Pedro Luis Ferrer
Final

Cuba’s gifts to the world of music are lavish and legendary, and surely reason enough to lift the United States’ vindictive, fifty-plus-year embargo on the island. Why punish a country that has produced so many wonderful artists, among them the singer-songwriter Pedro Luis Ferrer? To tell the truth, Cuban authorities on occasion have penalized Ferrer, by keeping his more iconoclastic songs from airplay. Ferrer’s written about pot parties in Havana with female space aliens, used artificial insemination metaphors to criticize Cuban agricultural policies, and satirized, in the same song, First World vegetarians and Cuban carnivores. He’s also an open-hearted romantic who composes love songs rich in poetry and free from sentimentality. Final comprises twelve new songs recorded in Ferrer’s home studio in Havana. Accompanying himself on the tres, a guitar-like instrument that is a fixture of various Cuban styles, he sings in a warm and relaxed baritone, never straining for an effect or over-emoting. His daughter Lena, a frequent collaborator, duets with him on several numbers, including “Dicen de Ti, Dicen de Mi”, a conversation, set to a barebones arrangement of tres and percussion, about women and the roles “that dilettantes designed for them.” The entire album has an intimate feel, with the voices of padre e hija and Ferrer’s tres framed by steady but unobtrusive percussion, horns, and synthesized strings. I love all of Ferrer’s work, but Final represents a high-water mark in the career of one of the most remarkable and original artists in the Americas.