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Written in Folk Roots issue 166, 1997

LUÉTIGA
Cernéula
Several SCD-913 (1996)

Along the north coast of Spain there are the quasi-autonomous regions of, from west to east, Galicia, Asturies, Cantabria and Euskadi. In contrast to the neighbouring regions (particularly Galicia and Euskadi, while Asturies continues to rise musically), there aren’t a lot of musicians working with Cantabrian music, but the group Luétiga has been in existence for ten years, finding and learning from traditional musicians and material. For example, last year when I was visiting band members Marcos Barcena and Kate Gass, Barcena had just made a contact via his local radio programme which that evening yielded, at a meeting in a bar near their home village south of Santander in the foothills of the Cordillera Cantabrica, a densely-written notebook of song lyrics passed down in a family.
      Cernéula, the band’s second album, features street marches, a ribbon dance, pasodobles, jotas, a dance-song, with Barcena on Asturcantabrian bagpipes, guitar and lead vocal, Roberto Diego on bagpipes, flutes and pipe and tabor, English-born Gass on violin, clarinet, requinto and melodeon, Raul Molleda on bass, tabor-pipe and vocal, and Conchi Garcia and Fernando Diego playing traditional percussion including pandereta, pandero and bombo.
      The language of the songs is Cantabrian, and the lyrics, combining new composition with traditional formats and tunes, and translated into Castellano and English in an informative CD booklet which also has photos of traditional musicians in past decades, tend not to mince words - “skin your woman and give it to a mink”, says Molleda in Arrimeme (“I Got Closer”), the text of a well-known song Mulinera (“The Miller Girl”) is modified by Barcena as a protest against Spain’s compulsory military service, and Roberto Diego’s lyric in Soi De Cantabria Soi is a lament for ‘a badly treated land, a disappearing culture, a sleeping village’ - “They came a hundred years ago from foreign shores, covered all our land, poisonous Eucalyptus ... the fear and the cheats oblige the people to curse the way they speak and treat it as worthless ... I won’t wait till tomorrow to defend what is mine”. The latter line sounds almost like fighting talk, perhaps, but what this band is really about (it seems to me) is a contemporary positivity about the land and culture it comes from stronger than any whiff of retrospective negativity - these people demonstrate that by the work they do, and it’s clear from the resulting music that Cantabria has a vitality and identity.
     

© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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