Our
third album with executive producer KC Porter has just been recorded in
Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and will soon be released under his Los Angeles based
Insignia Records label.
ORA TAMBÓ (Pray Drum) is a personal
tribute of Istvan Dely, one-time Congo tatan’ganga priest in Cuba and
the first conga drummer in his native Hungary, to his origins in drumming and
spirituality: tata Cuatrovientos Probafuerza and Yayi Chola of Guanabacoa. He
does so by adding to the rich legacy he once received, the accumulated harvest
of forty years of spiritual and musical quest on three continents, and raising
it to the new heights of a contemporary and global spirituality enshrined in
Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation. Walking
down this path with him as one soul in two bodies ever since he settled in Cartagena
in 1977 has been his Afro-Colombian wife, singer-songwriter Leonor. Without
her, Millero Congo (Sower of Congo Seeds), the name given to Istvan by his padrino
back in Cuba as a mission statement, wouldn’t have blossomed into the
family group of musicians and teachers that include their sons David and Shangó
The Delys found in Grammy winning
American music producer KC Porter the ideal partner in creating their new
trend of inspirational world music which Istvan coined “tribalglobal”.
This is their third album together, after Leonor Dely: Ámame (2001)
and Leonor Dely & Millero Congo: Talisman (2004).
ORA TAMBÓ
brings together prayers by Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb
with the sacred African drumming traditions of Cuban Santería, Haitian
Vodoun, Colombian Lumbalú, Puerto Rican Bomba, Bush Negro Winti and
Brazilian Candomblé, as a universally viable way, along with other
modes, of expressing the veneration of the sacred which lies at the very heart
of every culture.
