Alfredo
ABOUT ALFREDO
Alfredo Colón is a Dominican-American saxophonist and composer born and raised in New York City. His distinct sound lives at the crossroads of a wide range of experiences and inspirations, from his upbringing in Upper Manhattan, to his Dominican heritage, to his love of musicians with melodic approaches to improvisation, including Sonny Sharrock, Ornette Coleman, and Pharoah Sanders. In early 2020, Alfredo was awarded the Jazz Coalition Commission Fund Grant. He premiered his piece ‘A Witch Gets Married’ in October of that same year. The piece is a meditation on the way that the ethereal and the mundane are seamlessly woven together in Dominican folklore, and is inspired by some of the mysterious characters who appear in the stories.
"Whiteness is nothing but a relationship to blackness...but in particular a relationship to blackness in its relationship to capital" (Moten 55-56)
Alfredo performs his rendition of "Paloma E'," which is associated with a series of 1988 TV advertisements for the rum company Barceló. Alfredo watched the ads all throughout his childhood with his father, who had them on VHS tape and would watch the videos when he was missing the Dominican Republic. This video ad in particular brought tears to his father's eyes every time as it parallels their family's migration story. In this video, we see a Dominican man in a New York Yankees hat who has moved to New York and is trying to save up enough money to bring his wife over to start a family with her so that she doesn't have to work the fields anymore. The video ends with the couple embracing as they are reunited in New York, and this final image is "bottled up" in a bottle of rum. Alfredo's father likewise moved from New York, and was alone in the city for a year until he was able to bring Alfredo's mom.
The lyrics are imbued with a nationalist pathos, including lines about how wonderful the sugar cane is in the Dominican Republic, and that the DR is a country "that sings." At the end of the song, the narrator compares the first words his wife speaks each morning to the sun rise, lighting up each and every day.
Put succinctly, Barceló rum is made appealing by implying that shared migration and reunification stories of Dominican families are captured in the taste of this quintessentially Dominican rum. Indeed, Alfredo grew up with an deeply emotional connection to the rum—it reminded him of what his family had to go through in order to be together.
Alfredo has had countless impressive opportunities as a musician, but his parents were most proud when he was asked by the Association for the Dominican Classical Arts (ACDA) to arrange a song for pop singer Maridalia Hernandez, one of the musicians in Juan Luis Guerra's band, which you hear in this video. He chose "Oye Pichirilo," a song by Dominican musician Luis Diaz, who grew up in his parents' hometown.
Barceló's advertising resonates with the disapora story of "hundreds of thousands of Dominicans" who left the island for New York City, which has become a "second Dominican capital" (Roorda et. al 7). Luis Guarnizo argues that Dominicans in New York can be considered "non-assimilationist," and that "Dominicanness" is reproduced in "everyday social interactions" and "imprinted on the urban space" (Guarnizo in Roorda et. al 493). The "colorfulness" and "blaring music" in New York is a "replica of life on the island" (493).
This sentimental story is complicated by the fact that Barceló is a Spanish-owned company, which nods to the long and violent history—and continuing legacy—of Spanish colonization/occupation of the Caribbean islands. The rum company was founded in 1930, when Julián Barceló moved from Spain to Santo Domingo to follow "his dream of devising the best rum in the world." In 1974, Barceló gave the business to his nephew Miguel Barceló. The company later gave a group of Spanish businessmen the rights to export Bareceló. Yet the company advertises that the rum is "emblematic of Dominicans." In addition to constructing a Dominican sensibility in their messaging, Barceló's brand is very much concerned with the "authenticity" of the spirit itself, partnering with The West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association (WIRSPA) to get a stamp of "authenticity, provenance and quality" (Dowling 44). At the time of Dowling's article, the company employed 1,112 people directly and 2,600 indirectly (44).
Rum, which is made from either sugarcane juice or molasses (which is also derived from sugar), was "likely first distilled in Caribbean sugarcane plantations in the 17th century" after Christopher Columbus first brought sugarcane to Hispaniola (what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic)" in the late 1400s (Dowling 44). With the importation of sugarcane came the importation of enslaved labor from Africa via the Transatlantic Slave trade as early as 1503 (before the American Colonies), until slavery was officially abolished in the Dominican Republic in 1822 (and restricted in 1801) (Torres-Saillant 130). According to anthropologist Samuel Martinez, in the 1880s and 1890s West Indians largely replaced Dominicans in cane fields, and West Indians were largely replaced by Haitians by the 1930s (Martinez 2007, 22-23). This changing labor force helped plantation managers to circumvent resistance and promote "ethnic divisions as a strategy of labor control" (Martinez 2007, 23). For the past 100 years, sugarcane plantations have relied on seasonal migrant laborers from Haiti during the harvest (Martinez 2012, 1858). Historian/historical geographer characterizes the Dominican Republic as having a "sugar economy" with about 30 % of the economy depending on the sugar industry (Chardon 442-443).
Martinez aptly notes that as the sugar industry became a multinational corporate endeavor at the turn of the 20th century, the residential compounds of cane workers could be characterized by a "monotonous sameness" that establishes a "de facto 'international style' of plantation architecture" (Martinez 2007, 37). It is interesting, then, that Barceló's advertising tells a single beautiful diaspora story, capitalizing on the emotions of their consumers by accentuating individuality, while creating a system of mass labor that dehumanizes and de-individualizes workers.
It is important to note, however, that unfair labor practices on sugar plantations have been met with various forms of informal resistance throughout the decades. Especially during the Trujillo dictatorship from 1930- 1961, tensions between Trujillo and foreign investors gave cane cutters additional "leverage" in acts of resistance (Legrand 592).
