A Voice Silenced
The show at the 212 Club in Heredia with the Guatemalan
band Alux Nahual had gone well. Fidel Gamboa had shown up in support of the
visiting band and had stayed to play with them in a set that went very well.
The musicians stayed backstage after the show for some time, then Fidel, the
co-founder of the immensely popular Costa Rican band Malpais went home and went
to bed, where he was found in the morning, lifeless. He was just fifty years old,
a cultural voice of his generation, silenced.
Growing up with his brother Jaime, at
times on their grandfather’s cattle ranch in Guanacaste, Fidel Gamboa would
rise early to help milk the cows, then eat a second breakfast with his
grandmother. When they were a bit older, the two brothers often worked with
their uncle Max Goldenberg, a cheesemaker and part-time musician, also in the province of Guanacaste. Both were drawn toward
composing music and the storytelling involved. Fidel went on to study music in
theory and practice at the University
of Havana to perfect his
work on the clarinet and saxophone. He returned after two years to study and
work at the jazz workshops at the University
of Costa Rica in San Jose. It was there he began a working relationship
with Adrian Goizueta, eventually playing in his band for seventeen years, along
with his brother Jaime, while building a lifelong friendship with Goizueta.
In the early Nineties, Fidel changed
musical direction, picking up a guitar and started composing more and more songs.
He wrote a lot of material for advertisements, and appeared on more than thirty
albums. He found that he was writing modern material that had roots in his
Guanacastecan culture. He and Jaime were backing their uncle Max as Tierra Seca
for an album for their friend Manuel Obregon, a founding member of the highly
successful Costa Rican music label Papaya Music, when Obregon decided to sit in
on piano and voila! Malpais was
formed. The band went on to become one of the most popular in Costa Rica, but
it was always motorized and directed by the Gamboa brothers, with Jaime scoring
most of the instrumentation and Fidel writing and singing a great bulk of the
songs. A workaholic, Fidel always had several musical projects alive at the
same time. Among them were “La
Cancion de Edad”, in addition to “Cuarteto Sporadico” and
other splinter projects with Manuel Obregon, along with his work for national conservation
and for children’s education in Costa
Rica. Fidel was also the recipient of the
Achilles Echeverria and the ACAM awards.
Fidel was once asked what he would have
been if he hadn’t been a musician. His response was that he would like to have
been a sculptor. I think that wish became real, too, because he has sculpted songs
that have touched people, generations, and even a country. He will always be
missed and can never be replaced. Thank you for your gift of songs to us,
Fidel. Words cannot express our loss.
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