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Rustico Coming Alive
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Patriot Ledger, Rustico Coming Alive >>
Pedro Luis Ferrer is part of the Cuban Nueva Trova tradition, a music based on Cuban roots that also makes room for pop, romance, social protest, literary sensibilities and hippie idealism. He came along in the movement's second wave, after Pablo Milanes and Silvio Rodriguez, the genre's big daddies of the late '60s, established its boundaries. And he has continued to make strikingly good records.
The latest is "Rustico," in which he boils his new songs down to a folkish essence of voice, tres (the Cuban guitar with three sets of doubled strings), percussion and sometimes bass. To get precise, the comer of Cuban music Ferrer draws from is changui, a genre from Guantanamo, in eastern Cuba, involving the marimbula, a big wooden box with pluckable metal keys that serves as percussion and bass. He's constructing his own forms, mixing that old instrumental tradition with a few other vocal traditions in Cuban music, and some outside elements as well, including the Peruvian percussion box called the cajon.
But you certainly don't need to know all that. Ferrer's deep, precise voice, harmonized against his daughter Lena's soprano, works with the plucked chiming lines of the tres; they are simple but lovely, importing small dissonances and hints of Cuba's African past. "Rustico" shows off troubadour-like sensibility in pop songwnting that can stand up to the possibly more widely respected Brazilian masters. It is great craftsmanship, and strikingly beautiful.
Ferrer sings his own poems about love, and about local subjects, lightly politicized; his funnier songs turn conventions on their head. In "Fundarnento," he repeats, "Ay, I want seriousness so I can be happy;" in "Maridos Majaderos," his daughter sings against cranky husbands, instead of celebrating their macho; in "Conga Vegetariana"' he contrasts the Cuban plight of having no money to buy meat with the anti-meat prejudice of vegetarian in a developed nation.
-Ben Ratuff 03/08/05
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