PUERTO PLATA
MUJER DE CABARET

Puerto Plata is a coastal resort in Dominican Republic. It's also the nickname of this guitarist, José Manual Cobles, who hails from there. As a labourer he found it was easier to call people by where they were from than to try to remember their name. Now 83 year years old and an immigrant to the USA, this is his first album. He survived the 30-year brutal regime of Trujillo and perfected his music, which sounds very Cuban to me. I recall one afternoon laying in my hotel room in Santiago trying to kill a pain in my guts which a quack doctor had misdiagnosed as heatstroke, and as I drank the rum which made me worse, I could hear some classic Cuban son and bolero wafting up from the street from a cassette vendor's stand. Finally I roused myself and went down to give the guy a glass of rum in appreciation. Now I hear this disc I think that's what he was playing, thrown in with Trio Matamoros. It mixes well, like rum and orange juice -- but let's not go there. The album opens, indeed, with a Nico Saquito composition, a guaracha called "Amarrao con fé." It's unplugged which is great, you can really hear the skill of Edilio Paredes on the guitar which alternates between fluid runs and that brittle stumbling chicken-scratch typical of Dominican pop. Mexican as well as Cuban rhythms adapt well to this style of playing. In addition to numbers by duo los Compadres and Antonio Machin, Puerto Plata covers "Te la dejo toda" by Mexican diva Paquita la del Barrio. There are one or two original compositions thrown in among the standards, and a spare band that takes over half-way through as the fingerwork is probably too much for one pair of guitarists!

Alastair Johnston