From the Congo to Cuba, boleros to rumba, Oakland’s Bobi Céspedes delivers.
With her deep, resonant voice and captivating stage presence, Bobi Céspedes is a direct link between the new world and the old. Born in Cuba and raised in a family with living memories of the Congo, she’s been at the center of the Bay Area’s Latin music scene for four decades, revered for her command of the hard-driving Cuban genres of son and rumba.
In recent years however, Céspedes has expanded her repertoire, embracing a style that was once forbidden. She still belts out son with a ferocious groove, but these days she’s just as likely to slow the tempo down for a heart-rending tale of unrequited love.
As a little girl growing up on the outskirts of pre-revolutionary Havana, Céspedes could sing of many things, but soul-baring lyrics detailing the delights and torments of romantic love were supposed to be beyond the ken of a señorita.
“In Cuba, in my time, young ladies were not supposed to be loving early,” says Céspedes, her salt-and-pepper dreads framing a round, beatific face unlined by her 60-something years. “Now, after Castro, everything’s changed. But then, it was like, ‘Niña, what are you talking about? Don’t say that!’ But I heard these songs and absorbed them. I didn’t really know that I knew them until later on in life when I heard them and could sing along.”
Céspedes has waited a long time and traveled many musical roads before delving into this once forbidden realm, from co-founding the Bay Area’s pioneering Afro-Cuban orchestra Conjunto Céspedes and touring with the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart to creating a singular synthesis of son (the style that paved the way for salsa) and East Bay grease on her 2003 album, Rezos. But on her latest album, Patakín (Stories), the powerhouse Oakland singer finally immerses herself in the sumptuous world of boleros, delivering a program of classic songs and original tunes conveying heartfelt messages set to gracefully grooving Cuban rhythms. Tapping into her youthful memories, Céspedes claims a musical heritage she was too young to openly embrace in the 1950s.
Singing boleros, of course, takes a lot more than simply knowing the lyrics. While much of Cuban music is percussion-driven, boleros are sensuous ballads that require a particularly deft sense of time. It’s like the difference between a jazz vocalist swinging briskly through “The Lady Is a Tramp” and navigating the raw sense of loss and ache of “It Never Entered My Mind,” maintaining rhythmic tension at a leisurely tempo.
“You’ve got to listen to your band,” Céspedes says in an interview at the Jazzschool in Berkeley. “And you’ve got to have a real sense of time. It’s one thing to be up on stage going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ with the drums going crazy. But when you sing a bolero, your voice has to be right and you have to really understand the lyric. I really fell in love with singing them.”
The bolero style dates back to the late 19th century, when Cuban troubadours developed the deeply romantic ballad format. Early pioneers created elegantly swaying songs in 2/4 time, a highly flexible and popular form that quickly spread across Latin America. Some of the style’s most celebrated tunesmiths hailed from Mexico and Puerto Rico (Céspedes opens the album with the standard “Sabor a Mi” by the great Oaxacan composer Alvaro Carrillo), but the form never lapsed into pure nostalgia due to its unparalleled ability to absorb new rhythms, such as mambo, cha-cha-cha, and, particularly, son.
Part of what makes Patakín so powerful is that Céspedes has found a pitch-perfect cast of players. The album is co-produced by her working band featuring Guatemalan-American pianist Marco Diaz, Mexico City–born bassist Saul Sierra, and Puerto Rican percussionist Julio Pérez. Highly sensitive collaborators, they provide sympathetic support throughout, respectful of her vocal prowess without completely ceding her the spotlight.
“The first time I heard her sing I got chills,” says Diaz, a highly sought-after accompanist who doubles on trumpet. “She’s one of those artists that has such a stage presence, it captivates the audience. She sings with a lot of feeling and all her soul. That’s a gift, and I’m just glad to be part of something like that. I learn a lot from her phrasing. I tell her every day, let’s just keep making music.”
Born to Guatemalan parents in San Francisco, Diaz first started performing with Céspedes around 2003, after the release of Rezos. His trumpet skills made him an ideal fit for her band, as he could play the album’s horn lines behind her when stepping away from the piano. As an ace accompanist who works regularly with percussion masters John Santos and Jesus Diaz (no relation), he formed a particularly tight musical bond with Céspedes, who often sings intimate duets with him during the course of a concert. On Patakín, Diaz backs Céspedes solo on “Sin Razón Ni Justicia,” a bolero made famous by legendary Cuban sonero Beny Moré.
