Good will, good music from Cuba

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Roberto Vizcaino, a performer in the Latin Percussion Concert, plays the conga.

Updated: November 24, 2011 2:59AM

“The thing about Cuban music is that it has great energy and a real excitement that makes it special,” says Don Skoog, an Oak Park drummer and music teacher for more than 30 years.

He’s more than just a fan of the island’s sound. Cuban music, drumming in particular, is his passion, as well as his profession. And since 1994, he’s traveled to Cuba some 20 times to study the sounds, and soak up the culture.

“It’s a beautiful place,”
he says, adding that Cubans are “very American-friendly. They like us down there.”

Skoog is also the man behind a concert set for 7 p.m. July 2 at the 19th Century Club that will feature five top Cuban drummers and percussionists.

Grammy winners

Skoog won’t be surprised if the performances get people up and dancing. It’s hard not to respond to the insistent congas, timbales and other drums of Grammy Award-winning musicians like Roberto Vizcaino and Raul Pineda, who will perform.

“We’ll do some folkloric music, some flamenco, some jazz, there will be singing and I have a guest, Victor Alexander, who will dance to some numbers,” says Skoog. “It’s going to be loads of fun.”

The program will also include a presentation on Cuba’s bata drumming, Skoog’s specialty. The bata drum used in Santeria, a religion in Cuba, and as an instrument in Cuban folk music. It has an hourglass shape, he explains, “but it’s smaller than a conga drum. You hold it on your lap.”

This concert is the culmination of a week of drumming and percussion workshops Skoog holds annually under the auspices of his Contemporary Music Project, during which top percussionists instruct and perform. It’s an international event, he explained. “I have students coming from all over the country for it, but most are from the Chicago area.”

Skoog has been teaching drums and percussion in Oak Park for most of his career, and his students also take part in the concert.

For the past five years, the project has been held in Morelia, Mexico, “in a beautiful, little hotel,” said Skoog. However “little” is the operative word here, and in order to expand the educational program, this year he moved it to Oak Park.

Skoog fell in love with Cuba and its drumming over 35 years ago, when he decided to hone his skills in order to lead a Latin big band for Chicago’s Gallery 37 program.

Where better to find great drumming, he reasoned, than Cuba?

There were, however, official and diplomatic issues about visiting the Communist island.

Yet it never became a problem, says Skoog. “I’ve always gone legally.”

American citizens, he notes, can go to Cuba for professional reasons. So as a music teacher, he was good to go, and did. “I always called the State Department to tell them I was going, and never had any issues,” he says.

Music bridge

It was on his travels to Cuba that he met many of the performers in this concert. “I’m a bridge between Americans and Cubans,” he says.

Recently, Skoog has been glad to see a return of American cultural exchanges with Cuba. Such exchanges, says Skoog, can only be good for everyone. “We have basically a shared history,” he says. “The New World was conquered partly by Spain, partly by England. So some of us speak English, some of us speak Spanish.”

He also feels that while Cuban music has its deepest roots in African and Spanish music, American music, especially in the last century, has been a very strong influence on it.

Which means, he’s found, that “the Cubans have more in common with Americans than they do with the Spanish. They know us there.”