Umalali is a collaborative project put together by Belizean musician and producer, Ivan Duran. Umalali is defined by the stories that comprise

The Garifuna Women's Project ''Umalali: The Garifuna Women's Project'' is musical collection of stories, organized and produced by Ivan Duran. The album is built upon the voices of local women in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. The Garifuna people are residents of ...

Background

For Ivan, in part, Umalali is his own story, built on 10 years of recording various female vocalists and collecting songs that told the stories of the women of

Garifuna The Garifuna people ( or ; pl. Garínagu in Garifuna) are a people of mixed free African and indigenous American ancestry that originated in the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent and speak Garifuna, an Arawakan language, and Vincentian ...

. The Garifuna people are the descendants of shipwrecked African slaves who intermarried with indigenous people and lived on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in the 17th century. In the 1790s, they were shipped by British authorities to Roatán Island off the Central American coast, and had soon created settlements in

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Oce ...

Belize Belize (; bzj, Bileez) is a Caribbean and Central American country on the northeastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a wate ...

Guatemala Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico; to the northeast by Belize and the Caribbean; to the east by H ...

and

Nicaragua Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Managua is the cou ...

.{{Cite web, url=http://www.headbutler.com/products/beyond-classification/holidays-2010-ten-great-books-cds-dvds-things, title=Ten Great Books,Cd's,Dvd's, website=/www.headbutler.com, accessdate=16 October 2022 Duran recorded women and the traditional songs in everyday settings: kitchens, in the streets etc... "The project was always about the stories, about the lives of these women, about capturing the essence of their voices and putting them in a modern context. I was looking for songs that people everywhere could enjoy for their musicality and melodies, not just on a purely intellectual level."

Production

In 2002, five years into the project, Duran constructed a small, thatched roof, studio on the shore of the Caribbean Sea in

. From there, Duran tried to get the women he wanted on the album to take a break from their daily chores and come record. After getting all of the vocal tracks he wanted, Duran returned to his ''Stonetree Studio'' in western Belize and began another five-year process of layering instruments and adding effects to make the local music he had captured, speak to a global audience. In 2007, the final touches were put on the album and the project was complete. In 2008,

was released on independent label,

Cumbancha Cumbancha is a record label, booking agency and music publisher based in Charlotte, Vermont. The company was founded by ethnomusicologist and music producer Jacob Edgar in 2006. In 2007, Cumbancha Music Publishing was established to expand oppor ...

Discography

(2008)

Background

Production

Discography

Notes

Further reading