Beyond Buena Vista

The cream of post-war Cuban music is coming soon to a record store near you.

by. Gene Santoro

Let’s play jeopardy.  This reissue program started in May 2005, runs through June 2006, and taps into one of the more artistically sparkling and culturally significant troves of music made in the last fifty years. 

The question: What is Cuban Essentials (Escondida Music)?

To expand:  it’s a ten-CD series that culls gems from the vaults of Egrem, the record company that was launched in Cuban during the postwar heyday of mambo and cha-cha-cha (and nationalized after Castro came to power in 1959).

For this project, the artists whose work has been sifted, selected, and complied include handleader Beeny More (Ritmo), Chucho Valdes (Virtuoso), Irakere (Bacalao con Pan), Juan Fromell y Los Van Van (Por Encima del Nivel), Ibrahim Ferrer (Ay, Candela,) Ruban Gonzalez (Momentos), Eliades Ochoa (A la Casa de la Trova), Company Segundo (El Compadre Again), and Omara Portuondo (Sentimento).  (There is also a compilation called Guantanamera.)

Many of these artists have now won Grammies.  Some are familiar to fans of Buena Vista Social Club.  But nearly all the settings are different, often startlingly, from what newer fans might expect. 

Many of these artists were at their peaks when they made these recordings, but they were rendered invisible by the American cultural embargo against Cuba, the result of little misunderstandings like the Bay of Pigs invasion, the USSR-sponsored missile crisis, and several assassination attempts. 

Drawing of Egrem’s 7,000 recordings, this series may yield a broader, more systematic look at the dizzying variety and dazzling energy of postwar Cuban music than was possible earlier.  There have been notable efforts:  Columbia in the late 1970s used a brief Cuban- American thaw to sign a few Cuban artists, Blue Note in the 1990s did the same, and Rounder and others have reissued some prewar compilations.  But Cuban Essentials promises a new sweep of material for American listeners. 

Most current American fans of Cuban sounds have to thank Ry Cooder for once more prying open the swinging musical door between Cuba and the U.S., where nearly one third of Cubans now live.  But the historical irony is that Cuban and American music have been exchanging intimate secrets for a century.  You could call them kissin’ cousins. 

The evolutionary theory of convergent evolution explains a lot of New World culture- at least outside Kansas.  An ironic residue of history’s horrors-conquest, slavery- were the music hybrids that have flourished across the Americas for a century and more. 

Think of European music and instruments meeting African clave, the three-two (or two-three) beat that rock godfather Bo Diddley gave his name to.  It’s the same underlying rhythm that Jelly Roll Morton, jazz’s self described founder, called “Spanish Tinge,”  pointing out it drives most of the music tat emerged from New Orleans. 

Around the time American blues was surfacing in the Mississippi River’s delta, rural Cuba gave birth son, a raw-edged form with characteristic West African devices like call-and-response vocals and cyclical backing riffs.

In fact, early son sounds like country blues set to clave; guitars and improvised vocals are its hallmarks.  (Guitar virtuoso Eliades Ochoa hews close to this tradition.)  Like blues, son featured powerful singers, double entendres, and suggestive beats; and this remained the model even as son developed (as blues did with jazz and rhythm-and-blues) stylistic offshoots.  (Ibrahim Ferrer was an outstanding example of a post war modern style sonero.)

So son soon gave birth to larger units, sextets especially, and its popularity spread.  By the postwar era, its instrumentation grew closer to that of American dance bands.  (Ruben Gonzalez, the powerful keyboard master, introduced piano into son groups, and Beeny More, Cuba’s Cab Calloway, started with Conjunto Matamoros, a swaggering big-band version of a venerated small group.) 

Havana was an American playground, the Las Vegas of its day, complete with swank nightclubs and gambling courtesy of the Mafia, from the Roaring Twenties until Castro.  And New York was a mecca for Cuban musicians for at least a song. 

In 1926, the Sexteto Bolona became the first Cuban band to record in New York, amid the many Cuban musicians were dram to the city by the Harlem Renaissance and jazz.  In 1930, “El Manicero”  (the Peanut Vendor) launched the rumba, an offshoot of son, as the latest dance craze in the dance-crazy United States.  It would be followed by conga, mambo, bugalu, and salsa. 

Ah, mambo.  When Oscar Hijuelos was looking for an overarching metaphor reflecting the deep intimacies and inevitable frictions between Cuban and American cultures, he didn’t pull mambo out of a hat.  Mambo yearns to carry that symbolic weight.  A descendent of Congolese cult music, born in Cuba, raised in New York, mambo circled back to its native island via the Mexican-based dance band of Perez Prado, its most celebrated popularizer in the U.S. 

How intimately involved, in a twisty way, can you get? Try this:  Tito Puente, a New York-born Puerto Rican, and Celia Cruz, one of the greatest son singers and a Havana émigré in New York, dominate the soundtrack for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. 

Cuban music not only ruled America’s dance floors in the form of mambo, in New York it created Cubop, aka Afro-Cuban jazz, aka Latin jazz, still one of jazz’s most vibrant contemporary styles.  Machito and Mario Bauza and Dizzy Gillespie (who loved dancing the mambo)  found ways to marry the convoluted harmonic and rhythmic structures of behop with clave- a tricky combination, to say the least- as well as integrating Cuban, Puerto Rican, and American personnel.

By the 1970s, the most recent and continuing wave of Cuban-American music arose- salsa.  Also born in New York, it remains the lingua franca of the Latin American music world. 

Buena Vista Social Club, touching and valuable as it was, had little room for any of this.  And so Cuban Essentials provides another welcome perspective lacking to most Americans since the mambo gave way to the Missile Crisis.

For instance, it may surprise some BVSC fans to discover Ferrer skating his smooth tenor warble over skirling horns and explosive percussion, just as they may be surprised when they hear Segundo, Gonzalez, et al. in their prime’s stylistic garb, less great representatives of a dying breed and more fiery and feisty and at the cutting edge.  But the surprises should be good. 

And then there are young lions of the 1960s.

Juan Formell, one of Havana’s storied street poets, wrote lyrics sung in an irresistibly fluid voice, whish Los Van Van backed with stuttering syncopations out of American soul music, irresistible rhythms that filled Havana plazas with ecstatic dancers.

For 25 years the band Irakere, piloted by pianist Chucho Valdes, combined folk elements, classical touches, fiery bebop solos, and incendiary beats (even disco!) in a heady, ever-changing blend. 

Among Irakere’s personnel were reed master Paquito D’Rivera and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, among current jazz’s most charismatic soloists.  Both defeated from Cuba and established high-profile American careers that earned Grammy awards. 

Valdes, also a Grammy winner, records for Blue Note.  His two hands are so chock full of rhythms and post-bop harmonic sophistication that listening to him solo can induce an out-of-body experience.  

Hearing them together is a joy.  

Let’s hope Cuban Essentials signals the imminent revival of the long relationship between Cuban and American music, and that its semi-hidden past will continue to emerge.