Exuberant and unpretentious are not adjectives normally applied to the films of Wim Wenders, but they define his wonderful new movie, this documentary about popular Cuban music, the “son de Cuba”. The film is a collaboration between Wenders and the composer and rock musician Ry Cooder, whose film scores include Wenders’s Paris, Texas, 10 Walter Hill pictures and Primary Colors, but the film came about through the enthusiasm of London record producer Nick Gold.
Cooder has travelled the world in search of local music and new collaborators. But though he’d been to Havana and been impressed by the local scene, he’d never recorded there until Gold suggested a session with African and Cuban musicians at the decrepit Egrem studios, built by RCA in 1940 and little changed since. The performers ranged from teenagers to old-timers in their Nineties, few of whom had worked together before and some of whom hadn’t performed professionally for years.
The result was as significant and as romantic as John and Alan Lomax discovering Leadbelly and re-discovering Jelly Roll Morton in the Thirties, or the editors of Jazzmen and Rudi Blesh pulling the ageing Bunk Johnson out of the Louisiana ricefields, buying him a trumpet and a new set of teeth and putting him together with other forgotten veterans to launch the New Orleans revival in the early Forties.
The Havana recordings produced the worldwide bestseller Buena Vista Social Club (named for a long-forgotten gathering place of pre-revolutionary times). It captured Wenders’s imagination when he heard Cooder’s rough mix while they were working together on The End of Violence and led to this movie.
Shot mostly on video, the picture interweaves interview and documentary footage with three musical strands – the recording in 1998 in Havana of a solo album featuring the 72-year-old singer Ibrahim Ferrer and produced by Cooder, and two concerts that same year by the 15-strong Buena Vista Social Club orchestra in Amsterdam and at New York’s Carnegie Hall, in both of which Cooder sits in on guitar.
The performers are virtuoso instrumentalists as well as gifted singers and composers, but they work together beautifully as a mutually respecting and loving ensemble, and their music is sad, cheerful, cheeky, funny, full of life, love and joy.
As we watch them perform, we meet the musicians as they rehearse or walk the rutted streets of the beautiful, decaying Havana that has in recent years neglected their music and condemned a number of them to working as bootblacks and stevedores. The outgoing, 90-year-old Compay Segundo began life in the tobacco fields and has been smoking cigars for 85 years and supporting himself as a singer and guitarist since he was 15. His career is beginning to peak again.
The more reserved 80-year-old Rubén González, the band’s white-bearded pianist, was trained as a classical performer before turning to dance music. When he was contacted by Cooder, Rubén hadn’t owned a piano for a decade and was said to be crippled by arthritis. But in fact he plays with the dexterity of a young man, a point made with visual power when he rehearses on the vast second floor of a palatial seafront building used for training teenage gymnasts.
There is a sharp contrast between the immaculately mixed soundtrack and the apparently casual look of the images, virtually all shot on Steadicam and with different crews at work in Cuba, Holland and the States. But the different visual textures are part of the film’s meaning. The crude, stabbing quality of the Cuban footage captures the harsh, decaying atmosphere of sub-tropical Havana. The Amsterdam concert, however, is elegantly shot in desaturated colour by Robbie Müller, while the Carnegie Hall concert is garishly lit to match the unreal Manhattan that so entrances the Cuban performers visiting the city either for the first time or the first time since their distant youth.
The movie places the musicians in their social and cultural context, but it refuses to score easy political points about the dark side of the Castro regime or the vindictive character of US policy towards Cuba. The people in the movie impress us with their resilience and their self-respect. It is a tonic experience to be with them and hear their music.