Have your drum call mine...



San Baltasar brought the myrrh.

This is as close to a holiday blog as I'm going to get.

Lots of writing this last week. Enough so that I believe a rough, but complete, draft of the doctoral essay is realistic by March. My sense of time is a little off here with no semester schedules to follow, and no real awareness of the upcoming "winter" holidays. With candombe dictating my schedule, the next important date I have marked is the 6th of January, the Epiphany, or for Afro-Uruguayans, the day of Kings.

The llamadas that take place on this day are cited by most sources as the most significant, honoring the customs of the original African Naciones in Montevideo. I've already seen three events called Llamadas since arriving; two more than I had expected at this point. They all felt planned; tied to a political and national agenda. I have imagined that January 6 will be different, more spontaneous; not just another practice run for the comparsas before prize money is involved at carnival.

I've tried to ask if the true llamada still exists, as they're described by Rubén (I believe Rada) in Mónica Olaza's Ayer y hoy (2009: 50-51):

"...someone takes to the street, me with my drum at the corner of my house, and I play repique and you answer me with yours, and we get closer, and then another joins, and as we go we're adding [players]; that is a llamada."

This sentiment is echoed in the same book through an interview with Fernando "Lobo" Nuñez (54):

"...what I play, and what we play known as llamadas, takes a cuerda of drums. And I'm able to call to someone in that moment and those over there know that it's me. They know it's Barrio Sur that's playing; that is a llamada."

Both Rada and Nuñez make a clear distinction between this spontaneous, communicative form of playing as distinctive from the parades associated with carnival; events knowns as Llamadas.

When I ask about the spontaneous llamadas, I'm told they do exist. I get the feeling I may not see them, though I'm still hoping something of that sentiment remains on the 6th of January. If YouTube videos from previous years, and the following words from Rubén Rada are any indication, I'm not expecting something completely different: "the true expression of the tambores, that of January 6, the day of Saint Baltasar and Saint Benito...the black saints...is being lost" (Olaza, 51).