irwinloy

Belizean musician Andy Palacio has died. The respected musical figurehead of the Central American Garifuna community was felled this weekend at age 47 by "a massive and extensive stroke to the brain," according to an e-mail from his producer and manager, Ivan Duran.

When I interviewed Palacio in Belize just over a year ago, I found him in his windowless office at the National Institute for Culture and History in the Belizean capital, Belmopan. He was fretting over tour dates and logistics for the pending release of his new album, Wátina.

But he may as well have been planning the album for decades.

In the early 1980s, Palacio was a volunteer teacher when he visited sister communities in nearby Nicaragua, only to come face to face with the extinction of a culture - his own.

The people he met shared his same background - shipwrecked slaves from West Africa, who had mixed with indigenous Carib Indians on the island of St. Vincent almost four hundred years ago. Yet they were separated by what was supposed to be a common language.

Palacio could only find a handful of people who could speak to him in the native Garifuna language. None were younger than 50.

In his music, Palacio has sought to reinvigorate in his people the pride he felt in his culture. He sang in Garifuna, the vigorous Arawak language so many in his community had forgotten how to speak.

"I needed for the world to know, that somewhere in a corner of this planet, there is a people known as the Garifuna with a story to tell. And with something to offer the cultural fabric of the universe," Palacio said.

Palacio released Wátina weeks later to rave international reviews. The album fused traditional Garifuna rhythms and instruments with pop sensibilities. It suddenly presented Garifuna music as it had never been heard before - not as the party music of Palacio's earlier Punta rock incarnations; not as snapshots of a threatened folk music to be stored in a vault for posterity; but as a living, breathing, adaptable and thoroughly modern style of music.

It was, arguably, the first truly great Garifuna album for a new generation of a proud community.

Today, the headline in his New York Times obituary grandly declared, "Andy Palacio, Who Saved Garifuna Music, Dies at 47." While it wouldn't be fair to ignore those who preceded Palacio - a glance at the liner notes of his albums shows Palacio felt musically indebted to many - the headline is hardly hyperbole.

For further reading (filed under shameless self promotion):
CNN Traveller: Spread the Word
The Christian Science Monitor: The Last 'Parandero'