The most widely held Garifuna ethnogenesis story is one of resistance and resilience: escaping from shipwrecked European slave ships, a group of West African survivors made their way to the island of Yurumein, already inhabited by Indigenous Arawak and Kalinago people. Their shared descendants would fight against the colonists claiming Yurumein as Saint Vincent, leading to their mass internment and exile to the Caribbean coastlines of Central America and creating the urgent need to band together as a Garifuna community. By the 20th century, though, Garifuna identity was mainly stigmatized in Honduras and Belize, the nations with the largest proportion of Garifuna residents. Hoping to encourage more Garifuna youth to embrace their roots, many Garifuna cultural advocates turned to music.
One group with such goals was Chatuye, a Los Angeles-based band with members from or rooted in Belize’s Garifuna community. It was founded and led by late historian and educator Sidney Phillip Mejia and named after Chief Joseph Chatoyer, a leader of the 18th-century anticolonial resistance. Like many other Garifuna groups of the 1970s and 1980s, especially those connected to Belizean Garifuna cultural movements, Chatuye performed traditional Garifuna rhythms with more mainstream popular dance music sensibilities. Unlike most of their contemporaries, though, Chatuye kept their instrumentation streamlined for the 1986 debut album Ahmuti, largely eschewing electronic additions in favor of percussion and voice.
Nearly four decades later, Frederiksberg Records gives Ahmuti its first reissue. It holds up well. Layers of rhythm and tight vocal call-and-response drive each of the five tracks forward, densely packing a satisfying array of movements and textures into a compact and lively package. Never does a beat go astray, but neither does anything sound too slick to grab hold of. The opening track, “Ahmuti”, along with the very slightly different dub version that follows, sets the bar high where building momentum is concerned.
Following both versions is “Leh Hesebe Bu”, where rolling drums, a slightly more sinuous vocal line, and wordless calls in the background add compelling touches to the unstoppable rhythms. Simeon Chimilio joins the group on rhythm guitar for “Gagarada-Magarada”, in intriguing syncopation with the drums. The final track, “Gumanana”, ends with a heavy low end, but one that adds to the power of the overall mix rather than dragging anything down.
Short and cohesive, Ahmuti is a stellar display of Chatuye’s collective musicianship and a testament to no-frills production. The drummers (Mejia, Daniel Lino, Charles Lino, Ira Lino, Austin Paulino, and Owen Castillo) and vocalists (Mejia, the Linos, Paulino, and Allan Joseph) each come through with the clarity of a live performance. In the bigger picture, though, it also significantly contributes to the accessible body of commercially produced Garifuna music.
This reissue of Ahmuti adds another sonic point of view to the accessible body of commercial Garifuna music, a perspective distinct from but also in harmony with Pen Cayetano’s plugged-in punta rock, Andy Palacio’s early synthpop, and guitar-focused paranda. Today, as artists like Aurelio Martínez and the Garifuna Collective serve as unofficial ambassadors of Garifuna culture, performing what music scholar Amy Frishkey has called Garifuna World Music for outsider audiences, the Chatuye archives offer a broader understanding of how Garifuna artists have sounded that identity in community with one another. The fact that it’s also wonderfully appealing music makes it all the better.