Edito de Buena Vista Social ClubThe players and singers of the son de Cuba have nurtured this very refined and deeply funky music in an atmosphere sealed off from the fall out of a hyper-organised and noisy world. In the time of about a one hundred and fifty years, they have developed a beautiful ensemble concept that works like greased lightning. This album is blessed with some of the finest musicians in Cuba today their dedication to the music and rapport with each other is unique in my experience. Working on this project was a joy and a great privilege. This music is alive in Cuba, not some remnant in a museum that we stumbled into. I felt that I had trained all life for this and yet making this record was not what I expected in the 1990s. Music is a treasure hunt. You dig and dig and sometimes you find something. In Cuba the music flows like a river. My deepest thanks to everybody who participated in this record. Ry Cooder Song descriptions 1. Chan chan The slow country style son Chan chan is a recent composition by the 89 year old giant of Cuban music, Francisco Repilado a.k.a. Compay Segundo. Compay s career began with the first great flowering of the son in Santiago in the 1920s. By his early teens he was working in the tobacco fields but would head for the local bars at night to play and sing with the top musicians of the time soon joining Ñico Saquito s Cuban Stars. He acquired his nick-name when he formed the legendary Duo Los Compadres in 1942; Compay is Cuban slang for compadre (friend) and Segundo referred to his trademark, bass harmony second voice. He remained as guitarist and singer with Los Compadres for fourteen years and during this period he also played clarinet with the group s main rival, Conjunto Matamoros. The lyrics draw on Compay s own background of the east Cuban guajiro (peasant) and the couple in the song are themselves part of Cuban folklore, first appeared in a popular turn of the century song. Lead vocals are by fellow Santiagueran Eliades Ochoa, widely acknowledged as the finest guitarist of his generation, but Compay s own vocals and congas can be heard in the backing track. 2. De camino a la vereda The singer Ibrahim Ferrer was born at a social club dance in Santiago in 1927. He was the only one of his family to become a professional musician although he says they all like to dance2. He wrote De camino a la vereda in the early 1950s around the time he was touring the east of the island aboard a carnival float, as the specialist improvising singer with Pacho Alonso s group. After years of singing with Benny Moré, the Chepín-Chovén Orchestra and Los Bocucos amongst others, his pure soft voice had grown less fashionable in recent time. Called into the studio from his daily walk through the streets of Havana on the day of recording, this was his first session for a number of years. Ibrahim lives in old Havana in a run down apartment building. He is shy and unassuming man with a strong faith. His tiny living room is dominated by an alter to Saint Lazarus (Babalé-Ayé in the Santaría religion) and this song has religious overtones not to stray from the path. 3. El cuarto de Tula El cuarto de Tula has long been a favourite with Eliades Ochoa s group Cuarteto Patria. This extended descarga (Cuban jam style) features the great soneros Ibrahim Ferrer and Manuel Puntillita Licea joining Eliades in improvising lyrics laced with sexual innuendo in the Santiago tradition. The extraordinary solo on the laoud (a small, twelve string instrument similar to a lute) is by Barbarito Torres, the finest player in Havana. The timbales are played by the 13 year old phenomenon, Julienne Oviedo Sánchez, already a veteran of some of Cuba s most celebrated modern big bands. 4. Publo nuevo The 77 year old pianist Rubén González is regarded by his fellow musicians as one of Cuba s national treasures. He passed up the chance of a career as a doctor to be a musician and joined the conjunto (dance ensemble) of the legendary blind tres player Arsenio Rodríguez in the early 1940s. It was a time when the African-influenced mambo was taking hold and jazz harmonies were being introduced into Cuban music. Rubén is the last survivor of a trio of pianists, together with Lilí Martínez and Peruchín, who were at the heart of those developments and created the modern Cuban piano sound. Everythin you hear now in Cuban music , he says, comes out of that brilliant period. This track is typical of the urban piano style he developed in those years with an introduction in danzón rhythm followed by a mambo section with solos from piano, trumpet and bass. In the mid 1950s he began a thirty year association with Enrique Jorrín, the creator of the cha cha cha but in recent years Rubén had virtually given up playing due to arthritis and no longer has a piano at home. He was the first at the studio every morning waiting for the doors to be unlocked and once visible as his beautiful touch returned. In the two days that followed the recording of this album Rubén recorded his debut album for World Circuit. 5. Dos gardenias This classic bolero is the pianist and arranger Isolina Carillo s best known composition. Born in 1907 she wrote the song in the 1930s and it has since become an essential part of every bolero singer s repertoire. The great Cuban singer and bandleader, Antonio Machín scored a huge success with the song in Spain in the 1940s. Machín died in Seville in 1995 and Compay Segundo played the song at his funeral before sprinkling rum on his resting place as a tribute. This recording features an intimate performance from Ibrahim Ferrer who learnt the piece when he playing with the great Benny Moré, at the Club Alivar in the 1950s. 6. ¿Y tú qué has hecho This song with its beautiful lyrics and charming melody was written in the 1920s by Eusebio Delfín. Born in the last century, he died in Havana in 1965 was a good friend of Compay Segundo, who shares his baritone voice. Delfín made his first recordings in 1922, one of the first Cubans to do so, and was also a guitar accompanist to singers such as Rita Montaner and Luis María Morales. Moving away from the then typical strumming and introducing freer harmonies and rhythmic changes, Delfín caused a sensation in his time. I had a happy idea which completely changed the style that was employed to accompany the bolero," he later recalled. The delightful guitar duet with Ry Cooder here features Compay Segundo on the armónico, a small guitar with seven metal strings with the third double-strung, which he invented in the 1920s to combine the characteristics of the tres and guitar. 