nothin Orquesta Afinke Takes A&I To School | New Haven Independent

Orquesta Afinke Takes A&I To School

Percussionist and co-band leader Sammy Diaz, Jr., of the Bridgeport-based Orquesta Afinke, held his bongos in one hand and the microphone in the other.

The bongos are really pretty much the smartest guys in the band,” Diaz joked.

He was keeping it light for Orquesta Afinke’s family-oriented early afternoon International Arts & Ideas set on Thursday in the tent on the south end of the New Haven Green. The band was warming up for a longer set on the main stage that would begin a few hours later.

But they were serious about their rhythm even then. And they were showing the audience how it was done.

The congas,” Diaz said, are like the bass player.” On cue, the conga player began laying down the basic rhythm, low, sure, and true. Diaz then introduced the timbales, which laid polyrhythms over the conga’s foundation. The bongos belonged right into the middle. Their job, Diaz said, was to keep the time, and as a percussionist, he had the calluses to prove he did it often and well.

Our kids don’t like to touch our hands,” he said. He began to play, and among the three drummers, the rhythm flourished and grew. Those calluses were worth it, Diaz explained, to make the music sound more traditional, like where it’s from.” It also made the rhythm irresistible.

Orquesta Afinke plays across a few genres of Latin music with a hard-hitting style that would make the South Bronx proud. Their emphasis on digging deep into their musical tradition only brings out how powerful that tradition is — how rich, current, and immediately translatable to any audience.

Case in point: Afinke’s family-oriented set drew in plenty of adults without children, a few of whom danced at the edges of the tent. For their last number, they played a plena from Puerto Rico that, it was explained, traditionally functioned as a kind of community bulletin as bands traveled from town to town, incorporating current events — you know, this person got divorced, this person won a car” — into the lyrics of the songs.

But it was Orquesta’s unerring, driving rhythms that kept people moving. We don’t just stand up here and fake-sweat. We really sweat, because we’re feeling it,” Diaz had said earlier. Afinke means locking in together.” They certainly did. Their music carried across half the Green. People sitting around the chairs by the fountain moved in their seats.

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