Yoruba Andabo on YouTube

YouTube user wuakeen just posted this video of Yoruba Andabo doing "Linda Habana." A great song, and a nicely done video. Not sure where this is from, but it is fairly recent. I heard that Chappottín is no longer singing with them, can anyone confirm that? The fact that the title misspells the name as "Yuruba Andabo" makes me suspect this is not a Cuban production, although it is very professionally done.

For the percussionists there is a nice shot of the bass cajon player's basic drum/cajon motif. ( Here he seems to be using congas instead of the usual bata.) Notice also how when Yoruba Andabo plays guarapachangueo, the open tones of the tres/dos stay pretty constant, leaving most of the wild stuff to the caja and the quinto.

The song seems kind of truncated here though - it's mostly the intros and the décimas. The complete version can be heard on "When the Spirits Dance Mambo" CD, the excellent soundtrack to an okay film which came out in 2004.

If you haven't heard this record, it also features great contributions from Clave y Guaguancó (their best stuff, in my opinion) and "Los Egguns Hablan," kind of a supergroup of Puntilla and his buddies in Cuba. The 2-disc set seems to be distributed only through their website and is well worth checking out, one of the best rumba releases of that past 5 years. (It's not all rumba, but the rest of the stuff is great too. There are sound clips available at the site.)