Betsayda Machado y Parranda El Clavo: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Feb. 16, 2018, Felix Contreras Watching Betsayda Machado y Parranda El Clavo perform their Tiny Desk concert is like peering back in time. The music s roots extend to the Venezuelan slave trade, and while the vocals are in Spanish and not an African dialect, the instruments the group plays date back more than 500 years. The large bamboo cylinders, the djembelike drums and the large friction drum together create a symphony of interlocking polyrhythms that was unlike anything I d heard. Machado s vocals soar over the unrelenting rhythms, and when she harmonizes with the other singers, it creates a choirlike display of African callandresponse vocals. When discussing Africaninfluenced music from the southern hemisphere, we often focus on countries like Brazil and Cuba, places where the folk music eventually made its way into popular music. AfroVenezuelan culture and music is rarely featured or even acknowledged outside of the country. As you ll see in this video, that should change once music fans tak