Cuban music’s local cult status is soaring with the re-release of some legendary jam sessions by Cuba’s greatest musos, writes Peter Makurube
Born of a country in which politics and passion are the order of the day, Cuban music has always enjoyed cult status in South Africa. But its following grew to massive proportions last year with the local release of the Grammy Award-winning Buena Vista Social Club.
The latest release from World Circuit – the producer of Buena Vista and a host of other Cuban delights – is Estrellas de Areito’s Los Heroes. A double CD set, it is a re-release of legendary jam sessions by Cuba’s greatest musicians recorded in 1979, and it’s as sexy as it is danceable.
While Cuban music always flourished in its own back yard, it took a Puerto Rican band, the Fania All-Stars, based in New York City, to bring the Cuban style to the world’s attention.
In 1979, when the All-Stars paid a visit to Havana, most Cubans were not even aware of their presence in the city. However, a few musicians did attend and what they heard left them gob smacked. Rafael Lay Senior, conductor of the Orchestra Aragon, probably Cuba’s greatest band, spoke for all when he said: “I’m afraid of the future. The Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans are `eating us up’ with our music.”
After the Fania performance, Raoul Diomande – record producer and distributor of Cuban music – a native of the Ivory Coast who had seen many Cuban bands in Paris and New York, resolved to record an all-Cuban album.
Believing that Cubans could make better salsa records than non-Cuban copycats, Diomande approached EGREM, Cuba’s “official” record company that had been nationalised by Fidel Castro’s government in 1960. The executives there chose staff arranger/producer and prominent trombonist, Juan Pablo Torres, to take charge of the production. Torres assembled his most desirable musicians and put them in the recording studio in November of 1979. It was a dream band. Amardito Valdes, a timbales player on what became known as the Los Heroes sessions, says “Call it fate; the hand of God or whatever, but we were all in Havana at the time.”
But Torres did not only assemble a cluster of stars – he created a universe of sound with musicians who could not only play, but could “make music”. The finest practitioners of the Cuban sound saw to it that Estrellas de Areito was born.
Today the album called Los Heroes has been released, after 20 years of obscurity, and it’s awesome. The local distributors are new kids on the block, Sheer Sound.
The album features many great figures of modern Cuban music, among them pianist Ruben Gonzalez, whose career was almost single-handedly reinvigorated by American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder. Today Gonzalez is regarded as a great soloist, and his playing style has been recognised for its many allusions to classical Latin American musical styles of days gone by.
Other Cuban stars of note on the album include trumpeter Arturo Sandoval of Irakere fame. Sandoval was a top player in Cuba before he went into exile with the help of the late jazz icon, Dizzy Gillespie. His partner in Irakere, Paquito D’Rivera, an incredible alto sax player, is also part of Estrellas.
The two went on to become world stars, though in Cuba the fathers of the son (salsa music) remain largely unknown.
With musicians spanning three generations of Cuban music, the songs themselves range from the Forties – when Antonio Arcano’s charanga gave rise to the mambo – to the late Seventies.
Another great name on the Estrellas collection is Enrique Jorrin, a pioneer of the cha cha cha rhythm. Gonzalez recalled that moment, clearly, in a recent interview: “Jorrin used to play a lot in a club between Prado and Neptuno in central Havana,” said Gonzalez. “He used to say that is where the cha cha cha was born, and he was its creator”.
The rest of the line-up is made up of musicians from other Cuban bands of the Fifties like the Orchestra America, Orchestra de Cubana, Musica Mordena, Orchestra Riverside and musicians from the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television.
The singers include living legends like Miguel Cuni, Pio Leyva and Tito Gomez. The main female singer on the album is Teresa Garcia Cartula. She was lead vocalist and conductor of the Las D’Aida group, founded in 1952. According to Armadito Valdes, who plays timbales on the recording: “She made things swing. It was like a party”.
The Fania All-Stars travelled to Cuba to sell salsa to Cubans in very much the same way Paul Simon came to South Africa to sell mbaqanga. Unlike South Africa, however, the islanders went beyond their outrage, though at first they complained bitterly.
Enrique Jorrin explained their situation in words that could have been uttered by a South African: “What they do abroad is Cuban music, even if they add some details. Cuba has not had time to fully explore its music. Cubans don’t even know what is going on at home and yet abroad people are copying us”.
Finally, Armadito Valdes sums up the mood of the Los Heroes sessions: “It was one of those things that happens once in a lifetime. Everything just fell into place and it can never happen again. “What was captured was a unique moment that could never be repeated ; a critical turning point in the history of Cuban music. It’s the most important recording ever made in the last 20 years in Cuba.”