Season 3, Episode  9:  “We Came From the Same Groove" ft Cimafunk

Narration: I grew up listening to a lot of Ethiopian traditional music, usually via old cassette tapes that my parents would play in the car. You know, the kind where the sound warps, or gets slow from when splashes of coffee would drip and dry on the magnetic tape. It was a vibe. 

And until I was an adult, Ethiopian music was, in my mind, kind of stuck in the past, glued to the tapes themselves. It happens a lot to diaspora kids, where your version of culture is more like a snapshot of how things used to be in your source country. 

So imagine my surprise when I started going to Ethiopia as a grown woman and collaborating with musicians there, including many traditional ones. And working with those azmari artists was a revelation, because these musicians were some of the most experimental folks that I knew. On a Monday, I would hear krar meets punk. Tuesday, metal meets masenko. Wednesday singer-songwriter, aka me together with the kebero drum. You name the genre, Ethiopian traditional musicians were ready to find a way to make a new sound together. A choice between tradition and innovation? Nah. No such thing. 

It set up a lifelong curiosity in me to find artists who refuse to choose between tradition and innovation, and to understand the exact recipe of how they walked this sonic path. When I found the music of Cimafunk, I was instantly ready to dance to his version of this exploration. 

​My name is Meklit and this is Movement, music and migration, remixed. 

The day Cimafunk landed in Bogota, Colombia, he made local news: “The Cuban James Brown has arrived” read the headline. It was February 2019, and Cimafunk and his band were there to play their very first show outside of their native country, Cuba. 

But there was one other reason for the trip to Colombia. After bringing the house down in Bogota, they had a whole US tour in mind.

Cimafunk and all eight of his band members had visa appointments at the US Consulate there. For the last two years, the US Embassy in Havana had suspended all visa proceedings, so their best shot at getting to the US was by way of Colombia.

Thankfully their visas were granted, and the band took off on a whirlwind tour across the US. 30 performances, 50 days, in 16 cities. One of their first stops was in New Orleans. And the moment Cimafunk stepped foot in the city, he  was hit with an experience he’d never had before. 

Cimafunk: I was walking in the street in Mardi Gras and I was walking with more than 5,000 black people. Never in our life was we doing it like that. So looks weird, but it was like that. And was at some point that part of people that was walking with me, from my team in Cuba, they was feeling uncomfortable, like a black friend of mine. 

Meklit: Why?

Cimafunk: Because we don't see that in Cuba. You don't see so many black people jamming the street and grooving. You know, you don't see that.

Meklit: Was it like a fear?

Cimafunk: It was wasn't a fear, it was like a being aware, because, you know, culturally we got a lot of prejudge. And we never was around so many black people feeling that energy. And then we was there like, yo man, woo, this is good.

Narration: Although Mardi Gras was unlike anything Cimafunk had ever seen, New Orleans reminded him powerfully of his hometown in Cuba. 

Cimafunk: I grew up in Pinar Del Rio. That's the occidental part of Cuba. 

Narration: Pinar Del Rio is west of Havana, and famous for its tropical fields where the best tobacco on the island is grown. The landscape looks prehistoric with steep limestone hills, green valleys and red soil. And as you get closer to the region’s urban center, where Cimafunk grew up, tobacco-curing barns turn into pastel colored houses and colonial style buildings. In town, there’s a century-old cigar factory where premium cigars are hand rolled. Down the street, sits one of Latin America’s first theatres, and just around the corner, is Cimafunk’s childhood home. 

Cimafunk was born Erik Iglesias Rodríguez. Growing up in western Cuba in the 90s and early 2000s, he remembers music always playing from somewhere. Walking through the neighborhood was like flipping through radio stations. One minute he’d hear reggaeton blaring from an old car stereo, and on the next block, classic Cuban nueva trova spilled out of the local club. And the music didn’t stop when he got home. 

Cimafunk: Everybody was musical. In my family, everybody, everybody could like a jam and groove and everybody was in the groove. 

Narration: Erik was raised by his grandmother, the matriarch of his tight-knit extended family. He says her home was the place to be on the weekends. 

Cimafunk: Every Saturday and Sunday all the family have to go to the grandma house and there everybody eat and stuff. And I remember that always was music. Music on all the time. It was a lot of salsa music. It was a lot of Afro-Cuban sound, Bob Marley. My uncle also was giving me cassettes of Lionel Richie, Michael, all these people. And I was listening music all the time in the car, the old car that they got. And yeah, was the best part was jamming with the family the times.

Narration:  Along with Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, his family made sure his taste included all the Cuban greats. 

