Istvan Dely

Ever since I can remember I felt an unbearable yearning for the tropics and African drumming. I attained both for the first time in Cuba where I was sent on a scholarship from my university in Budapest, to complete my master degree in Latin American literature. There I learned drumming in African religious settings, with all that this trade implies in the host cultures: spirituality, morality, community. Upon initiation into the Vititi Congo “house” of the Congo cult I received the name and mission Millero Congo (Congo seedbed) which made drumming a lifetime apostleship for me.

Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 2003Konga Dely - This second title I earned back in Hungary in the early seventies. I was the first and only conga drummer in Central Europe at the time and in the momentous upsurge of progressive rock and jazz in my old country suddenly everybody wanted a conga drummer on their team! I played and recorded and toured Europe with all the top musicians in every conceivable genre and situation.

At the same time I followed my other calling too, the one I got my degree for: languages and literature. Among critics and readers I became one of the best translators of world literature from Spanish and English into Hungarian. In 1977, at the peak of success and popularity in both careers, I decided to take the “Big Leap”, to defect – not to the West as everybody else, but to the South, back to my beloved Caribbean.

With my Colombian wife, singer/songwriter Leonor, we settled in Cartagena, a gem of a colonial city on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia. With her and our sons David and Shangó I founded in 1986 the first ethnic drumming school in the country and the experimental Afro Caribbean acoustic fusion group Millero Congo. Our eleven years (5 in Cartagena, then 6 in Barranquilla) of pioneering work both with the school and the music group were a unique training and maturing period for the fruits to come, both collectively and separately, to my ever growing Millero Congo mission.

Our third album with executive producer KC Porter has just been recorded in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and will soon be released under his Los Angeles based Insignia Records label.In the year 2000, multi Grammy Award winner American music producer KC Porter signed up Leonor Dely & Millero Congo on his label Insignia Records, executive producing and releasing our two CDs: Amame (2001), and Talisman (2004), almost entirely Leonor’s compositions to Bahá’u’lláh’s words in rootsy Colombian and AfriCaribbean music styles with a global sound, initiating a new trend of “Music with a Cause” that we call tribalglobal: Much of the spirit of village music, many of the means of urban music, with a nature and purpose new and ancient. We toured the US four times with our music so far, teaming up with master musicians from China, Iran and North America.

Music

I have been many things in many places in life, but never a salesman, I regret to say. So I’m not selling my music here, just showing you shortish sound clips gleaned from a period of 30 years.

Until recently I also lived up to my self-coined slogan: I remember nothing but the future. So much of the past is lost, to me at least. From old friends in the old country I was able to rescue some interesting relics from that legendary period of the early seventies when rock and jazz music was born in Hungary as a thrilling antidote to the drabness of life under communism, the only tolerated form of dissent.

In those early days I mostly worked my Cuban drums alone (I quickly trained my brother Laci so as not to feel so lonely) as guest musician with all the best rock, jazz, and protest song groups then thriving in Hungary. From among those giants of Hungarian music history I remember best (for having worked with closest and longest): Presser Gábor’s Lokomotiv GT, the Köszegi Rhythm & Brass jazz group and Szakcsi Lakatos Béla’s Rákfogó.

In Colombia I raised and trained a whole family to carry on together the Millero Congo (Congo seedbed) mission in percussive tribalglobal music: my wife Leonor (lead vocals and songwriter), and our sons David and Shangó. That took some time, which explains the gap of “recording silence” between 1977 and 1995. All our musical production from this second period has been a collective family job. And it’s barely beginning… I still remember nothing but the future.

HUNGARY 1973 - 1977

2 - Az esö és én (Lokomotiv GT) - MP3 Sample
3 - Züst nyár (Lokomotiv GT) - MP3 Sample

COLOMBIA 1995

1 - Yuka-e (Millero Congo) - MP3 Sample
2 - Cumbia Cienagüera (Millero Congo) - MP3 Sample

Website: http://www.istvandely.com