Cuban singer Daymé Arocena speaks to Isabella Gomez Sarmiento (NPR, 1 March 2025) about her trajectory and her latest album, Alkemi, recorded and produced in Puerto Rico with Eduardo Cabra of Calle 13.
For the past few years, Daymé Arocena‘s life has been transformed by two major revelations.
The first struck swiftly, in a moment of fear and desperation: the artist realized she needed to get away from the island she’s long called home, the one that turned her into a jazz star when she was still a teenager. The second came to her in a kind of subdued focus, as conversations with people outside of Cuba compounded with the messages she’d internalized about her body growing up: that Latin pop music erases and rejects Blackness, she says — Black women, in particular — and she’s ready to change that.
Her new album, Alkemi, is the synthesis of those two epiphanies within the 32-year-old. Recorded and produced in Puerto Rico with Eduardo Cabra of Calle 13, the album retains the Afro-Cuban folklore and jazz traditions that became integral to Arocena’s sound in the early 2010s. But Alkemi is also an expansion into R&B, bossa nova, funk and neo-soul, providing a richly layered backdrop for Arocena’s powerhouse vocals to take center stage while moving her further into Latin pop than she’s ever been before.
That amalgamation of genres and cultures echoes the sounds she grew up with. Arocena was born in Havana during Cuba’s Special Period of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered an economic crisis. She says the apartment she shared with 14 relatives often lacked electricity. “But in my house, they would sing and dance every day,” she says over Zoom from her home in Puerto Rico. “My family, they were my radio, they were my TV shows, they were everything.” [. . .]
Her career took off quickly — when she graduated from the conservatory, she decided to keep singing professionally rather than continue into the traditional orchestra conduction program. She joined the band Maqueque, leaned musically into her Santería background and began performing at concerts and festivals in Europe, the United States and Latin America.
But playing in Havana, she says, proved to be more difficult. The Cuban government passed Decree 349 in 2018, a widely criticized law requiring artists to obtain special permissions from the government in order to perform. [. . .]
Finding herself in Puerto Rico
As she rode out the pandemic in Canada, Arocena felt a strong urge to break out of the genre boxes she felt were starting to limit her. She reached out to Cabra to see if he’d be interested in producing her new material. He was the only option in her mind, she says, because he’d lived in Cuba and deeply understood her musical background. But he was also known for melding global influences with Caribbean sounds through his work in Calle 13, as a solo artist and as a producer for artists like Jorge Drexler, Rita Indiana and Monsieur Periné. [. . .]
Cabra invited Arocena to Puerto Rico, opening up his home so they could get to know one another and collaborate in the studio. When she arrived, she says, something shifted — and not just artistically. “I identified myself as Caribbean, because I didn’t know what the Caribbean was before,” she says, noting how isolated Cuba felt from its surroundings. “I remember any time I traveled to Mexico and other countries in the continent, I felt like, ‘I’m Latina, but I’m not exactly like the people here.’ When I came to Puerto Rico, it was like, ‘okay, now I understand.’ ” [. . .]
For full article, visit https://www.npr.org/2024/03/01/1234650490/dayme-arocena-on-new-album-alkemi-and-puerto-rico
Also see https://edmorales.net/2024/03/13/dayme-arocenas-afro-cuban-alchemy/ and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/arts/music/dayme-arocena-al-kemi.html
Cuban singer Daymé Arocena speaks to Isabella Gomez Sarmiento (NPR, 1 March 2025) about her trajectory and her latest album, Alkemi, recorded and produced in Puerto Rico with Eduardo Cabra of Calle 13. For the past few years, Daymé Arocena‘s life has been transformed by two major revelations. The first struck swiftly, in a moment of fear and