Cimafunk: They was telling me stories about Irakere and Chucho Valdes. Oh, this is the gold. Yeah. Because of the best pianist. And then Omara Portuondo with Buena Vista. Yeah Omara, she's the queen and stuff. And all the, all the appreciation and the admiration for the legends in my family was always super, like, important. They always elevate the Cuban musicians.

Narration:  And while music education was a natural part of life with his grandmother, what she encouraged most was securing a stable profession through education. 

Cimafunk: My auntie she's surgeon. My aunt is engineer. My mom is work in mental health and everybody's like, my cousin is also surgeon. Like everybody was in the professional environment, so it was like a yes, we grew up and we focus on be smart and figure it out and do professional stuff.

Narration:   Following in the footsteps of his relatives, Erik decided on a career in medicine. But after two tedious years in medical school, he knew it wasn't for him. 

Cimafunk: Finally, I tell to the family like, I gonna be a bad doctor. And they say like, no, no, better leave. You better leave. We don't want, you don't want, no, we don't want no mediocrity in the family.

Meklit: Wow. That's an amazing journey because it's like you described your grandmother's house as being the center of the music when you were growing up, like when you were young, but then she was also the kind of push for you to do this other thing. But then in the end, your family was with you. They were supportive of you.

Cimafunk: Yeah. All the time.

Narration: With the blessing of his family, he moved to Havana to find his footing as a musician.  

Cimafunk: I didn't have no, a physical place of my own there, so I was living with family.  I start to figure out for raise some money and working in car shops and stuff for two years. And I remember that one day I was just, I was just exhausted of that type of scene.

And I was like, yo, I already have been two years here. I didn't know nobody in the street, no musician, no producer, nobody. I was, no farandula, as we say. And then I say like, yo, I gotta figure it out.

Narration: He remembered a musician from his hometown named Raul Paz rose  to fame in France, and then moved to Havana. They didn't know each other personally, but Erik thought someone in Pinar Del Rio might. Erik asked around, and sure enough, someone told him the neighborhood Raul lived in. 

With a vague idea of where to look, Erik went back to Havana to try his luck. 

Cimafunk: So I finished the work at one day at 5:00 PM and I was walking, just finding that place. And I found the building and I asked to a old lady. Old ladies, they always the best because that old lady, I asked her what this guy that he was really famous was living. And she tell me, oh yeah, he's living in this building in the, in the penthouse, but you can come in for the garage. So it's a small door here. She's getting for the garage and go out straight to his house and I’m like, yo, that's perfect. I like, thank you.

She gave me the entrance of a super expensive building to the penthouse of this guy. And I knocked the door and he opened the door and he was like, yeah. And I like, yo man, I'm from your hometown too. I'm a friend of a friend and I wanna do some music. He just don't know nobody. Maybe you can help me. And the guy's like, Hey. just come to the studio. So he, he take me to the studio, give me the guitar, I sing couple songs. Then he told me like, okay, you can do choir from me in a show, big show that he was doing in TV Live transmitting on live in Cuba, in France. 

Meklit: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Cimafunk: And the day of the show I was with, everybody was on black because it was a really expensive and, and, and super, classic theater. I was dressed like, as you say here, as a pimp. Big glasses like that, and my shirt was really small and tight, and it was a pants from my sister really, really tight and, and some shiny shoes.

Meklit: How did you decide to dress like that? Like were, did you say I wanna be noticed, or were you just being yourself?

Cimafunk: No, part of the truth. The truth is that most of the time I didn't have no other clothes to wear. So many of the clothes at that time was friend of mine, a boyfriend of my sister. I already love the bell bottom pants since I was in my hometown, and I didn't have none. So this friend of mine have couple of that one because they was hippie. It was like a hippie musicians. 

Narration: On live TV, Erik stole the show in his bell bottoms and big glasses. And then, he started to get recognized in public. 

Cimafunk: They put the show, that concert every time in TV for a whole year. So everybody was watching me and everybody was like, who is this guy? Who is this guy? Who is this guy? And people start to tell me that in the streets. So I take that as an advantage and I start to ask for more work, making more choral choirs, background vocals and record vocals for other artists. And I just take that moment and.

Meklit: It’s  also like, every step you took towards music, music took 10 steps towards you.

Cimafunk: Yeah, yeah, yeah, It's just, music is a gift. And if you, if you just go for it, is she gonna reward you, reward you, you know, she gonna give you back what you,  what you give to, to the, to that state of mind.

Narration: Not long after that first TV performance, Erik was invited to join the Cuban collective, Interactivo, led by jazz pianist Roberto Carcassés. With Interactivo, Erik mastered the art of improvisation, performing alongside a rotating cast of musicians who fused traditional Afro-Cuban rhythms with funk, jazz, and soul. During his time with Interactivo, Erik sang lead vocals and developed his composing and songwriting skills. 

