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New Mexico's World Music & Culture Celebration
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Globalquerque, New Mexico's World Music & Culture Celebration >>
José Manuel Cobles, a.k.a. Puerto Plata, is an 83-year-old veteran of the guitar tradition of the Dominican Republic, adept in all of its many forms—bolero, merengue, ranchera, mangulina, bachata—and above all, son. Son is a style which is most often associated with Cuba; nevertheless, the Dominican Republic is home to an unbroken native son tradition, and José Cobles has personally lived a good part of its history. He offers us a taste of the living music of the great soneros which only a contemporary of theirs could give us, yet his interpretations of classic sones and boleros have a particularly Dominican flavor. When he plays merengue, he takes us back to a time, before the dominance of saxophone and accordion, when son, merengue, guaracha and música jíbara were much closer in their nature, being merely different regional variations of the same Afro-Iberian fusion. Born in the resort town of Puerto Plata in 1923, Cobles combines the wisdom of an elder statesman with an astounding vigor and charisma which one would expect of a much younger man. His mother died when he was young, and upon the death of his grandmother when he was 16 he went to work as a carpenter for the United Fruit Company. His work took him to Manzanillo, to Panama, and finally led him to settle in Santiago (in the Dominican Republic) at the age of 27. There, because of his hometown, he was christened with the nickname Puerto Plata. It was when he was living in Manzanillo that he began to save pennies in a shoe box until he was able to buy his first guitar for 20 Dominican pesos. He was 24 years old—leaving him a scant 56 years of practice to bring his mastery to its current level! 06/01/07 >> go there
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