“Every time we would play these concerts people would yell ‘Lágrimas Negras,’” Diaz says, referring to the classic bolero by Cuban trova star Miguel Matamoros. “Bobi would clear out the band and sing it just piano and voice. What’s challenging is trying to capture the mood of the song and really respect the genre. I’m 34, and I’m playing music from the 1940s and ’50s. I’m trying to do justice to the music and make it sound beautiful.”
Though Céspedes grew up in the 1950s, her consciousness stretches back for generations. The youngest of 14 children, she was raised in the midst of a musical family and steeped in Afro-Cuban culture. Her paternal grandmother was Congolese, and though she died before Céspedes was born, the music, stories, and cultural knowledge she passed on from the Old World resounded through the Céspedes family. “The tradition and folklore of the Yoruba and Congolese is all over Cuba, inside of everybody’s blood, one way or another,” Céspedes says.
She expanded her folkloric knowledge after moving to New York City in 1959, joining her mother and sisters in pursuit of an education. She studied and performed for four years with Sylvia del Villar, a renowned African–Puerto Rican vocalist and cultural activist. By her mid-20s, Céspedes had become a priestess of the orisha (sacred spirit) Obàtálá in the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, a spiritual practice that continues to suffuse her life and music. She often begins a performance with a Yoruba incantation honoring Obàtálá, and frequently draws on ritual rhythms, erasing boundaries between the sacred and profane.
“There’s no separation,” Céspedes explains. “Singing orisha songs and praises to God on stage is permissible, and they’re so beautiful. Some people sing gospel music, and it’s beautiful and not contradictory to their belief in Jesus. I couldn’t write if I didn’t employ my beliefs.”
Like so many other young people at the time, she lit out for San Francisco in 1969 and became a leading force in bringing Cuban roots music to the region. She first gained widespread notice with the celebrated band that she founded with her brother, Luis, and nephew Guillermo, Conjunto Céspedes. While Latin dance music had a big following, the Céspedes family group, which started as a trio and grew to a 12-member ensemble, introduced an earthy sound that eschewed slick production. Emerging far from the East Coast centers of Latin music had advantages. The group cultivated a strong local following in the Bay Area by playing community concerts and found the freedom to arrive at their own sound.
Percussionist Jesus Diaz, who ended up touring the world as a member of Conjunto Céspedes for more than a decade, recalls first experiencing Céspedes at a dance in Oakland shortly after moving to the Bay Area in the mid-1980s.
“She had this mesmerizing voice, and everybody was riveted,” Diaz says. “Not long after that I was asked to be part of the band. And as long as I was in the band, as great as it was, the minute Bobi came on stage she was the center of attention. She’s one of the biggest musical treasures of Afro-Cuban music. She’s very passionate about what she does, and in all the years I’ve been watching her, she just keeps getting better.”
Céspedes continued her musical exploration, and probably reached her widest audience as part of drummer Mickey Hart’s Planet Drum and Bembé Orisha projects. Always open to new sounds, she looked for connections between the African-derived music of her childhood and the African-American music that she absorbed living in Oakland. The styles all came together on Rezos, a captivating musical synthesis that producer Greg Landau called “funkloric.”
While Rezos launched her solo career, Céspedes has been a scarce presence on the local scene in recent years because she’s devoted herself to education, teaching teachers about Afro-Cuban culture through San Francisco State University. Last year the program documented its pedagogic method in the book, Soy Bilingüe Adult Dual Language Model for Early Childhood and Elementary Teacher Education, which includes contributions from the singer, as well as other educators including Ronald Rosario, Roman Carrillo, and Sharon Cronin. “It’s not just about having a cultural arts component in a school,” Céspedes says. “Our curriculum brings music and folklore into every aspect of the class.”
In many ways she takes on the same mission outside the classroom. Céspedes’s original songs pass on hard-won wisdom. Whether warning about the dangers of over-imbibing or underachieving, Céspedes has a gift for setting serious concerns to infectious rhythms.
“My songs are modern patakíns,” Céspedes says. “They’re subjects I want to address without being too serious and intimidating (I tend to be intimidating from time to time). ‘Si Agua No Llueve Maiz No Crece’ [If it doesn’t rain, corn won’t grow] is a great message. People feel they can just sit and things will come to be without work, [but] it doesn’t work that way. You have to put your heart into everything. I consider it a patakín, because it’s a very popular refrain among the old people in Cuba, but it translates into many languages.”
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Andrew Gilbert is The Monthly’s music critic.