But after two years with the group, he got an opportunity he couldn’t pass up: a chance to travel outside of Cuba for the first time. He and a few friends booked an 8-month gig on a cruise sailing to Greece and Turkey. 

Cimafunk:  They hired us for singing traditional Cuban music. That's what they hired most of the Cuban musician for that type of work. 

Narration:  Instead of sticking to the traditional, Erik and his friends decided to experiment.   

Cimafunk:  They was complaining the director of the ship, but the clients, they was like, yo, man, we pack the ship in the floor that we was playing you couldn't cross. 

Narration:  Technically, they weren't hired as the main act, but their performances started attracting bigger crowds than the main shows. People on the cruise couldn’t get enough of their take on classic soul and funk.  Their unique twist on songs like “Easy Like Sunday Morning”, and Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” got everybody dancing. 

Cimafunk: We was mixing everything with Cuban music and putting tumbao [singing] And we was jamming with all these things, but we put people dance. And I realized that time that time, if you do dance of a music, you gotta figure out, people have to dance. And that was the scene. That was the scene there.

Narration: In his down time between shows, Erik took advantage of another opportunity that came with gig: reliable internet access. Something he did not have in Cuba.  

Cimafunk:  When I get internet, the first thing that I did was get into YouTube and I get obsessed with live shows. So that’s the time where I discover all these live shows of Prince in Las Vegas, all the new power generation movement. And then I discovered James Brown, like for real.

Narration:  The first time he clicked on a video of James Brown, he knew his life had changed forever. 

Cimafunk:  I was like, yo, man, this is, this is a type of life that I want, to just want to feel that groove in that way and just go forward. 

Narration: Seeing James Brown perform gave him an idea what was possible beyond singing backup or writing for other bands. He imagined what leading his own group could look like, but what to call that vision wouldn’t come until later. 

One day, around a year later when Erik was back in Cuba, he struck up a conversation with a stranger. 

Cimafunk:  This old guy asked me where I came from one day and I was like, I came from Pinar Rio, my hometown. He said like, no, no, no, but where you came from, what is your roots?  

Narration:  Beyond his grandparents' generation, he'd never really thought about his lineage until that conversation. At first he was upset he didn’t have a better answer, but then curiosity took over. He went to the elders in his family, and asked them to tell him all they knew of their African roots. 

He then came across the biography of Esteban Montejo, an Afro-Cuban man born on a sugar-cane plantation in the 1860s, two decades before slavery was abolished on the island. While still a young man, Esteban escaped enslavement and lived as a maroon,  or cimarrón, in the hilly rural areas of Cuba where he and other cimarrones established independent communities.

 Esteban lived to be over one hundred years old and was the last living cimarrón in Cuba when his biography was published in 1966. Learning about this history, Erik knew he’d found his artist name: Cimafunk, a fusion of words, just like his sound. 

Cimafunk: Cima is from the maroons that in Cuba go to, to live in the deep forest. They was building small communities there and they was living, hiding in the mountains. 

But for me it's like the base of what the music sound and aesthetic of Afro Cuban descendants because they was doing their own scene. And they was living out together. It was new sounds. There was kids was born there, so it was new type of like, so I take Cima from that. 

Meklit: Because your people were cimarrones? 

Cimafunk: Yeah. From my mom's side, what we know, it was a maroon cimarrones descendants. 

Meklit: It's such a powerful story of freedom, the cimarrones and of like that independence, like you were saying. It's like, renaming yourself that is like a rebirth. Is it like a rebirth?

Cimafunk: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, yeah. And it applied to everything. It applied to everything because it's history. So all the stories that people tell me when I was a kid, all the different type of custom, of family relationships.I get all this type of things came from there. You know, once you, I start to figure it out and know more about it, like, okay, yeah, now I know melanin is good.

Meklit: Melanin is gold.

Cimafunk: Yeah, everything start to move forward.

Narration:  In 2017, soon after he decided on the name Cimafunk, Erik came out with his first solo album, called Terapia. He self-produced the entire project from his bedroom. 

Cimafunk: I learned how to produce music in the computer with that album. I didn't know nothing. And that album made me realize that I could keep doing it. And I was ready for show the people what I was thinking. 

Cimafunk: And I was the opening door for me.

Narration: Without the backing of any major label or marketing campaign, Terapia went viral across the island. The music got so popular, Cubans started calling what was happening Fenomeno Cimafunk. 

A year later, the phenomenon made it to the US. Terapia landed Erik on Billboard's list of "Top 10 Latin Artists to Watch”. And a couple months later, Cimafunk, which included an eight-piece band, made their US debut at SXSW.

Terapia is full of danceable songs that fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms like pilón with American funk, influenced by the style Erik developed and honed in Havana. Over the years, he became obsessed with finding the perfect way to translate funk into Spanish. 

