Ahmed Alom: EXILIO
By George Grella

Away from home for an indeterminate time—possibly forever—and likely alone, walking through unfamiliar places and trying to hold onto the sensations and comforts of memories, thinking of old streets while passing along new ones… In time, this new environment becomes familiar, and maybe has its own comforts, but it never feels like home. There’s a small hollow place in the chest that can only be filled by one thing: returning. But will that ever happen?

There is one word to define that state: exile. Speak it, and feel it. But what does it sound like? Because sound, especially music, is a part of exile. Walking those new streets brings out the sounds of home from memory, and the music, the tunes that are essential to the intimacy of home. This album from Cuban pianist Ahmed Alom—music of home he made while living in New York City, far away from his home of Havana—is the sound and music of exile, EXILIO.

Central to the album, in more ways than one, is Colombian composer Luis Antonio Calvo (1882-1945). In 1916, Calvo was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease (leprosy) and sent into internal exile in the town of Agua de Dios—where lepers were confined—where he spent the rest of his life and did the bulk of his composing. As a historical figure, Calvo encloses this album in a circle; contemporary Colombian composer Julián De La Chica—his Adiós Cuba is the final, bonus track on EXILIO—published a book, God’s Punishment (IGM-2022) that tells the story of the town and how Colombia used the patients as subjects for experiments (he has also developed an opera out of the story). And De La Chica is behind Irreverence Group Music, the imprint for this recording.

“There is a very deep connection I feel with Calvo’s exile, here in New York,” Alom adds. He plays Calvo’s four Intermezzos, arguably the composer’s finest work, with warmth and care, channeling the uncanny combination of charm and emotional distance in the music. If not the, that is at least a prominent sound of exile, a combination of wistfulness and acceptance, a smile followed by arched eyebrows, looking ahead and knowing that there is a loss that can never be replaced. Feelings spike, then draw back, things settle, but in the end never completely fit.

There is, of course, Cuban music, not simply because that is Alom’s heritage but because Cuba, through wars and revolutions, is a disproportionate source of both important, vital music—especially vis-a-vis North America—and of people in exile.

The lives of Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905) and Ernesto Lecuona (1896-1963) overlapped briefly, but they came from two very different periods of Cuban turmoil. For Cervantes, it was the revolutionary movement against Spanish imperialism—the composer raised money for the rebels and fled for his safety to Mexico and the United States. A fundamental figure in the development of a specifically Cuban compositional style, how wrote for the salon with the rhythms of dance. The selections from his Danzas Cubanas—a codification that taught these styles to international audiences—are the sounds of the past, his own and his country’s. The images are of parlors and small dance halls, people dressed for dancing, the rituals of social life.

Lecuona’s two dance pieces transmit the same ideas, but from the mid-20th century—the composer left Cuba for Florida in 1960, disillusioned by Castro’s new government. The grand En tres por cuatro bears itself proudly, fiercely holding on to memories, old lifestyles. Cervantes and Lecuona were exiled not just from their country but from its past, a land that none of us can ever return to.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) and Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) are the two most famous names on this recording, and their exiles from Spain were very different. For the latter, it was perhaps voluntary—he was a popular musician, traveling and performing around the world, it was illness that caught him in France at the end of his life. His Recuerdos are instantly identifiable, even if his name escapes the thoughts this music has been heard before, it triggers the memory. The syncopated rhythms and lyrical interlude are equally sinuous, and like the impressionistic works of Debussy and Ravel they paint a picture of a place, once visited, now lingering in the past.

De Falla was another political exile, fleeing Spain after the Nationalist’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, settling in Argentina. He is perhaps the most important 20th century Spanish composer, and the aching elegance and simplicity of his Canción is a distillation of his art. Everything is just right, nothing is wasted nor excessive, with a minimum of materials, gestures, and even duration, it creates an entire world that is intense and unreachable, the unbridgeable distance adding to the power of the music. And while Calvo smiles through it all, the Cuatro piezas españolas try and dance through it all, or shout, or grit their teeth, Alom balancing determination against the trap of nostalgia. As Beckett wrote in a language other than his own, we can’t go on, we’ll go on.

De La Chica’s vocal work, arranged by Alom for this session for piano and sung by Alom’s wife, mezzo-soprano Rosario Armas, is about, as the pianist says, “what it means to say goodbye to Cuba, to your roots and everything.” The last piece on the album, it is not quite the last word, because all together the music is alive in the present, determined to face the future; Alom brings it here through his playing. He, then, should get the last words: “To me, exile represents a transformation, a movement, a direction. Rather than feeling nostalgia or pain because of the departure, for me it is a matter of having those feelings and looking forward towards universality, with movement and direction. That, for me, is exile.”