Buena Vista Social Club
Encyclopedia
The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana
, Cuba
that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician
Juan de Marcos González
and American guitarist Ry Cooder
with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.
The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club
after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam
in 1998. German director Wim Wenders
captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall
, New York City for a documentary
that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award
nomination for Best Documentary feature
and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.
The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music
in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo
, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer
, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laud player Barbarito Torres
and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo
, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.
neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana
. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies
at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo
and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.
The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo
, a community cofradía (fraternity
or guild
) dating back to Spanish colonialism
. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity
, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans
was institutionalized
. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao
Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.
According to American guitarist Ry Cooder
, Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López
and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga
, and dance forms such as the pachanga
and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban
musical styles such as rumba
and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno
. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music," has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
of 1959, newly elected Cuban President Manuel Urrutia Lleó
, a devout Christian and liberal
, began a program of closing gambling outlets, nightclubs, and other establishments associated with Havana's hedonistic lifestyle. This had an immediate impact on the livelihoods of local entertainers. As the Cuban government rapidly shifted towards the left and an effort to build a "classless and colorblind society", it struggled to define policy toward forms of cultural expression in the black community; expressions which had implicitly emphasized cultural differences. Consequently, the cultural and social centers were abolished, including the Afro-Cuban mutual aid Sociedades de Color in 1962, to make way for racially integrated societies. Private festivities were limited to weekend parties and organizers' funds were confiscated. The measures meant the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. Although the Cuban government continued to support traditional music after the revolution, certain favor was given to the politically charged nueva trova
, and poetic singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez
and Pablo Milanés
. The emergence of pop music and salsa
, a style derived from Cuban music but developed in the United States, meant that son music became even less common.
Cuban music experienced quite radical change in the 1960s, as National Geographic notes:
The occurrence of these closures and the change in traditions is the simplest explanation of why many musicians were out of work, and why their style of music had declined before the Buena Vista Social Club made it popular again.
producer
Nick Gold of World Circuit Records
to record a session where two African High-life musicians from Mali
were to collaborate with Cuban musicians. On Cooder's arrival (via Mexico to avoid the ongoing U.S. trade and travel embargo against Cuba
), it transpired that the musicians from Africa had not received their visas and were unable to travel to Havana. Cooder and Gold changed their plans and decided to record an album of Cuban son music with local musicians.
Already on board the African collaboration project were Cuban musicians including bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, guitarist Eliades Ochoa
and musical director Juan de Marcos González
, who had himself been organizing a similar project for the Afro-Cuban All Stars. A search for additional musicians led the team to singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, pianist Rubén González and octogenarian singer Compay Segundo, who all agreed to record for the project.
Within three days of the project's birth, Cooder, Gold and de Marcos had organized a large group of performers and arranged for recording sessions to commence at Havana's EGREM
Studios, formerly owned by RCA
records, where the equipment and atmosphere had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Communication between the Spanish and English speakers at the studio was conducted via an interpreter, although Cooder reflected that "musicians understand each other through means other than speaking".
The album was recorded in just six days and contained fourteen tracks; opening with "Chan Chan
" written by Compay Segundo, a four chord son that was to become what Cooder described as "the Buena Vista's calling card"; and ending with a rendition of "La Bayamesa", a traditional Cuban patriotic song (not to be confused with the Cuban national anthem
of the same name
). The sessions also produced material for the subsequent release, Introducing... Rubén González, which showcased the work of the Cuban pianist.
One of the songs that featured on the album was "Buena Vista Social Club", a song written by bass player "Cachaíto"'s uncle, Israel López
, who also wrote Pueblo Nuevo, track 4 on the album. The song spotlighted the piano work of Rubén González and it was recorded after Cooder heard González improvising around the tune's musical theme before a day's recording session. After playing the piece, González explained to Cooder the history of the social club and that the song was the club's "mascot tune". When searching for a name for the overall project, manager Nick Gold chose the song's title. According to Cooder,
Upon release on 17 September 1997, the CD became a huge "word of mouth hit", far beyond that of most world music releases. It sold more than five million copies and won a Grammy award in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by the New York based Rolling Stone
magazine as #260 in The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
A total of twenty musicians contributed to the recording including Ry Cooder's son Joachim Cooder, (b. 1978) who at the time was a 19 year old scholar of Latin percussion and provided drums for the band. Ry Cooder himself played slide guitar
on several songs and helped produce and mix the album, afterwards describing the sessions as "the greatest musical experience of my life". Ry Cooder had been a successful American guitarist since the 1960s, recording with Captain Beefheart
and the Rolling Stones. Known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music
led him to record music from diverse genres including Tex-Mex
, Hawaiian
and Tuvan
throat singing
. He was later prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act
, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo
.
