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World music
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El Curi
Familia Valera Miranda, Antoine "Tato" García & Sabrina Romero
Javier Colina
In the post-Buena Vista Social Club era, the potted history of the musical kinship between Spain and Cuba may well have exhausted superficial listeners and world-weary aficionados alike. It's worth remembering, however, that Marcelino Guerra "Rapindey," Francisco Repilado "Compay Segundo" and their compadres were touring Spain with adoring audiences well before Ry Cooder came along, and Spanish immigration to Cuba continued to carry musical ideas west well into the twentieth century. Indeed, contrary to the profit-seeking rash of bandwagon "Cuban music" releases that flooded the market for years after BVSC, the mutual fascination and creative engagement between musicians of these two lands continues today.
From Cuba's Oriente, singer, tres player and percussionist Félix Valera Miranda heads the Traditional Music Department of the Santiago Provincial Music Center, and fronts the family band of his name, performing a traditional repertoire of son and bolero. With family roots in Spain and the Canary Islands, and a long association with Compay Segundo, Familia Valera Miranda makes a natural pairing with Perpignan gypsy singer Antoine "Tato" García (formerly of Tekameli) and flamenco singer Sabrina Romero. The gypsy repertoire embraces Cuban and Puerto Rican chestnuts including "Sarandonga" (Compay Segundo), "Bilongo" (Guillermo Rodríguez Fiffe), "Felicidad" (Tito Rodríguez) "Lágrimas Negras" (Miguel Matamoros), "Santa Barbara" (Celina González), "Sobre una tumba una rumba" and "Bardo" (Ignacio Piñeiro), all rendered anew here. The direct connection comes via son Kike (Enrique) Valera who, unusually, plays cuatro (its Puerto Rican origin makes it an instrument not often played in Cuba; he's also the band's arranger and recording engineer). Kike and Tato connected at the 2003 Lyon world music festival, which in turn brought Tato to perform at Santiago's celebrated Casa de la Trova. On Cantos de Ida y Vuelta ("round trip," an apt expression of the international character of this project), the rumba "Tremendo sabor" and the street festival sound of "Conga" assume particular freshness, blending Afro-Cuban percussion and carnival music with the plaintive Gypsy vocals of Tato and Romero.
Paired with El Sexteto Maguey, Valladolid native El Curi (Antonio Curiel), the former Basque rocker (known in Spain for his 1979 LP La respuesta ya no está en el viento, i.e., "the answer is no longer blowing in the wind"), puckish tenor and international vagabond presents another of his autobiographical expatriate readings of Cuban tradition, sparked by a 1994 trip to the island that still animates his music. El Curi's is the wry, knowing gaze of an aging anti-imperialist hipster, wounded romantic and Santería convert, reflecting upon desperate love and the inexorable contradictions of daily life in his beloved Havana. El Curi is at home with the island and its music, and (unlike many come-lately musical tourists) has the good sense to allow his collaborators to do what they do best as he tells his own story. As "the gentleman of Havana" relates on the title track, "One day I arrived in this island, the result of a shipwreck, and I realized where I'd landed when I heard the drums, the dances, the sounds. The tale I tell here is neither false nor true. It's the saga of a gallego [native of Galicia] and his effort to become a habanero [Havana habitué], who went a bit crazy from loving and desiring you so much." The music is in this vein, relaxed, slightly down at the heels, with a sincere intensity that retains the capacity to step back and acknowledge the quirky, untidy character of one man's passionate illusions, lived to the full.
A Pamplona native, Javier Colina is a leading bassist and arranger on the European jazz scene. He's worked with Gary Bartz, Louis Bellson, Frank Lacy, Tete Montoliú, Idris Muhammad and Jimmy Owens, while crossing genres with Carmen Linares, Dieguito and Enrique Morente, Tomatito, Radio Tarifa, Jerry González and the Fort Apache Band, Compay Segundo and, most recently, Bebo Valdés and Diego "El Cigala." Self-taught on the double bass, Colina has a consummate tone and impeccable sense of timing, the rhythmic and creative anchor to this enchanting project, a re-envisioned music that in lesser hands exceeded its shelf life before leaving the sound factory.
Colina congregates some of Cuba's top instrumentalists - tres master Pancho Amat, trumpeter Julito Padrón, José Luis Quintana "Changuito" on timbales, Federico Arístides Soto "Tata Güines" on tumbadoras and Valencia saxophonist Perico Sambeat. Colina fills out the overall sound with diva Osdalgia (Cuba) and, on the flamenco side, Spanish singers Santiago Auserón (who recorded with Compay Segundo in the early 1990s) and Juan Rafael Cortés Santiago "Duquende," whose staggering talent marks him, for many, as the heir to Camarón.
Logged in Havana's EGREM Studios, and engineered in Madrid and Barcelona by Luis Auserón (Santiago's brother), Si te contara ("if I were to tell you") is one of those rare, brilliant efforts whose all-star lineup transcends repertoire and artistic reputation alike, precipitating in a new sonic terrain where jazz meets flamenco meets the Cuban standards. If you pick up one "jazz" or "Spanish" or "Cuban" title this year, here's your contender. - Michael Stone
Some of these CDs are available from cdRoots
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