7. Veinte años The only woman on the album, Omara Portuondo has sung with many of Havana s groups including the all-woman bands Orquesta Anacaona and Aida Diestro, but she is best known as a solo bolero and feeling singer. A rare calm descended on the studio as she dictated tempo and arrangement and in just two hours Veinte años was recorded. The song was written by María Teresa Vera, one of the great figures of music who died in 1964 and here Omara perfectly captures her spirit. 8. El carretero This composition by Guillermo Potabales is a typical guajira (country lament) from the east of Cuba, a style which is very popular in West Africa. Sometimes known as the Cuban blues it is, in fact, derived from the Spanish tradition. Eliades Ochoa is the song s perfect interpreter. A close associate of the guairo maestro Ñico Saquito, who was Portabales mentor, Eliades is deeply immersed in traditional and wears his cowboy hat to identify himself as a country man. Born in Santiago into a whole family of guitarists and singers, he first picked up the instrument at the age of six. As a youth he was a familiar sight playing guitar in the brothels and bars around Santiago and by the early 1970s he was a regular at Santiago s celebrated music club the Casa de Trova . In 1978 he took over the renowned Cuarteto Patria, a group which has existed in some shape or form since 1940. Like Compay Segundo he plays a self-made hybrid of guitar and tres, doubling the D and G strings of a standard six string guitar. 9. Candela This composition by the 85 year old Faustino Oramas is the perfect vehicle for Ibrahim Ferrer s extended vocal improvisation. It features a heavy two chord tumbao (rhythmic riff), developed at the turn of the century in Oriente de Cuba by Victoria de la Tunas of the Familia Valera Miranda. Oramas who now lives in Spain, was a popular tres player and singer in eastern Cuban and this song is a typical example of the guayabero or passion fruit style of singing which talks of everyday life, with lyrics full of sexual double meanings. 10. Amor de loca juventud The 88 year old composer and guitarist Rafael Ortiz, known as Mañungo (although nobody can remember why) was for many years a member of the celebrated Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñero. Written in the 1930s this song was, including gospel and jazz, which were popular in Havana at the time. Augmented by Ry and Joachim Cooder, this performance features Compay Segundo y sus Muchachos, the group Compay has led with varying line-ups for the past 40 years. This formation has been together since 1992. 11. Orgullecida The prolific composer and tres player Eliseo Silveira played a major part in developing the son form in the 1930s. A member of various Havana sextets including El Bolero he was a keen student of popular American music by wat of cinema and radio and he would incorporate the harmonic and rhythmic ideas he liked into his compositions. Over the years Compay has made this song his own. It has a ragtime/early jazz feel which is beautifully captured by Guajiro Mirabal s trumpet and Joachim Cooders drums. Compay was particularly delighted by Ry Cooder s cowboy guitar solo which he thought would have won Silveira s enthusiastic approval. 12. Murmullo This romantic ballad, inspired by Hollywood musicals, was written by Electo Rosell, better known as Chepín who, alongside Bernardo Chovén led the popular Chepín-Chovén dance orchestra for a quarter of a century from 1932. Ibrahim Ferrer, once a member of that orchestra is featured in the urban nightclub style with interesting piano accompaniment from Rubén González. 13. Buena Vista Social Club The Buena Vista was an old members-only social club situated in the hills in east Havana. This instrumental was written by Israel López and was suggested for these sessions by his nephew, Orlando Cachaíto López who plays bass throughout this album. Cachaíto comes from a whole family of musicians which includes forty bass players. His father Orestes and uncle Israel Cachao , both prolific composers learnt to play bass from their father Pedro. In the late 1930s the brothers experimented with an African syncopation of the danzón to lay the foundations of the mambo rhythm which soon came to the forefront of popular Cuban music. In the 1950s Israel played a seminal role in the creation of the descarga which fused jazz style improvisations with Afro-Cuban rhythms. This recording which opens in danzón rhythm and moves into a mambo section features an extended improvisation from Rubén González on piano. 14. La bayamesa La bayamesa, was written by the great bohemian troubadour Sindo Garay in 1869. Composed in the criolla rhythm, a precursor to son, it is a patriotic hymn to the Republic. The lyrics tell the story of a woman from Báyamo, the first town to be liberated in the revolutionary war of 1868, who burns her house rather than let it fall into the hands of the Spanish. This version features a news ending, arranged by Compay Segundo who has clear memories of a time when as a boy of seven, Garay would visit his family home. The lead vocals here are by the 71 year old Manuel Puntillita Licea, one of the great soneros who made his name in the 40s and 50s singing with the big Havana orchestras. Lire la suite