Zapateado    

6:48

El Macrolocuaz

2:32

Buy all songs of this album

All songs just $0.99 each!
Listen to sound samples by clicking on
Click here for help with audio samples.


Buy Songs

Buy Songs 20 Songs, only $14.99

Gift Certificates
Buy one for a friend!

Playlists
Tunes from the Axis of Evil - a Spin The Globe playlist Tunes from the Axis of Evil - a Spin The Globe playlist
Listen Now


Andrea Echeverri Favorites Andrea Echeverri Favorites
Listen Now


Music from Segou, City of Architecture Music from Segou, City of Architecture
Listen Now


Brazilian Carnaval Brazilian Carnaval
Listen Now


DJ Root's Brazilectric Beatz! DJ Root's Brazilectric Beatz!
Listen Now