Many of the Cuban musicians who featured on the album were at their musical prime in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of the 1997 record they became known in Cuba as "Los Superabuelos" (the Super-Grandfathers). Juan de Marcos González
, a Cuban folk revivalist who was younger than the bulk of performers introduced Cooder to veteran singer Ibrahim Ferrer
. Ferrer (1927–2005) had been lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso
, and also sang for Beny Moré, Cuba's most prominent performer in the 1940s, before his soft singing style fell out of fashion. Having found the semi-retired seventy year old Ferrer taking his daily stroll on the streets of Havana and shining shoes for extra money, González signed him up for the project. Cooder later described the discovery as something that happens "perhaps once in your life", and Ferrer as "the Cuban Nat King Cole
". Ferrer became a prominent member of the group, and the success of the record was attributed in part to the popularity of his vocal performances. The singer went on to record a number of successful solo records and performed with contemporary acts such as the Gorillaz
before his death in 2005 at the age of 78.
Virtuoso pianist Rubén González (1919–2003) also had further success releasing two solo albums after working on the initial project. González was a pianist for bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
in the 1940s, and is attributed with helping establish Cuban piano styles that were to dominate Latin music for the remainder of the century. Despite suffering from arthritis and not even owning a piano at the time of recording with Cooder, (due to an infestation of termite
s whilst living in South America) the American guitarist described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard". After the success of the 1997 record, González recorded and toured with bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was the only musician to play on all of the songs on the Buena Vista Social Club album. "Cachaito" (1933–2009) was the son of multi-instrumentalist Orestes López
and the nephew of fellow bassist Israel "Cachao" López
, the brothers often attributed with inventing the mambo. Named after his prestigious uncle, "Cachaito" (little Cachao) was a leading Descarga musician in the 1950s and '60s, a musical form that takes its influence from modern jazz, and he became the ever present bassist at Buena Vista Social Club performances and recordings.
One of the first to come onboard the project was Compay Segundo (born Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz) (1907–2003), who at 89 years old was the oldest of the performers. During a discussion about politics, the veteran Segundo said: "Politics? This new guy [Fidel Castro] is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times."
Segundo was an accomplished guitarist and tres player who started his career playing with established bands of the 1920s and 30s. In the 40s, he gained fame as one half of the Los Compadres duo, and then formed Los Muchachos, a band that he led until his death in 2003. For the Buena Vista Social Club recording and performances, Segundo played a unique seven-stringed tres, an armonico, which he devised himself, and sung, mostly doing background vocals, in a number of songs in his baritone
voice including the self penned opening track, Chan Chan, with Eliades Ochoa as the leading voice. Cowboy hat
wearing Eliades Ochoa (b.1946), who had collaborated previously with Segundo and was a well established traditional Cuban folk performer, played guitar and sang for the group. Omara Portuondo
(b.1930), a bolero singer and the only female in the collective, sang "Veinte Años" on the record and duetted with Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer during live performances.
Other performers included singer Pío Leyva
, (1917–2006) who had been working with Segundo since the early 1950s, and fellow and singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, (1927–2000), who had performed with Celia Cruz
and Benny Moré
. Additional improvised percussion was provided by Amadito Valdés
and Carlos González. The youngest established member of the group was Barbarito Torres
, (b.1956) a virtuoso player of the laúd
, a Cuban offshoot of the lute
. Trumpet was provided by Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, (b. 1933) who went on to release solo records under the Buena Vista presents... title.
on the soundtrack to Wenders' film The End of Violence
, the third such collaboration between the two artists. According to Wenders, it was an effort to force Cooder to focus on the project, "He always sort of looked in the distance and smiled, and I knew he was back in Havana." Although Wenders knew nothing about Cuban music at the time, he became enthused by tapes of the Havana sessions provided by Cooder, and agreed to travel to the island to film the recording of Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer's first solo album, in 1998.
Wenders filmed the recording sessions on the recently enhanced format Digital Video
with the help of cinematographer
Robert Müller, and then shot interviews with each "Buena Vista" ensemble member in different Havana locations. Wenders was also present to film the group's first performance with a full line-up in Amsterdam
in 1999, and a second concert in Carnegie Hall
, New York City.-.jpg)
The completed documentary was released on 17 September 1999, and included scenes in New York of the Cubans, some of whom had never left the island, window shopping and visiting tourist sites. According to Sight & Sound magazine
, these scenes of "innocents abroad" were the film's most moving moments, as the contrasts between societies of Havana and New York become evident on the faces of the performers. Ferrer, from an impoverished background and staunchly anti consumerist
, was shown describing the city as "beautiful" and finding the experience overwhelming. Upon completion of filming, Wenders felt that the film "didn't feel really like it was a documentary anymore. It felt like it was a true character piece".
The film became a box office success, grossing $23,002,182 worldwide. Critics were generally enthusiastic about the story and especially the music, although leading U.S. film critic Roger Ebert
and the British Film Institute's
Peter Curran felt that Wenders had lingered too long on Cooder during the performances; and the editing, which interspersed interviews with music, had disrupted the continuity of the songs. The film was nominated for an Academy Award
for best documentary feature in 1999. It won best documentary at the European Film Awards and received seventeen other major accolades internationally.
, Sean Combs
, and Jennifer Lopez
, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic
Lopez.
Performances in Florida, which has a large Cuban exile
and Cuban American
community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba
turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government
. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach
in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van
drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem
(transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.
"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros
, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music."
Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry
of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist
, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana
it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner." Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba
, Songo
and other musical forms on the island, such as reggaetón
by luminaries such as Raul Zeballos, the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new; they were just playing the same songs that Cubans know and have been playing for many years.
Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that some music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba
in the east of the island." British world music record label Tumi Music
, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians, all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first."
Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez
believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion". The American Historical Review
suggested that the Buena Vista Social Clubs mise en scène
fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado
in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista
until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad".
The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana
, Cuba
that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician
Juan de Marcos González
and American guitarist Ry Cooder
with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.
The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club
after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam
in 1998. German director Wim Wenders
captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall
, New York City for a documentary
that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award
nomination for Best Documentary feature
and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.
The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music
in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo
, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer
, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laud player Barbarito Torres
and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo
, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.
neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana
. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies
at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo
and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.
The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo
, a community cofradía (fraternity
or guild
) dating back to Spanish colonialism
. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity
, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans
was institutionalized
. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao
Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.
According to American guitarist Ry Cooder
, Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López
and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga
, and dance forms such as the pachanga
and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban
musical styles such as rumba
and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno
. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music," has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
of 1959, newly elected Cuban President Manuel Urrutia Lleó
, a devout Christian and liberal
, began a program of closing gambling outlets, nightclubs, and other establishments associated with Havana's hedonistic lifestyle. This had an immediate impact on the livelihoods of local entertainers. As the Cuban government rapidly shifted towards the left and an effort to build a "classless and colorblind society", it struggled to define policy toward forms of cultural expression in the black community; expressions which had implicitly emphasized cultural differences. Consequently, the cultural and social centers were abolished, including the Afro-Cuban mutual aid Sociedades de Color in 1962, to make way for racially integrated societies. Private festivities were limited to weekend parties and organizers' funds were confiscated. The measures meant the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. Although the Cuban government continued to support traditional music after the revolution, certain favor was given to the politically charged nueva trova
, and poetic singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez
and Pablo Milanés
. The emergence of pop music and salsa
, a style derived from Cuban music but developed in the United States, meant that son music became even less common.
Cuban music experienced quite radical change in the 1960s, as National Geographic notes:
The occurrence of these closures and the change in traditions is the simplest explanation of why many musicians were out of work, and why their style of music had declined before the Buena Vista Social Club made it popular again.
producer
Nick Gold of World Circuit Records
to record a session where two African High-life musicians from Mali
were to collaborate with Cuban musicians. On Cooder's arrival (via Mexico to avoid the ongoing U.S. trade and travel embargo against Cuba
), it transpired that the musicians from Africa had not received their visas and were unable to travel to Havana. Cooder and Gold changed their plans and decided to record an album of Cuban son music with local musicians.
Already on board the African collaboration project were Cuban musicians including bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, guitarist Eliades Ochoa
and musical director Juan de Marcos González
, who had himself been organizing a similar project for the Afro-Cuban All Stars. A search for additional musicians led the team to singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, pianist Rubén González and octogenarian singer Compay Segundo, who all agreed to record for the project.
Within three days of the project's birth, Cooder, Gold and de Marcos had organized a large group of performers and arranged for recording sessions to commence at Havana's EGREM
Studios, formerly owned by RCA
records, where the equipment and atmosphere had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Communication between the Spanish and English speakers at the studio was conducted via an interpreter, although Cooder reflected that "musicians understand each other through means other than speaking".
The album was recorded in just six days and contained fourteen tracks; opening with "Chan Chan
" written by Compay Segundo, a four chord son that was to become what Cooder described as "the Buena Vista's calling card"; and ending with a rendition of "La Bayamesa", a traditional Cuban patriotic song (not to be confused with the Cuban national anthem
of the same name
). The sessions also produced material for the subsequent release, Introducing... Rubén González, which showcased the work of the Cuban pianist.
One of the songs that featured on the album was "Buena Vista Social Club", a song written by bass player "Cachaíto"'s uncle, Israel López
, who also wrote Pueblo Nuevo, track 4 on the album. The song spotlighted the piano work of Rubén González and it was recorded after Cooder heard González improvising around the tune's musical theme before a day's recording session. After playing the piece, González explained to Cooder the history of the social club and that the song was the club's "mascot tune". When searching for a name for the overall project, manager Nick Gold chose the song's title. According to Cooder,
Upon release on 17 September 1997, the CD became a huge "word of mouth hit", far beyond that of most world music releases. It sold more than five million copies and won a Grammy award in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by the New York based Rolling Stone
magazine as #260 in The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
A total of twenty musicians contributed to the recording including Ry Cooder's son Joachim Cooder, (b. 1978) who at the time was a 19 year old scholar of Latin percussion and provided drums for the band. Ry Cooder himself played slide guitar
on several songs and helped produce and mix the album, afterwards describing the sessions as "the greatest musical experience of my life". Ry Cooder had been a successful American guitarist since the 1960s, recording with Captain Beefheart
and the Rolling Stones. Known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music
led him to record music from diverse genres including Tex-Mex
, Hawaiian
and Tuvan
throat singing
. He was later prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act
, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo
.
Many of the Cuban musicians who featured on the album were at their musical prime in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of the 1997 record they became known in Cuba as "Los Superabuelos" (the Super-Grandfathers). Juan de Marcos González
, a Cuban folk revivalist who was younger than the bulk of performers introduced Cooder to veteran singer Ibrahim Ferrer
. Ferrer (1927–2005) had been lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso
, and also sang for Beny Moré, Cuba's most prominent performer in the 1940s, before his soft singing style fell out of fashion. Having found the semi-retired seventy year old Ferrer taking his daily stroll on the streets of Havana and shining shoes for extra money, González signed him up for the project. Cooder later described the discovery as something that happens "perhaps once in your life", and Ferrer as "the Cuban Nat King Cole
". Ferrer became a prominent member of the group, and the success of the record was attributed in part to the popularity of his vocal performances. The singer went on to record a number of successful solo records and performed with contemporary acts such as the Gorillaz
before his death in 2005 at the age of 78.
Virtuoso pianist Rubén González (1919–2003) also had further success releasing two solo albums after working on the initial project. González was a pianist for bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
in the 1940s, and is attributed with helping establish Cuban piano styles that were to dominate Latin music for the remainder of the century. Despite suffering from arthritis and not even owning a piano at the time of recording with Cooder, (due to an infestation of termite
s whilst living in South America) the American guitarist described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard". After the success of the 1997 record, González recorded and toured with bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was the only musician to play on all of the songs on the Buena Vista Social Club album. "Cachaito" (1933–2009) was the son of multi-instrumentalist Orestes López
and the nephew of fellow bassist Israel "Cachao" López
, the brothers often attributed with inventing the mambo. Named after his prestigious uncle, "Cachaito" (little Cachao) was a leading Descarga musician in the 1950s and '60s, a musical form that takes its influence from modern jazz, and he became the ever present bassist at Buena Vista Social Club performances and recordings.
One of the first to come onboard the project was Compay Segundo (born Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz) (1907–2003), who at 89 years old was the oldest of the performers. During a discussion about politics, the veteran Segundo said: "Politics? This new guy [Fidel Castro] is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times."
Segundo was an accomplished guitarist and tres player who started his career playing with established bands of the 1920s and 30s. In the 40s, he gained fame as one half of the Los Compadres duo, and then formed Los Muchachos, a band that he led until his death in 2003. For the Buena Vista Social Club recording and performances, Segundo played a unique seven-stringed tres, an armonico, which he devised himself, and sung, mostly doing background vocals, in a number of songs in his baritone
voice including the self penned opening track, Chan Chan, with Eliades Ochoa as the leading voice. Cowboy hat
wearing Eliades Ochoa (b.1946), who had collaborated previously with Segundo and was a well established traditional Cuban folk performer, played guitar and sang for the group. Omara Portuondo
(b.1930), a bolero singer and the only female in the collective, sang "Veinte Años" on the record and duetted with Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer during live performances.
Other performers included singer Pío Leyva
, (1917–2006) who had been working with Segundo since the early 1950s, and fellow and singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, (1927–2000), who had performed with Celia Cruz
and Benny Moré
. Additional improvised percussion was provided by Amadito Valdés
and Carlos González. The youngest established member of the group was Barbarito Torres
, (b.1956) a virtuoso player of the laúd
, a Cuban offshoot of the lute
. Trumpet was provided by Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, (b. 1933) who went on to release solo records under the Buena Vista presents... title.
on the soundtrack to Wenders' film The End of Violence
, the third such collaboration between the two artists. According to Wenders, it was an effort to force Cooder to focus on the project, "He always sort of looked in the distance and smiled, and I knew he was back in Havana." Although Wenders knew nothing about Cuban music at the time, he became enthused by tapes of the Havana sessions provided by Cooder, and agreed to travel to the island to film the recording of Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer's first solo album, in 1998.
