Music - The Rough Guide to Belize - page 250

Music
For such a tiny country, Belize enjoys an exceptional range of musical styles
and traditions. Whether your tastes run to the wind melodies and percussion
of the Maya, the up-tempo punta rock of the Garifuna or to calypso,
marimba , brukdown, soca or steel pan, Belize is sure to have something to
suit. For a current list of the best of Belize's recorded music, check out the
website of Belizean record label Stonetree, W stonetreerecords.com.
Roots and Kriol sounds
Until the demise of the Maya civilization and the arrival of the Spanish, the indigenous
Maya of Belize played a range of instruments drawn almost entirely from the flute and
percussion families. Drums were usually made from hollowed logs covered in deerskin,
with rattles, gourd drums and turtle shells providing further rhythmic accompaniment.
Trumpets, bells, shells and whistles completed the instrumentation. However, as befits
a nation of immigrants, each new group arriving - the Europeans, the Creoles, the
mestizos and the Garifuna - brought with them new styles, vigour and variety which
today inform and influence popular culture.
Mestizo music combined elements of its two constituent cultures: Maya ceremonial
music and new instruments from Spain, such as the classical guitar and violin, and later
brass-band music. Mestizo communities (including the Mopan Maya) in the north and
west of the country continue to favour marimba bands: half-a-dozen men playing two
large, multi-keyed wooden xylophones, perhaps supported by a double bass and a
drum kit. Up to half-a-dozen bands play regularly in Cayo District: famed healer Elijio
Panti presided over the nation's pre-eminent marimba group, Alma Beliceña , while
leading marimba bands frequently pop over from Flores in Guatemala, and Mexican
mariachi bands occasionally make an appearance, too. Nonetheless, traditional mestizo
music remains under threat as the youth turn to rock, rap and punta. Traditional artists
to look out for include Pablo Collado , a Maya-mestizo master flautist/guitarist, and
Florencio Mess , a harpist maintaining a centuries-old Maya tradition; his Maya K'ekchi'
Strings is an essential album.
Europeans introduced much of the hardware and software for playing music:
“western” musical instruments and sheet music, and, much later, record players,
compact discs and massive sound systems. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards,
British colonial culture, through church music, military bands and the popular
music of the time, was able to exert a dominant influence over what was acceptable
music in Belize.
An exciting melange of West African rhythms and melodies, as well as drums and
stringed instruments, arrived in Belize as a result of the slave trade during the
eighteenth century. However, given that the Baymen purchased slaves from Jamaica
rather than directly from Africa it should be remembered that African influences
arrived indirectly.
A new, syncretic style, nurtured in the logging camps and combining Western
instrumentation with specifically African musical inflections, emerged in the late
nineteenth century to create a specifically Belizean musical tradition known as
“ brukdown ”. Featuring a modern line-up of guitar, banjo, accordion, drums and the
jawbone of an ass (rattling a stick up and down the teeth!), brukdown remains a potent
reminder of past Creole culture. Although the style is slowly fading, as Creole society
itself changes, there are a few active practitioners. The style's most prominent figure,
the late master accordionist Wilfred Peters (who died in 2010), was the founder of the