Sugarcane worker pictured on Baceló's website.
"War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience" (Sidney Mintz qtd. in Curtis, 64)
Rum and Coca Cola—adjacent story in Trinidad
"Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar
Out on Manzanilla Beach
G.I. romance with native peach
All night long, make tropic love
Next day, sit in hot sun and cool off"
Though the mixed drink of rum and Coca-Cola likely has its roots in the Spanish-American War (1898), the drink was popularized in American populations during World War II (Curtis 64). It was during WWII that the U.S. military arrived in Trinidad, with "Chiclets chewing gum" and "case after case of Coca-Cola," with war being a "prime occasion" to boost the drink (67). The off-duty activities of American soldiers inspired Calypso singer Lord Invader to alter a tune originally composed in 1906 by Trinidadian musician Lionel Belasco called "L' Année Passée" and it became a "great local hit" with both Trinidadians and sailors (68). While on a tour of the West Indies military bases, comedian/cellist Morey Amsterdam overhead soldiers and sailors singing the song, who performed the song on the radio, and later published. The singing group the Andrews Sisters further popularized the song, and by February 1945, "nearly a half-million copies" of the sheet music had been sold (69).
Here, we again see how the the material impact of occupation— on the economy, on food, on interpersonal relations—are brought directly into an indigenous music practice.
The Dominican Republic is characterized by the "blending of all things indigenous, European, and African" due to centuries of European and American colonization (Roorda et. al 1). As a result, a wide range of musical activity, particularly that of the Dominican military band, has direct influences in the French, Spanish, British and American military. I thus want to provide a (very brief) overview of the occupation of the Dominican Republic. Christopher Columbus' 1492 arrival in what is now the Dominican Republic, and subsequent initiation of the first Spanish colony marks the beginning of the colonization of Dominican land (3). This was followed by a Spanish effort to create a plantation economy by "dividing up the indigenous people and forcing them to word (2). In 1697 the "western portion of the Island" was handed over to the French, and thus the colony Saint Domingue was born (3). After Haiti declared its independence in 1804, Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines led an effort to occupy the Dominican Republic in 1822, who had just declared independence from Spain. In 1844, Dominicans gained independence from Haiti ( 5). 1860s were marked by a a recolonization effort by the Spanish, and in the 1870s, the U.S. attempted to "annex" the country (5). From 1916 to 1924, the U.S. marines engaged in a brutally violent occupation, which "built the foundation" for the "long-lived dictatorship" of Rafael Trujillo, who took over in 1930 and remained in power for three decades (6).
As my above discussion of Barceló should make clear, the legacy of Spanish colonization is by no means negligible, and Spain continues to have a substantial amount of economic power.
Photograph of the Dominican Military Band
I am especially interested in the French influence on the Dominican military band, given Alfredo's affiliation to the saxophone (which was invented by Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax). I was unable to find any substantial scholarship about the Dominican military band so my writing here relies on some of my own conjecture.
The saxophone was invented in 1840 by Adolphe Sax, and was soon after introduced into French (and later, British) military bands. An 1891 news article by "The Metronome" praises the use of the saxophone in the military band due to its capability of "furnishing a tone of considerable volume, which at the same time is of good musical quality, blending harmoniously with the other and several families of read or brass instruments" ("Saxophones," 53).
Today, the saxophone is a key instrument in the Dominican military band (as pictured above) as well as in other Dominican music practices. We can see, for example, the saxophone featured heavily in merengue music:
"Jazz's double signification as a generically North American form on one hand and a specifically black North American form on the other lies behind the contradictions that surround its assimilation in the Dominican Republic. As an expression of African-American culture in the United States, jazz represents an alternative to dominant, mainstream culture to many North Americans. By contrast, jazz represents connections to the hegemonic United States to many Dominican music fans, who see it as a cosmopolitan marker of social status. Dominican musicians, on the other hand, have created aesthetically integrated merengue-jazz hybrids that stand as an affirmation of the shared foundations of African-influenced musics in the United States and the Dominican Republic " (Austerlitz 17).
Alfredo's own hybrid music-making exists at a complicated crossroads. As a Dominican jazz musician in the U.S., Alfredo's music approaches jazz both as a Dominican and as a Black American.
The interesting paradox of occupation is that it simultaneously energizes rupture and continuity. This is the hinge on which instruments are indigenized and traditions are invented.
The first occupation of the Dominican Republic by Spain launched centuries of sociopolitical rupture for the indigenous populations on the island. At the same time, however, this immense rupture also set the groundwork for a continuity and expansion of a variety social and economic practices.
We can see, for example, a continuing Spanish influence on the economy, even after Dominican independence. This is why a Spanish businessman is responsible for one of the largest Dominican rum companies. Furthermore, it was an existing Dominican affiliation to rum that Ron Barceló strategically capitalized on in the first place. And that affiliation came into fruition after Columbus' introduction of sugarcane on the island! We similarly see a Belgian/French military instrument incorporated into already-existing musical traditions in the Dominican Republic. The sonic characteristics of the saxophone have made it an effective instrument both in Dominican military music, as well as in merengue and jazz.
Alfredo's performance of "Paloma E'' reflects all of this, as he attempts to take control of Barceló's narrative, reclaiming rum and reclaiming stories of (at times, forced) migration.
“Form and content are both mutually expressive of the whole. And they are both equally expressive…each have an identifying motif and function. In Black music, both identify place and direction. We want different contents and different forms because we have different feelings. We are different peoples" (Baraka 185).
To learn about jazz as a military tool during the Cold War:
If you want to watch Alfredo's composition "A Witch Gets Married," his take on a Dominican Folktale: