Rumbos de la Rumba” is a conceptual musical journey with musicians Pedro Pablo Martínez and Román Díaz. It is also a project about Rumba’s performance culture understood as a set of socio-historical relations.

Rumbos de la Rumba” is a conceptual musical journey with musicians Pedro Pablo Martínez and Román Díaz. It is also a project about Rumba’s performance culture understood as a set of socio-historical relations. Each track and concept is located within a different psychic space, to evoke a sense of walking in la Havana, or circulating in the diaspora, or feeling caught between love and conflict or between the secular and the sacred. I proposed six essential Rumba concepts to Pedrito and Román: dialogue, prohibition, conflict, seduction, Abakuá, éxodo and fragmentation. Pedrito and Román interpreted these concepts by arranging popular Rumbas and composing new ones. Both decided to interpret the fragmentation concept individually. Pedrito created his “Encyclopedia of the Drum,” a number performed with the batá drums—a double-headed set of three drums considered the “Ph.D.” of African drumming. His piece is a salute to Élegua, Ogún and Ochosí, Yoruba warrior deities, also known as the Orishas from Cuba’s Regla de Ocha (Santería) religion. While Pedrito’s “Encyclopedia” shows one of rumba’s spiritual precedents, Román deconstructed the concept of fragmentation into an eight-movement composition. “Fragmentacion” traces Rumba ethnic roots and culminates in a totality: “all of a sudden you are in a Santería ceremony, then all of sudden you are in a rumba, this is Havana.”