1947-2009

Afro-Cuban musician Peache Jarman’s music insists you dance. If you’re sitting while listening, it takes you by the shoulders, making you sway rhythmically back and forth. You might stand and shift your weight. It is music for dancing in a hot, dark place…music that draws the body relentlessly toward movement. Weight shifts, you sway, you walk in rhythm, buoyed along by a Red Sea of rhythm in which even the densest object floats.

Mr. Jarman’s insistent rhythms – strangely representative of language which can be heard and understood despite never being spoken – derive some of their compelling power from their dual inspiration in the forces of nature and the human need to express reverence for these phenomena. These rhythms speak of saints and sacred herbs, colors and oceans, woods and moods. This music has exerted its attraction on Mr. Jarman since he began his studies at the tender age of seven. The urgent need to express its meanings is so great that Cuban tradition encompasses immigrant dockworkers’ improvisational boxes when drums were not available. So Mr. Jarman’s rhythmic rhetoric is in part comprised of phrases originally articulated on shipping boxes and crates. Mr. Jarman carries on traditions both formal and vernacular, inspiring movement all the while.