Wenders filmed the recording sessions on the recently enhanced format Digital Video
with the help of cinematographer
Robert Müller, and then shot interviews with each "Buena Vista" ensemble member in different Havana locations. Wenders was also present to film the group's first performance with a full line-up in Amsterdam
in 1999, and a second concert in Carnegie Hall
, New York City. The completed documentary was released on 17 September 1999, and included scenes in New York of the Cubans, some of whom had never left the island, window shopping and visiting tourist sites. According to Sight & Sound magazine
, these scenes of "innocents abroad" were the film's most moving moments, as the contrasts between societies of Havana and New York become evident on the faces of the performers. Ferrer, from an impoverished background and staunchly anti consumerist
, was shown describing the city as "beautiful" and finding the experience overwhelming. Upon completion of filming, Wenders felt that the film "didn't feel really like it was a documentary anymore. It felt like it was a true character piece".
The film became a box office success, grossing $23,002,182 worldwide. Critics were generally enthusiastic about the story and especially the music, although leading U.S. film critic Roger Ebert
and the British Film Institute's
Peter Curran felt that Wenders had lingered too long on Cooder during the performances; and the editing, which interspersed interviews with music, had disrupted the continuity of the songs. The film was nominated for an Academy Award
for best documentary feature in 1999. It won best documentary at the European Film Awards and received seventeen other major accolades internationally.
, Sean Combs
, and Jennifer Lopez
, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic
Lopez.
Performances in Florida, which has a large Cuban exile
and Cuban American
community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba
turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government
. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach
in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van
drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem
(transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.
"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros
, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music."
Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry
of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist
, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana
it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner." Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba
, Songo
and other musical forms on the island, such as reggaetón
by luminaries such as Raul Zeballos, the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new; they were just playing the same songs that Cubans know and have been playing for many years.
Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that some music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba
in the east of the island." British world music record label Tumi Music
, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians, all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first."
Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez
believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion". The American Historical Review
suggested that the Buena Vista Social Clubs mise en scène
fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado
in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista
until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad".
The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana
, Cuba
that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician
Juan de Marcos González
and American guitarist Ry Cooder
with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.
The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club
after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam
in 1998. German director Wim Wenders
captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall
, New York City for a documentary
that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award
nomination for Best Documentary feature
and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.
The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music
in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo
, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer
, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laud player Barbarito Torres
and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo
, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.
neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana
. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies
at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo
and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.
The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo
, a community cofradía (fraternity
or guild
) dating back to Spanish colonialism
. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity
, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans
was institutionalized
. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao
Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.
According to American guitarist Ry Cooder
, Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López
and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga
, and dance forms such as the pachanga
and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban
musical styles such as rumba
and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno
. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music," has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
of 1959, newly elected Cuban President Manuel Urrutia Lleó
, a devout Christian and liberal
, began a program of closing gambling outlets, nightclubs, and other establishments associated with Havana's hedonistic lifestyle. This had an immediate impact on the livelihoods of local entertainers. As the Cuban government rapidly shifted towards the left and an effort to build a "classless and colorblind society", it struggled to define policy toward forms of cultural expression in the black community; expressions which had implicitly emphasized cultural differences. Consequently, the cultural and social centers were abolished, including the Afro-Cuban mutual aid Sociedades de Color in 1962, to make way for racially integrated societies. Private festivities were limited to weekend parties and organizers' funds were confiscated. The measures meant the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. Although the Cuban government continued to support traditional music after the revolution, certain favor was given to the politically charged nueva trova
, and poetic singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez
and Pablo Milanés
. The emergence of pop music and salsa
, a style derived from Cuban music but developed in the United States, meant that son music became even less common.
Cuban music experienced quite radical change in the 1960s, as National Geographic notes:
The occurrence of these closures and the change in traditions is the simplest explanation of why many musicians were out of work, and why their style of music had declined before the Buena Vista Social Club made it popular again.
producer
Nick Gold of World Circuit Records
to record a session where two African High-life musicians from Mali
were to collaborate with Cuban musicians. On Cooder's arrival (via Mexico to avoid the ongoing U.S. trade and travel embargo against Cuba
), it transpired that the musicians from Africa had not received their visas and were unable to travel to Havana. Cooder and Gold changed their plans and decided to record an album of Cuban son music with local musicians.
Already on board the African collaboration project were Cuban musicians including bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, guitarist Eliades Ochoa
and musical director Juan de Marcos González
, who had himself been organizing a similar project for the Afro-Cuban All Stars. A search for additional musicians led the team to singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, pianist Rubén González and octogenarian singer Compay Segundo, who all agreed to record for the project.
Within three days of the project's birth, Cooder, Gold and de Marcos had organized a large group of performers and arranged for recording sessions to commence at Havana's EGREM
Studios, formerly owned by RCA
records, where the equipment and atmosphere had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Communication between the Spanish and English speakers at the studio was conducted via an interpreter, although Cooder reflected that "musicians understand each other through means other than speaking".
