Season 3, Episode 12: “Keep That Tradition Alive" ft Kiki Valera
Narration: I remember first learning about recycling at school in my Brooklyn childhood. All of a sudden, teachers were talking about it, there were posters everywhere with those triangular arrow symbols, and brand new blue bins showed up at our doorsteps. It was an efficient municipal program and for a long time, that’s what I thought recycling was. Until I went to Ethiopia.
In Addis Ababa households, glass bottles had always been returned to the factories by the people themselves. If a car died, its insides would be entirely repurposed, and an electronic part might have 3, 4, 5 different lives in different machines. There, I realized that recycling is creativity rooted in necessity, and it’s an evolved way to lighten our heavy footprints on this earth.
As I traveled more, I understood that this is one of geniuses of the global south as a whole. Because if you don’t have enough access to resources, you’ve to use what you got and figure it out. You have to make a way out of no way.
Cuban tres maestro Kiki Valera comes from just this ethos. When I heard that he was a recording engineer, multi-instrumentalist, a composer, who had built himself a way to listen to the world when he was only a teenager, I had to find out more about how creativity rooted in necessity had shaped his life.
My name is Meklit, and this is Movement, music and migration, remixed.
KIKI: I think I was starting to go to school, I was about six years old and my father for my birthday say, OK, you have a gift. I was wanting a bicycle or a car toy or something, you know, and he gave me an old small Cuban tres. I thought to myself, so what I'm going to do with it. Can you imagine? I mean, this little boy with six years old trying to get a sound out of this rusty steel strings. So but I did.
Narration: Long before his father gave him that tres, Kiki was already being primed for life as a musician.
KIKI: I used to go to my grandmother's house
MEKLIT: To the countryside?
KIKI: To the countryside. I loved that.
MEKLIT: Yeah. What did you love about it?
KIKI: Everything I can tell you when you wake up in the morning and you hear the rooster. All the chicks.
MEKLIT: Yeah
KIKI: Everything was about music, bongos, congas, guiros, maracas, tres, guitar, and everybody sings. So I started more seriously to play. And my Uncle Sam, you know what I have to tell you, you're going to be very good with that stuff. Keep playing that way.
You can imagine this person born in Cuba in 1966 in a very communist socialist country. We had a radio at home, but that radio was AM.
MEKLIT: Not FM, yeah
KIKI: But I knew that shortwave exists. With shortwave you can reach out there. So one of my father's friends, he was an electronic engineer. He gave me a book. The title was “How to Build a Shortwave Receiver and Transmitter”.
MEKLIT: You found what you were looking for.
KIKI: Yep, right away. So I went to my dumpster and I started to recycle old radios and TV sets for salvaging.
MEKLIT: For parts.
KIKI: Yeah!
MEKLIT: Yeah, yeah.
KIKI: I salvage everything from transformer's, to resistor capacitors, everything. In a matter of a year, I built my first short wave receiver. I was 16 years old, I was in high school.
MEKLIT: OK, so so you built the radio.
KIKI: Yeah.
MEKLIT: And then through that, you started listening to the rest of the world.
KIKI: Yeah.
MEKLIT: Wow.
KIKI: That was in the early 80s.
MEKLIT: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
KIKI: The first song that I heard out of my radio was Chicago Band.
MEKLIT: What was the song?
KIKI: Street Player.
MEKLIT: All right.
KIKI: Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. Oh, my God, was I started, you know, to look for more of that. I discovered the Commodore's.
MEKLIT: Mmhmm
KIKI: With the Brickhouse, you know?
MEKLIT: Yeah!
KIKI: After that, one of my father's friends gave me two cassettes, one Wes Montgomery.
MEKLIT: Mm hmm.
KIKI: And the other one was with Pat Metheney. My jaws were all the way down, huh! From my world, my small musical world, the way to improvise is more inside a cage. Even though I had the ears to listen what they were doing, I didn't have the knowledge.
MEKLIT: Yeah.
KIKI: So I started to listen to them.
MEKLIT: Is this how you developed your own musical perspective?
KIKI: Yeah, because I'm trying to offer something, you know, different.
MEKLIT: Yeah.
KIKI: And it’s not the way you play, no it’s the way you tell. Because when you when we improvise and we when we play, we tell the stories as well.
MEKLIT: Yes.
KIKI: You know, you make a sentence da da da, and then you have to answer da da da da da da da. So, you know, the way you do that is what the people identify, that is you.
Narration: When Kiki was a young man in Santiago de Cuba, a visiting musicologist made some recordings of him and his family. Those recordings were released as an album, and soon, Kiki was touring the world alongside his parents and brothers, playing festivals and concert halls as La Familia Miranda Valera. That was how he first visited Seattle, the city where he lives now with his wife Naomi
KIKI: El amor move montanas. Love can move mountains. That's the translation. And that's why I'm here.
Narration: But even though Kiki’s ears and heart have drawn him outside the country where he was born, he continues to perform the songs that were passed down through his family.
KIKI: My family we have something that is very important that maybe no one else has. We are the bearers of this tradition, so I decided to try to keep that flame alive, to keep that tradition alive as long as I live.
Narration: In the years since we first recorded this piece, Kiki’s album Vacilón Santiaguero was nominated for Best Tropical Latin Album at the Grammy Awards. You can find that record and his whole collection, wherever you listen to music.
This episode of Movement was produced by Ian Coss, and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World and we are distributed by PRX.