"The racism in Colombia is clear," says the 49-year-old band leader from his office in Cali. "This has created an additional level of difficulty for our etnia," our ethnic group, "because we are black and because we are poor."
With seven gold and four platinum records under his belt since forming Grupo Niche twenty years ago, Varela has come a long way from the poverty of his native Quibdó, a tiny village on the Pacific coast in the department of Chocó. At the time of his arrest in 1995, the musician owned a modeling agency, a two-million-dollar discotheque in Cali, and a $250,000, 48-track, state-of-the-art recording console. He also invested generously in the campaigns of aspiring Afro-Colombian politicians, a move Varela thinks did not go unnoticed by the nation's power elite. He is convinced that his wealth and influence got him into trouble with the law in a country he believes is not ready to accept a successful black man.
Race is particularly complicated in Colombia, where geographical and cultural regionalism have separated the sangre, those with African blood, from one another as well as from the rest of the nation. Chocó is one of many far-flung territories where the Spanish plantation system scattered African peoples. Limited contact among the black people of Chocó, the Caribbean islands, the Atlantic coast, and the inland city of Cali led to the development of distinct forms of neo-African expression in each region. What being black means -- and what it sounds like -- often depends on where you live.
Racism, the brutal common denominator of the black experience, unites otherwise very different Afro-Colombian communities. Paradoxically racism also aggravates the intense regionalism that characterizes Colombian culture in general. While Colombians of all races tend to identify by region first and foremost -- as Paisas (from Medellín), Caleños (from Cali), or Costeños (from the coast), Afro-Colombians are especially likely to put hometown before nation. The songs Varela has written for Grupo Niche include praise for Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla, but not a single tune celebrates Colombia as a whole.
When asked about the Colombian roots of Grupo Niche's salsa sound, Varela answers adamantly: "There is no Colombian influence in my music. The influence is African." Varela does not mean the influence comes directly from the continent of Africa, however. He explains, "The melodies and the rhythms come from the African people where I grew up on the Pacific coast."
From the time he was eight until he was twelve years old, Varela played with a band of village children called La Timba. The youngsters raised funds for their pastimes by performing African-based folk music on bongos, maracas, and guiros during feast days for the saints. The children learned music from the adults around them. Varela recalls, "My town was so small all you had to do was open your eyes to see what everyone else there was doing."
In addition to the local folk music that played an important role in village life, recordings from Cuba made their way to Chocó. Varela tells how the traditional Cuban son sounded familiar: "We heard more of ourselves in groups like Sonora Matancera than we did in the Colombian groups that were coming from the other coast or from the interior." Across thousands of miles and hundreds of years of separation, Varela heard in the Cuban music the same African roots that inspired him in Quibdó.
The village burned down in 1966, sending the then-seventeen-year-old aspiring musician to Bogotá to continue his studies. At that time little of the neo-African music playing along the coasts and in Cali could be heard in the nation's capital. Varela kept playing, though, and in 1980 formed Grupo Niche, taking for his band's name a term that in Colombia describes the very darkest of black-skinned people.
"We didn't have much of an echo in Bogotá," remembers Varela, telling why the band moved in 1983 to Cali. "In Cali we had the total support of the people." A city with a considerable Afro-Colombian population, Cali began to import salsa with a passion in the late 1960s, and developed a distinctive style of dance that often required speeding up salsa records from 45 rpm to 78 rpm. By the time Grupo Niche arrived two decades later, Caleños were eager for a band that could play music to match their frantic dance style. "There was such an integration between Cali and Grupo Niche," observes Varela, "that we developed hand in hand."
In Cali Niche found a new singer, Tito Gomez, who helped break the group into the international market. The band brought their Colombian sound to the World Festival of Salsa at Madison Square Garden in 1986. Since then Grupo Niche has launched a number of solo singers and become a staple of salsa clubs and festivals. The group has toured the United States more than 100 times and played more than 1700 shows worldwide. But success has had its aesthetic downside: Niche's brand of salsa consequently settled into a rather predictable format that emphasizes the treble with the high end of the piano and a whole lot of horn. Rapid montunos satisfy the Caleño taste for fast footwork, but Varela's consistently neat arrangements aim to please an international audience that knows what it wants and wants to hear it again and again.