The album was recorded in just six days and contained fourteen tracks; opening with "Chan Chan
" written by Compay Segundo, a four chord son that was to become what Cooder described as "the Buena Vista's calling card"; and ending with a rendition of "La Bayamesa", a traditional Cuban patriotic song (not to be confused with the Cuban national anthem
of the same name
). The sessions also produced material for the subsequent release, Introducing... Rubén González, which showcased the work of the Cuban pianist.
One of the songs that featured on the album was "Buena Vista Social Club", a song written by bass player "Cachaíto"'s uncle, Israel López
, who also wrote Pueblo Nuevo, track 4 on the album. The song spotlighted the piano work of Rubén González and it was recorded after Cooder heard González improvising around the tune's musical theme before a day's recording session. After playing the piece, González explained to Cooder the history of the social club and that the song was the club's "mascot tune". When searching for a name for the overall project, manager Nick Gold chose the song's title. According to Cooder,
Upon release on 17 September 1997, the CD became a huge "word of mouth hit", far beyond that of most world music releases. It sold more than five million copies and won a Grammy award in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by the New York based Rolling Stone
magazine as #260 in The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
A total of twenty musicians contributed to the recording including Ry Cooder's son Joachim Cooder, (b. 1978) who at the time was a 19 year old scholar of Latin percussion and provided drums for the band. Ry Cooder himself played slide guitar
on several songs and helped produce and mix the album, afterwards describing the sessions as "the greatest musical experience of my life". Ry Cooder had been a successful American guitarist since the 1960s, recording with Captain Beefheart
and the Rolling Stones. Known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music
led him to record music from diverse genres including Tex-Mex
, Hawaiian
and Tuvan
throat singing
. He was later prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act
, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo
.
Many of the Cuban musicians who featured on the album were at their musical prime in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of the 1997 record they became known in Cuba as "Los Superabuelos" (the Super-Grandfathers). Juan de Marcos González
, a Cuban folk revivalist who was younger than the bulk of performers introduced Cooder to veteran singer Ibrahim Ferrer
. Ferrer (1927–2005) had been lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso
, and also sang for Beny Moré, Cuba's most prominent performer in the 1940s, before his soft singing style fell out of fashion. Having found the semi-retired seventy year old Ferrer taking his daily stroll on the streets of Havana and shining shoes for extra money, González signed him up for the project. Cooder later described the discovery as something that happens "perhaps once in your life", and Ferrer as "the Cuban Nat King Cole
". Ferrer became a prominent member of the group, and the success of the record was attributed in part to the popularity of his vocal performances. The singer went on to record a number of successful solo records and performed with contemporary acts such as the Gorillaz
before his death in 2005 at the age of 78.
Virtuoso pianist Rubén González (1919–2003) also had further success releasing two solo albums after working on the initial project. González was a pianist for bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
in the 1940s, and is attributed with helping establish Cuban piano styles that were to dominate Latin music for the remainder of the century. Despite suffering from arthritis and not even owning a piano at the time of recording with Cooder, (due to an infestation of termite
s whilst living in South America) the American guitarist described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard". After the success of the 1997 record, González recorded and toured with bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was the only musician to play on all of the songs on the Buena Vista Social Club album. "Cachaito" (1933–2009) was the son of multi-instrumentalist Orestes López
and the nephew of fellow bassist Israel "Cachao" López
, the brothers often attributed with inventing the mambo. Named after his prestigious uncle, "Cachaito" (little Cachao) was a leading Descarga musician in the 1950s and '60s, a musical form that takes its influence from modern jazz, and he became the ever present bassist at Buena Vista Social Club performances and recordings.
One of the first to come onboard the project was Compay Segundo (born Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz) (1907–2003), who at 89 years old was the oldest of the performers. During a discussion about politics, the veteran Segundo said: "Politics? This new guy [Fidel Castro] is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times."
Segundo was an accomplished guitarist and tres player who started his career playing with established bands of the 1920s and 30s. In the 40s, he gained fame as one half of the Los Compadres duo, and then formed Los Muchachos, a band that he led until his death in 2003. For the Buena Vista Social Club recording and performances, Segundo played a unique seven-stringed tres, an armonico, which he devised himself, and sung, mostly doing background vocals, in a number of songs in his baritone
voice including the self penned opening track, Chan Chan, with Eliades Ochoa as the leading voice. Cowboy hat
wearing Eliades Ochoa (b.1946), who had collaborated previously with Segundo and was a well established traditional Cuban folk performer, played guitar and sang for the group. Omara Portuondo
(b.1930), a bolero singer and the only female in the collective, sang "Veinte Años" on the record and duetted with Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer during live performances.
