Oral Culture

Oral Robert Fuentes grew up in Belize hearing the Belizean musician Lord Rhaburn, and in the 1980s he went to Dangriga and heard Pen Cayetano's Turtle Shell Band, the group that turned Garifuna rhythms into punta rock. That music led him to write ‘Me Rock’ and ‘A-Miche, Miche-nary’, songs that other artists recorded and that were sung in churches and youth camps well beyond Belize.

His first band was Caribbean Jam, a multicultural group that played local and national events across Belize. Caribbean Jam brought Belizean cultural songs and rhythms into the country's gospel music, and by the band's own account was named Best Roots Cultural Band for it. Fuentes travelled through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Suriname, Guyana, the United States and the Caribbean.

In 1989 he enrolled at the Academy of Performing Arts in Cambridge, Ontario. He wrote songs and toured with two groups from the school, the rock band The Warriors and the soul and blues band Soul'd Out, playing New York and Nashville several times. Along the way he also lived in Oregon and in Longview, Texas.

Fuentes came to Saskatoon in 1992 to follow a girlfriend. She left; he stayed. The city's clubs wanted cover bands, and none of them would book an unknown singer who only played his own songs. People laughed at the idea, and some musicians quit his band rather than give up the covers. He kept writing.

In 1995 he and DJ Juan Valdez began hosting Latin and Caribbean nights at the Odeon Events Centre. Those shows grew into the Saskatoon Reggae Festival, which Fuentes ran as a registered non-profit and later renamed the Saskatoon Reggae and World Music Festival so that drummers, dancers and other cultural performers had a stage too. He screened every act for a positive message, and festival contracts barred profanity and homophobic statements from the stage.

By the mid-2000s the Oral Fuentes Reggae Band was a fixture at the SaskTel Saskatchewan Jazz Festival. In 2005 a writer for All About Jazz reported that theirs was one of the few sets all week that got people dancing, and the only one he saw that brought calls for an encore. That June, Planet S described a show at McNally Robinson's Prairie Ink cafe that began slow and mellow and built until diners left their tables to dance. A year later, at the Long Day's Night Music Festival in Swift Current, the band packed the dance floor in front of a record crowd. An American magazine writer who couldn't decide what to call the music settled on "funky reggae," and Fuentes kept the name.

Ross Nykiforuk, the Saskatoon keyboardist who played with The Northern Pikes, approached Fuentes about making an album and recorded it at his COSMICPAD Studios. Oral Culture came out in 2007 with twelve songs, all written by Fuentes and arranged by the band. Nigel Wright played lead guitar, Zender Millar bass, Geoff Assman keyboards, Ghana-born Joseph Ashong percussion and djembe, Dave Nelson trumpet and Mike Kereiff trombone, with guitar and backing vocals from Fabian Minnema and backing vocals from Sophia Kutsiuruba, Olya Kutsiuruba and Diane Pingue on ‘Sum Lovin’. Fuentes said he had enough songs left over for three more records. He chose to sing in English rather than Belizean Creole so Saskatoon audiences could follow every line. His lyrics ran from being a one-woman man to poverty to the history of his home country; ‘Rhaburn’ carries the name of the musician who first inspired him, and the album closes with ‘Belize’. The band launched the album at the 2007 Jazz Festival with African, Caribbean and Latin dance troupes and Juan Valdez spinning between sets. Fuentes reports that in late 2008 the video for ‘Whey Natty Dey’ spent more than two weeks at number one on Plus TV in Belize.

By 2011 the group had shortened its name to the Oral Fuentes Band, since it played punta rock, brukdown, soca and dancehall as well as reggae, though promoters kept billing it as the Oral Fuentes Reggae Band and that name returned. By 2011 some of its players had been with Fuentes for fifteen years. That February the band opened the Bassment's Mardi Gras Fest with Ashong, Nelson, Kereiff, Millar and drummer Kevin Pierce, and guitarist Randy Woods of the funk band Absofunkinlutely sitting in. Fuentes sang, played guitar and led the band with small hand signals; he also plays drums, congas and djembe.

Woods recorded and produced the second album, Rise Up, at his own studio in Saskatoon. It opens with the up-tempo ‘Creole Man’ and includes ‘Gone da Manantee’, ‘Fyah Dey’, ‘Reggae Takin Over’, ‘Feelin Dread’, ‘Punta Rock’ and ‘Praising Jah’. Rise Up came out on July 23, 2017 in a small run that was never sold online, and the band reissued it digitally in 2020. The 2017 band counted nine musicians from Belize, St. Lucia, Ghana, Nigeria, Seattle, Victoria and Saskatoon.

The band's press materials list shared bills with Maceo Parker, Divine Brown, Ivana Santilli, Jason Wilson, the African Guitar Summit, Winnipeg's Caraballo and Arrested Development. It has played the Calgary Reggae Festival, the Regina Folk Festival, Ness Creek, the Waskesiu Lakeside Music Festival and JunoFest. In 2019 it was on the bill of the Rock Against Racism Spring Solidarity Concert in Saskatoon, and in March 2023 the Black History Music Festival at Persephone Theatre. That August the band made its Salmon Arm ROOTSandBLUES debut and carried on to Kelowna. It still plays the Bassment's World Music Series, most recently in February 2026, billed as a midwinter trip to the Caribbean.

-Robert Williston