Sunsundamba is the owl, in the Kongo ritual language that enslaved Central Africans carried into Cuba and kept alive in the religion of Palo Monte. Idelis Ruiz sings to it: the owl that keeps watch while the forest sleeps, that hates the moon for making it visible, that she asks, over and over, to keep her safe. The song keeps circling back to the owl. Ruiz breaks sunsundamba into a chant, sun sun, calls it, then the full word, then “pajarito vuela, vive en el monte”: the little bird flies, it lives in the wild. In Palo Monte the wild is where the spirits are, and you reach them by naming them and saying where they are. That is what the repetition is for.

Ruiz grew up in Havana and trained in Afro-Cuban song, dance and rhythm after her studies, and from her father, Miguel Ángel Ruiz Silva, a composer, poet and visual artist whose work feeds directly into her repertoire. The music behind her comes from Paris. Isaackito plays trombone in Malka Family, a French funk band that has spent the best part of forty years chasing George Clinton, and he records wherever he can find a socket: a hut in Réunion for Danyel Waro, a village in Mali for the Diabaté brothers. Here he puts slap bass, guitar and piano under her voice and adds two horns, his own trombone and Gil C Freak‘s trumpet. A Palo invocation, carried on funk.

Stream “Sunsundamba” HERE