EVERY GENRE PROJECT - January 27 - Tamborito

Genre of the Day - Tamborito

Album of the Day - Hoy como ayer by Marimba Chapinlandia (1970)

Today’s listening journey was a bit of uncharted territory. That is: what if the album I listened to doesn’t even represent the genre at hand at all? This shows one potential pitfall of RateYourMusic; one wrong descriptor, one kind of inaccurate genre listing, and the discrepancy detracts from the experience. Today’s genre was tamborito, but I can’t even say if I heard a tamborito album or not. With more niche regional genres, they sometimes blur into each other because music is a continuum, just like language, between neighboring regions and cultures. The farther you get, the more different; the closer together, the more potentially similar traditions are likely to be. That being said, a huge tenet of this project is approaching each genre thoroughly, but unfortunately I’m not sure I even did that.

Tamborito is surprisingly our first slice of the vastly diverse musical world of Latin America. In particular, tamborito hails from the narrow isthmus region of Panama, and means ‘the little drum.’ Like many other folk musical traditions, tamborito is not just a form of music as much as it is a practice: there’s a connected dance, it’s a very participatory genre employed for special occasions in Panama, and it has a deep history. In its earliest form, its creation was influenced by the dance rhythms brought to Panama by enslaved west Africans and became fused with Latin traditions, developing a strong musical tradition for Panama. It’s interesting how regional music genres get elevated to national status in our world defined by the countries that exist within its system; after all, Panama wasn’t even a country until the US funded rebel groups in order to build the Panama Canal, but that’s a story for another day.

I’ll be damned, though: the album I ended up listening to today wasn’t even from Panama, let alone really tamborito, because tamborito traditionally includes female vocals, whereas this album doesn’t use vocals at all. A lesson to do my research prior to listening to the album; I usually try to go in blind and then research as I listen, but of course the sequence looks different every day. And unfortunately, I listened late enough in the day to rectify the issue. So, let’s separate the art from the artist for today, so to speak, and just consider the genre apart from the album. 

Today’s album, Hoy como ayer by Marimba Chapinlandia is a slice of Guatemalan, intensely marimba-driven (do intense and marimba really belong in the same sentence?) folk music. This music has an undeniable pep in its step, which I appreciated; these melodies are imbued with joy, highly catchy, but pretty similar and sonically homogenous across 30 minutes. The marimba is expertly played here, its characteristically sunny sound teeming with an irresistible brightness. Did I enjoy a new half hour of music I hadn’t ever been exposed to? Certainly. Did I learn anything about tamborito? Absolutely not. This is something I’ll have to correct on my own time, I guess; but today’s article can act as a two-in-one, with a moral to the story at the end; you have both a genre and an album not in that genre to explore, and the lesson remains that researching before diving into any undertaking blind is a prudent strategy in life.