By Andra Jackson. The
Age. Australia, Monday 26 February 2001.
Sitting in a small bar in the out-of-the-way fishing village of Ciega
Dlavila, Don Burrows watched in astonishment as an entire band sauntered into
the room and began playing.
The Australian jazz legend, now 72, wasn't in Cuba to perform. In the best
Hemingway tradition, on his 1993 trip to Cuba he was pursuing his other great
passion as a member of the Australian saltwater fly-fishing team competing
against Canada.
"We were discussing how we were going to fish and what gear we were
using, and all of a sudden a band walked in. I thought: How could they afford to
pay a band to play in this tiny bar?" he remembers. They started singing in
three-part harmony. "It was beautiful music."
Burrows' reaction was instinctive. "I just reached into my shoulderbag
and got out a flute and went over and played with them."
Through a translator, the musicians asked where he was from, and then: "But
how do you know our music? How do you know what we play?"
"They couldn't figure out how I knew the music of Ernesto Lecuona, who
to them, is like George Gershwin," Burrows says.
He told them: "When I was a little boy growing up in Australia, one of
the most popular bands on the Australian airwaves was Ernesto Lecuona and his
Cuban Boys."
Burrows explains: "In those days, Cuba used to export music to all over
the world and Ernesto Lecuona was as important to me in those days as Duke
Ellington. So by the time I was 10, I knew every song that Ernesto Lecuona had
ever written. And these boys in the band just couldn't believe that someone over
the other side of the world knew as much Ernesto Lecuona as they did."
In turn, he learnt that in post-revolution Cuba, where music is serious
business, musicians receive a set monthly wage from the communist state, even if
they play overseas.
Burrows' story illustrates the enormous musical impact Cuba once had
internationally. It is also a measure of how 40 years of living under an
American-led trade embargo left the next generation of Cubans out of touch with
their music's former international status. The lavish casinos and nightclubs,
once the playground of American gangsters and the rich, closed as the tourist
trade waned. Recording studios were hampered by outdated equipment.
It was American guitarist/musicologist Ry Cooder who acted to ensure the
music wasn't lost to the rest of world. He brought Britain's World Circuit label
to Cuba to capture the music of an older Cuban generation. The result was the
1996 Buena Vista Social Club album, which achieved for Cuban music the wider
international prominence that eluded Cuba's latter-day music exports.
On the weekend, 60 years after the music of Ernesto Lecuona reigned on
Australian airwaves, the Buena Vista Social Club tour featuring Ibrahim Ferrer,
Omara Portuondo and Ruben Gonzalez, performed sell-out shows in Melbourne.
Portuondo began singing in the '50s and never stopped. With her vocal
quartet, Cuarteto Las D'Aida, she frequently toured Europe and North America and
Latin America before the embargo.
In subsequent decades, she says, "I knew that Cuban music had been
popular outside of Cuba and was being lost to people overseas. For example, the
mamba was a golden era for Cuban music, and the cha-cha-cha, and a long time
before that there was the music of Ernesto Lecuona."
Portuondo recalls performing at Havana's fabled Tropicana club, with
imposing pillars set outdoors. "In the '40s and the '50s, the audience was
international. People came from every part of the world to hear Cuban music and
how it was played ... the Mexicans, Americans, Spanish, Germans."
American musicians also worked the lucrative Havana circuit. Portuondo
recalls performing at the Tropicana for Nat King Cole, with Cole taking over the
song they were singing, Dos Gardenias - which features on the Buena Vista Social
Club album. "Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington ... a lot of
American jazz artists were working in Cuba."
American jazz left its imprint on Cuban music: Portuondo was part of the
'50s movimiento de filin (feeling movement). Influenced by jazz standards, it is
a style of singing close to the traditional bolero or ballad, but in which the
melody is changed around.
In turn, Cuban rhythms were also introduced into Afro-American jazz and now
the two streams of music are intertwined, she says. The American jazz trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie, who fused Cuban rhythms with bop in the late '40s, was later
given a citation by Fidel Castro.
Portuondo stresses she was very young in the Buena Vista Social Club's
heyday but performed there later. In the '40s, each district boasted its
members-only club where the workers went after work. "They went there to
talk, to hear music, to play music together and there they could also do sport
and cultural activities," she says.
With the economic hardship the embargo produced, the clubs went into
decline.
"Nothing in life is eternal...," says Portuondo. "The clubs
no longer exist from before, but the music continues to be played. With this CD,
the Cuban music of the '40s and '50s has come back ... So many young people are
ignorant of this music, but the musicians never forget."
The name Buena Vista Social Club was inspired by the fashion of each club to
produce its own version of a danzon, music to accompany Cuba's national dance.
The Buena Vista Social Club's danzon was written by mambo creator and later
Miami resident Orestes Lopez, whose son Cachaito plays bass on the album.
The CD and Wim Wenders' 1997 film Buena Vista Social Club have placed
Portuondo at the centre of another international boom for Cuban music.
"At the moment, this (boom) is stronger than the one before because we
travel to more places," she says. "To my mind, it is more momentous
because people can have the video and the CDs of Cuban music all over the world."
Portuondo's interview translated by Melbourne-based Cuban musician Osvaldo
Figueroa and Aurelia Balpe.
Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2001. | 