Album Notes

Aizatic delivers from withing the sounds of the Afro-Caribbean people called Garífuna. This production of musical tradition combining powerful vocals with a dense percussive base.
Maintaining the palpable West African elements in his music, Aziatic builds on a three-drum ensemble resonant with African percussive traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Garífuna singing and drumming entails a fiercely percussive, communal call-and response formulation rooted in the sacred context of ancestral invocations and spirit possession, as in Cuban santería, Haitian vodoun and Brazilian candomblé. The most salient Garífuna secular traditional genres are paranda and punta. Spanish for \"carousal,\" paranda adds an acoustic guitar to the Garífuna drum tradition; the punta couple dance (named for its characteristic rhythm) recalls the pelvic thrust or vacunao of the Cuban guaguancó rumba form.

In the early 1980s, punta rock, a creation commonly attributed to Belizean Garífuna musician, composer and artist Delvin \"Pen\" Cayaetano, added the amplified guitar to the Garífuna rhythm ensemble. Punta rock\'s upbeat message of cultural awareness and mutual respect has spilled over into the rest of Caribbean Central America and with \"The Rebirth\" Aziatic brings to life his multicultural world experience.