Aurelio Martínez, the Honduran musician who championed his country’s Garifuna people (also known as the Garínagu) and brought their music to wider international attention, has died. Martinez was one of thirteen people killed last night, Monday, March 17, in a small plane crash off the coast of the Caribbean island of Roatán. He was 55.
Born in the isolated town of Plaplaya in Honduras’ Gracias a Dios district in 1969, Martínez participated in traditional Garifuna rituals from a young age. Typically performed on acoustic guitar with percussive accompaniment, Garifuna songs combine West African rhythms with latin, reggae, and calypso music. At the age of 14, Martínez moved to the port city La Ceiba, where he began performing in various latin jazz ensembles. Eventually, he formed his first group, Lita Ariran, whose 1995 album Songs of the Garifuna made them one of the first Garifuna bands distributed on an international label.
Two years later, Martínez met Andy Palacio, a fellow rising star in Garifuna music from Belize, when the two recorded the duet “Lánarime Lamiselu” for Stonetree Records’ compilation Paranda: Africa in Central America. He put out his debut solo album, Garifuna Soul, in 2004, and in 2005 was elected as the first member of African descent in the National Congress of Honduras, where he fought for the rights of the Garifuna community. However, following Palacio’s death in 2008, Martínez returned to music, and would go on to release three more studio LPs under the moniker Aurelio: Laru Beya in 2011 and Lándini in 2014, and Darandi in 2017. Last year, Lándini was named as one of the best Latin American albums of all time in the Los 600 discos de Latinoamérica, a list project compiled by music journalists from the region.
In 2015, Martínez gave a performace for NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concert” series. “The beautiful thing about Aurelio is that he didn’t want to do things just for himself,” Garifuna activist Ubafu Topsey told The Guardian following Martínez’s death. “He came from such humble beginnings and he never forgot where he came from. He spoke and wrote about the reality of our lives and how to be determined to overcome and to be consistent with how our history.”
