The Balance Imbalance of Afinque: Dancing Through the Tensions and Intricate Realities that Unite Us with Zemog El Gallo Bueno on YoYouMeTú Volume 3
Zemog El Gallo Bueno is the philosopher’s psychedelic Latinotronic band. With multiple, branching roots and a lifetime of grappling with identity, the driving force behind the group Abraham Gomez-Delgado-Delgado has gathered musical kindred spirits back into a band for a raw, rhythmically stunning, dancefloor-ready, thinking person’s album.
Nothing is as straightforward as you want to make it, Gomez-Delgado insists. But it can be a hell of a beautiful ride, as mapped out on YoYouMeTúTrilogy: Volume 3 (release November 9, 2018).
“It can feel awkward to use the term Latinx or Latin or Latino, because you’re being grouped together with so many people. But you can’t say no to it, or things get taken away from communities. I wanted to walk close to the line of tradition and then do something that’s not necessarily predicted. To say, hey, we are individuals and have intricate realities like other humans,” Gomez-Delgado says. “We’re not all just like, ‘hey salsa, let’s party!’ I’m not your entertainment, nor am I here to be a jerk and not entertain you.” Gomez-Delgado and Zemog are here to get you to dance to your own humanity, as they grapple musically with theirs.
Volume 3 presents a closing rally to a deep-going, wide-ranging trio of albums. The previous, Volume 2, was sparked by Gomez-Delgado’s struggle to rebuild his life while grappling with intense experiences of alienation and migration, Volume 3 revels in the joys of healing love and friendship and the three-chord song--a formula just as potent in Cuba and Puerto Rico as in garage rock (“Sexy Carnitas,” “Pianola”)--and in life’s moments, great (“Wedding Song,” “Delgados Feliz”) and small (“Quiero Correr,” about a really good jog in the park).
Gomez-Delgado’s musings on “Balance Imbalance Dance” speak to the spirit of the whole album: “Without balance there is no imbalance. You need tension. You need to throw a wrench into things,” Gomez-Delgado reflects. “It’s not an opposite; it’s in balance. You zoom out to wanting utopia, and as hard as hard times can be, we need them to remind us of what is and what is important.”
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The texture and timbre of complex experience has always been important to Gomez-Delgado. His work strives to embrace all the contradictions and riches of his Puerto Rican-Peruvian heritage, his life as a young immigrant in a sometimes less-than-friendly environment, and his yearnings as a remarkably deft and sensitive musician. He longs to create the connection between people, onstage and off, that’s often called afinque in salsa music: that moment of meld when everyone sways as one.
After a successful string of albums with his band--and many of his favorite bandmates continue to play with him--Gomez-Delgado found himself in a period of deep introspection that made it challenging to play music with others. Eventually, Gomez-Delgado found his way forward, moving all his favorite salsa elements to a single instrument that could be played by a single musician. “It coaxed me toward remembering how to play with others,” Gomez-Delgado recalls.
That energy, once coupled with the excellent New York-based musicians in Zemog, burst into new intensity at a regular gig at Brooklyn music hub Barbès, where the band had a long-standing residency. Gomez-Delgado worked to keep the intensity present on Volume 3, keeping the live vibe on tracks like “Agua a Peso” and “Pianola.”
This new-found sense of vibrant community lets Gomez-Delgado’s wonderfully vivid imagination run wild, vibrating with cha cha cha, salsa, guaracha, punk, funk, and pure idiosyncrasy. “I wanted this album to have a wide spectrum. That asks a lot of people. That’s not always fair or right, but sometimes you are reacting to what life is,” notes Gomez-Delgado. “I’m going to bring these things up in my music. I wanted to lay some heavy stuff down and if you can get through that, then we’ll have fun and a good conversation.”
The heavy stuff springs from the political, no surprise for an artist like Gomez-Delgado in this day and age. “Americae,” with its Latin lyrics and its fantastic, all-over-the-place polyrhythms, cuts to the heart of the American dilemma of its cries for freedom and its basis in genocide and slavery. “This original and ‘invisible’ sin keeps coming up. Until we deal with it, it will keep coming back,” comments Gomez-Delgado.
Yet Zemog never lets gloom dominate the conversation. “Motivate,” written with conga virtuoso Reinaldo DeJesus, urges movements and motions, with coils of low brass, inspiring percussion, and a dreamy guitar line that dares you to sit still. The lyrics ask us all to get the guts to up on the dancefloor, literally and figuratively, to step up and wake up, in an anthem that feels like Frank Zappa and Antibalas colliding with cumbia.
With a similar floating sense of rhythm but a more stately sway, “YoYouMeTú” addresses identity dilemmas of a more intimate nature. The crisis of connection that we all face--that promises greater happiness if we learn to deal with it--can be resolved only by losing some of what we cling to and having faith in this vulnerability. “The lyrics use the words ‘afinque’ and ‘afincado,’ used in salsa starting in the 60-70s. They basically describe when the band is tight and becomes one, with the dancers in the room. You lose time, fully present but not in a stressful, ego-filled way. The band is swinging. That to me is the main thing of all of this,” explains Gomez-Delgado. “It’s hard to accept because anything that’s new is contradicting what you knew before. That tension takes an inner faith to move through.”
What happens on the dancefloor or in our tangled inner worlds blurs for Zemog, but that is where the pleasures of committed relationship (a moment celebrated with his wife Olia in “Wedding Song,” which they crafted for their big day) and family (“Delgados” includes a recording of Gomez-Delgado’s extended family singing together in Puerto Rico.) This is the place Gomez-Delgado fought so hard to reach, what he lays out in polychrome, shifting, quirky detail on the album. “I don’t care how cliche it is. It’s really about us and how we affirm each other’s existence. It’s the most basic thing, but I don’t care. The message still isn’t getting through, judging by our current climate. So it’s vital to say it and play it.”
AboutZemog EL Gallo Bueno is a New York City based group of musician friends created and led by Puerto Rican/Peruvian composer and multi-instrumentalist Abraham Gomez-Delgado. Zemog’s music has been described as “Kaleidoscopic Avant Latin Roots” which adventures through 1930's Puerto Rican street cries, 60's free jazz fumes, 70's New York salsa residue and 80’s warehouse Latin Punk.
Gomez-Delgado left his native Puerto Rico as a child and relocated to the mainland U.S. where he moved frequently and lived in different socio-economic and racially charged communities where he experienced first hand the deep divisions and injustices that plague the United States. He had also met many healing, inspiring and loving people through out his journey, in the U.S. These experiences and people helped shape much of Abraham Gomez-Delgado’s music and led him to connect and collaborate with many like minded and innovative musicians, composers, artist’s and educators that make up the members of Zemog El Gallo Bueno. Reinaldo DeJesus, Chris Stromquist, Jackie Coleman, Benjamin Willis, Maria Christina Eisen, Bryan Vargas, Ted Nordlander, Juancho Herrera, Pablo Bencid and Matt Bauder.
Zemog El Gallo Bueno has performed at the Blue Note, Montreal Jazz Festival, Joe's Pub, Mass MoCA, Jazz Gallery, S.O.B’s, Lincoln Center, BAM, Chicago World Music Festival, Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, Barbes, Zebulon, Camaradas El Barrio amongst others.
Abraham Gomez-Delgado was awarded the New Jazz Works grant from Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Foundation, Meet The Composer MetLife Grant, USArtists International Award and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
The release last year of 10, on ZOHO Music, marked a decade of musical innovation by 
Born (1970) and raised in Lima, Perú, 
A decade of musical innovation by