Cimafunk: I was always intrigued how, how singing in funk music in Spanish was so difficult to pull the words with flow, you know? 

Meklit: Oh yeah. 

Cimafunk: It was different because it's like a, it is like a getting a, an American to sing a bolero in English

Meklit: Right. It doesn't quite work

Cimafunk: No because the words have a different pronunciation. So the funk was the same and I was like, okay, the one was, the one that saved me. Hit it on the one all the time.

Meklit: Really

Cimafunk: Yeah. 

Meklit: Because Cubans, you mess with the one

Cimafunk: We mess with the one all the time. We call syncopation. 

Meklit: There you go. 

Narration: It was that obsession with getting funk just right in Spanish that led Erik to compose a song with legendary Cuban musicians in mind. 

Cimafunk: Was a crazy idea that I was trying to put together Omara Portondo, Pancho Amat, Chucho Valdez, Orquesta Aragón. I was trying to put together all this goats, Cuban goats and make a song of groove. And with tradition too.

Narration: As it turns out the idea wasn't so crazy. All the artists agreed to record with Erik for his song “El Potaje” in 2019. 

One day during a recording session, Erik and tres master Pancho Amat were bonding over how to combine funk with traditional Afro-Cuban sound, and Pancho Amat brought up New Orleans.

Cimafunk: I didn't know that he knows so much about, about New Orleans and all this stuff. I didn't know almost nothing about New Orleans.

Narration: This was the same year Erik had taken his first trip to New Orleans and fallen in love with what he saw during Mardi Gras. But back in Cuba with Pancho Amat, he learned how deep the Cuban-New Orleans exchange ran.

Cimafunk: And he started to talk with me and he was like, yeah, man. But you know, the trade was like that. And you can find the same rhythm. The Clave Cubana, there is the soul, it's most of the soul of the, the Cuban that is ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta. That's for us. It's like the food, you was like, it is the same in New Orleans because the, the New Orleans, the New Orleans groove, when you hear the jazz musics, just with the drum. I was using the [sings]. 

Meklit: So that conversation was the key to doing funk in Spanish.

Cimafunk: I was already doing it. I was already sounding good, but when he start to explain me, I was like, okay, now I understand why it's, it's not easy. Because I was, I was not seeing a lot of artists and band doing funky music in Spanish. And the one that I was seeing, I didn't like it. Most of them for the pronunciation, how they put, how they was putting the words on time. 

Meklit: Yes, the phrasing, yeah.

Cimafunk: Me it was like a yo. Because in English you can say, I love you because, baby. And in Spanish is te amo por que.  And that in Spanish doesn't sound with flow. That sound like a hmmm 

Meklit: Right, right. Why do you think that funk and Afro-Cuban music goes so well together? What is it about them that makes them like perfect friends?

Cimafunk: Blackness. 

Meklit: Ayyyy!

CimafunkMelanin. Yeah. The melanin. Yeah. It's not, I think that it's no other, other main reason. It's like we came from the, from the same groove and, and we developing different stuffs cause transculturation and all the phenomenon of immigration and slave trade and stuff. 

And Cuba was so big potence in terms of impact on cultural movement in the world actually, before the, the fifties and yeah, we was, we was crashing New York in the twenties with Machito and Afro-Cuba, and with Mario Bauzá. And that was like a friend of Dizzie with all this movement in the twenties impact so much the American sound that, that getting to the funky.

Meklit: Amazing.

Cimafunk: You know, the Afro-Cuban is inside the funky, like really, really there. The tempos in the, in the soul, in the, in the expression and in the move. And when you hit the groove there is the Afro-Cuban is there.

Meklit: Mm.

Cimafunk: Marvin Gaye songs and James Brown songs. All, all of them was Funkadelic. George used to have a Cuban percussionist. Cuban was all around 

Meklit: Yes.

Cimafunk: In that time. It was all around. So it was doing that connection super deep before.

Narration: Erik moved to New Orleans in 2023, and released his second album, “El Alimento” with features from artists he’d idolized, like George Clinton and Chucho Valdes. 

And outside of the studio, the people are co-signing him too. Just like in Havana, his live shows in New Orleans are big dance parties for the body and the soul. 

Cimafunk: You can be any color, any religion, anything. When the groove get you at some point, when the groove that's, that's physical, you cannot, you cannot, you cannot control that, that go beyond of your knowledge. When the groove beat your body, you're gonna just have to deal with, with yourself and let it go. 

Narration: Cimafunk's latest album is called Pa’ Tu Cuerpa and it’s out now wherever you get your music. 

This episode of Movement was produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our sound designer and co-founder is Ian Coss. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World and we are distributed by PRX.