Although Varela's compositions continue to reference the African traditions of Chocó and other regions of Colombia, racial consciousness remained a muted concern in Grupo Niche's music until Varela's arrest. Finding himself, despite his fame and fortune, at the mercy of the same forces that lead to the disproportionate incarceration of black men across the globe, Varela's lyrics began to make more pointed statements about race.
"What happened to me doesn't have a name," Varela observes bitterly. He was convicted in 1995 of illicit enrichment, conspiracy, and money laundering. The charges centered on 48 million pesos ($27,000) Grupo Niche received from Cali cartel boss Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela as payment for a concert appearance. The band leader was released from jail a year later, after demonstrating that the court failed to consider royalties he received for his recordings from Sony Internacional when accounting for his income. Prosecutors appealed the ruling, however, returning Varela to prison at the end of 1997. He served two additional years in a casa especial, a special facility for distinguished convicts, before being released under the condition that he remain inside Colombia.
"They told me we made bad money," Varela protests, "but they didn't say anything to white artists who played on the same payroll. [Venezuelan salsero] Oscar D'Leon and [Puerto Rican salseros] El Gran Combo played there. So did Colombian acts, like [vallenato singer] Carlos Vives. There was no equality."
Grupo Niche continued to tour extensively without Varela and released two albums under his remote direction. For A Prueba de Fuego (Trial by Fire, 1997), the jailed leader approved the band's interpretation of his new compositions by cell phone. In the casa especial, the authorities allowed Varela to install a computer on which he composed, arranged, and played back the material for Señales de Humo (Smoke Signals, 1998).
"Maybe the quality of these projects suffered," Varela admits, "but the sacrifice and dedication it took to keep going more than makes that up for me."
A Golpe de Folklore (With the Force of Folklore, 1999) is Grupo Niche's first release since Varela left jail in October of last year. Free from prison Varela also has extricated himself from Sony. Varela cut the disk on his own label, PPM, Professional Music Producers. His eldest daughter, Yanila Muñiz, runs the U.S. office of PPM out of a small warehouse in the Doral district of Miami. Whatever the source of Varela's income, the production value of A Golpe de Folklore suggests PPM has more than enough money to generate high-quality recordings and manage an extensive distribution network. The strong name recognition of Grupo Niche makes it seem likely Varela's label will succeed where smaller, garage startups fail. The first single, "Han Cogido la Cosa" ("They've Taken Up That Thing"), protests the common use of racial slurs to make jokes. The song repeats a number of traditional racist jabs, only to reverse them in the end. The chorus demonstrates the kind of unequal treatment Varela believes has victimized him: "Black man running is a thief/White man running is an athlete." During the improvised soneo, singer Willy Garcia suggests another way to see the black man. "Let's do the real accounting," he sings. "I am a black man. I am a salsero. My drum plays the message."
The rage behind the humor in "Han Cogido la Cosa" is palpable. The arrangements, however, are as polite as ever in Niche hits. Despite centuries of oppression, each instrument patiently awaits its turn. No matter how ugly the world may be, there are no messy descargas here. The orderly instrumentation might be a way of keeping a cap on the rage, a way of holding back what threatens to explode. As if following the hypocritical mores of Colombian society, the song's most pointed chorus fails to be heard on the recording at all: "Don't call me moreno," read the liner notes, "call me negro."
MUSIC EDITOR WANTED
Music guru and "Kulchur" columnist Brett Sokol is moving up to a full-time writing wrole with Miami New Times, and that means we need a new music editor. We're looking for someone with strong opinions and sharp editing skills who can plan and manage a weekly music section, write long-form feature stories, and polish the copy of staff and freelance writers. An editing test is part of the interview process. Serious applicants should send a résumé, cover letter, and writing samples to:
Anne Tschida, associate editor,
Miami New Times
P.O. Box 011591
Miami, FL 33101-1591
e-mail submissions: [email protected]
No phone calls, please.