Other performers included singer Pío Leyva
, (1917–2006) who had been working with Segundo since the early 1950s, and fellow and singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, (1927–2000), who had performed with Celia Cruz
and Benny Moré
. Additional improvised percussion was provided by Amadito Valdés
and Carlos González. The youngest established member of the group was Barbarito Torres
, (b.1956) a virtuoso player of the laúd
, a Cuban offshoot of the lute
. Trumpet was provided by Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, (b. 1933) who went on to release solo records under the Buena Vista presents... title.
on the soundtrack to Wenders' film The End of Violence
, the third such collaboration between the two artists. According to Wenders, it was an effort to force Cooder to focus on the project, "He always sort of looked in the distance and smiled, and I knew he was back in Havana." Although Wenders knew nothing about Cuban music at the time, he became enthused by tapes of the Havana sessions provided by Cooder, and agreed to travel to the island to film the recording of Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer's first solo album, in 1998.
Wenders filmed the recording sessions on the recently enhanced format Digital Video
with the help of cinematographer
Robert Müller, and then shot interviews with each "Buena Vista" ensemble member in different Havana locations. Wenders was also present to film the group's first performance with a full line-up in Amsterdam
in 1999, and a second concert in Carnegie Hall
, New York City. The completed documentary was released on 17 September 1999, and included scenes in New York of the Cubans, some of whom had never left the island, window shopping and visiting tourist sites. According to Sight & Sound magazine
, these scenes of "innocents abroad" were the film's most moving moments, as the contrasts between societies of Havana and New York become evident on the faces of the performers. Ferrer, from an impoverished background and staunchly anti consumerist
, was shown describing the city as "beautiful" and finding the experience overwhelming. Upon completion of filming, Wenders felt that the film "didn't feel really like it was a documentary anymore. It felt like it was a true character piece".
The film became a box office success, grossing $23,002,182 worldwide. Critics were generally enthusiastic about the story and especially the music, although leading U.S. film critic Roger Ebert
and the British Film Institute's
Peter Curran felt that Wenders had lingered too long on Cooder during the performances; and the editing, which interspersed interviews with music, had disrupted the continuity of the songs. The film was nominated for an Academy Award
for best documentary feature in 1999. It won best documentary at the European Film Awards and received seventeen other major accolades internationally.
, Sean Combs
, and Jennifer Lopez
, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic
Lopez.
Performances in Florida, which has a large Cuban exile
and Cuban American
community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba
turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government
. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach
in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van
drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem
(transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.
"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros
, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music."
Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry
of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist
, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana
it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner." Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba
, Songo
and other musical forms on the island, such as reggaetón
by luminaries such as Raul Zeballos, the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new; they were just playing the same songs that Cubans know and have been playing for many years.
Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that some music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba
in the east of the island." British world music record label Tumi Music
, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians, all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first."
Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez
believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion". The American Historical Review
suggested that the Buena Vista Social Clubs mise en scène
fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado
in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista
until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad".
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician
Music of Cuba
The Caribbean island of Cuba has developed a wide range of creolized musical styles, based on its cultural origins in Europe and Africa. Since the 19th century its music has been hugely popular and influential throughout the world...
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
and American guitarist Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.
The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club
Buena Vista Social Club (album)
- Music :"Chan Chan", the first song on the album, is a Cuban song composition by Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, Juanita and Chan Chan. The song was one of Segundo's last compositions and was written in 1987, already having been recorded by Segundo himself various...
after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 1998. German director Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, New York City for a documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
nomination for Best Documentary feature
Academy Award for Documentary Feature
The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films.- Winners and nominees:Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year...
and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.
The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music
Latin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.-Biography:...
, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laud player Barbarito Torres
Barbarito Torres
thumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.
Social club
The Buena Vista Social Club members-only club was located in the populous MarianaoMarianao
Marianao is a town and municipality in the province of the city of Havana, Cuba, 6 miles southwest of the original city of Havana, with which it is connected by the Marianao railway. , the municipality had a population of 133,016. Marianao is on a range of hills about 1500 ft. above sea level,...
neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies
Master of Ceremonies
A Master of Ceremonies , or compere, is the host of a staged event or similar performance.An MC usually presents performers, speaks to the audience, and generally keeps the event moving....
at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.-Biography:...
and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.
The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo
Cabildo (Cuba)
Cabildos de nación were African ethnic associations created in Cuba in the late 16th century based on the Spanish cofradías that were organized in Seville for the first time around the 14th century...
, a community cofradía (fraternity
Fraternal and service organizations
A "fraternal organization" or "fraternity" is a brotherhood, though the term usually connotes a distinct or formal organization. Please list college fraternities and sororities at List of social fraternities and sororities.-International:...
or guild
Guild
A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society...
) dating back to Spanish colonialism
Spanish colonization of the Americas
Colonial expansion under the Spanish Empire was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores and developed by the Monarchy of Spain through its administrators and missionaries. The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Christian faith through indigenous conversions...
. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans
Afro-Cubans
The Afro-Cubans were a latin jazz band founded by Machito in 1940; often billed as Machito and his Afro-Cubans. Their musical director, and an important musical innovator, was Mario Bauza, Machito's brother-in-law....
was institutionalized
Institutional racism
Institutional racism describes any kind of system of inequality based on race. It can occur in institutions such as public government bodies, private business corporations , and universities . The term was coined by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s...
. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao
Marianao
Marianao is a town and municipality in the province of the city of Havana, Cuba, 6 miles southwest of the original city of Havana, with which it is connected by the Marianao railway. , the municipality had a population of 133,016. Marianao is on a range of hills about 1500 ft. above sea level,...
Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.
According to American guitarist Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
, Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López
Cachao López
Israel "Cachao" López , often known as Cachao, was a Cuban musician and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s....
and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga
Charanga
Charanga is a term given to traditional ensembles of Cuban dance music. They made Cuban dance music popular in the 1940s and their music consisted of heavily son-influenced material, performed on European instruments such as violin and flute by a Charanga orchestra....
, and dance forms such as the pachanga
Pachanga
- Music :In Cuba in 1955, Los Papines fused the violin-based music of charangas and the trumpet-based music of conjuntos Eduardo Davidson's La Pachanga , recorded by Orquesta Sublime, introduced Cuba to a Colombian dance...
and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban
Afro-Cuban
The term Afro-Cuban refers to Cubans of Sub Saharan African ancestry, and to historical or cultural elements in Cuba thought to emanate from this community...
musical styles such as rumba
Cuban Rumba
In Cuban music, Rumba is a generic term covering a variety of musical rhythms and associated dances. The rumba has its influences in the music brought to Cuba by Africans brought to Cuba as slaves as well as Spanish colonizers...
and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno
Son montuno
The son montuno is a style of the Cuban son, but exactly what it means is not an easy question to answer. The son itself is the most important genre of Cuban popular music. In addition, it is perhaps the most flexible of all forms of Latin-American music...
. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music," has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Closure of musical venues and changing traditions
Shortly after the Cuban RevolutionCuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
of 1959, newly elected Cuban President Manuel Urrutia Lleó
Manuel Urrutia Lleó
Manuel Urrutia Lleó was a liberal Cuban lawyer and politician. Urrutia campaigned against the Gerardo Machado government and the second presidency of Fulgencio Batista during the 1950s, before serving as president in the first revolutionary government of 1959...
, a devout Christian and liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, began a program of closing gambling outlets, nightclubs, and other establishments associated with Havana's hedonistic lifestyle. This had an immediate impact on the livelihoods of local entertainers. As the Cuban government rapidly shifted towards the left and an effort to build a "classless and colorblind society", it struggled to define policy toward forms of cultural expression in the black community; expressions which had implicitly emphasized cultural differences. Consequently, the cultural and social centers were abolished, including the Afro-Cuban mutual aid Sociedades de Color in 1962, to make way for racially integrated societies. Private festivities were limited to weekend parties and organizers' funds were confiscated. The measures meant the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. Although the Cuban government continued to support traditional music after the revolution, certain favor was given to the politically charged nueva trova
Nueva trova
Nueva trova is a movement in Cuban music that emerged around 1967/68 after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the consequent political and social changes....
, and poetic singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez is a Cuban musician, and a leader of the nueva trova movement.He is considered Cuba's best known folk singer and known for his highly eloquent and symbolic lyrics. Many of his songs have become classics in Latin American music, such as Ojalá, Playa Girón, Unicornio and...
and Pablo Milanés
Pablo Milanés
Pablo Milanés Arias is a Cuban singer-songwriter and guitar player. He studied at a conservatory in Havana. He is considered one of the founders of the Cuban nueva trova, along with Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola...
. The emergence of pop music and salsa
Salsa music
Salsa music is a genre of music, generally defined as a modern style of playing Cuban Son, Son Montuno, and Guaracha with touches from other genres of music...
, a style derived from Cuban music but developed in the United States, meant that son music became even less common.
Cuban music experienced quite radical change in the 1960s, as National Geographic notes:
Cuban dance music also witnessed dramatic change beginning in the late 1960s, as groups explored the fusion of Cuban son with American rock, jazz and funk styles. Groups such as Los Van Van and Irakere established modern forms of Cuban music, paving the way for new rhythms and dances to emerge as well as fresh concepts in instrumentation. ... Cuba's dance music had already inspired a change from the older son-style dances, as younger Cubans broke free of step-oriented dances...
The occurrence of these closures and the change in traditions is the simplest explanation of why many musicians were out of work, and why their style of music had declined before the Buena Vista Social Club made it popular again.
Album
In 1996, American guitarist Ry Cooder had been invited to Havana by British world musicWorld music
World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...
producer
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
Nick Gold of World Circuit Records
World Circuit (record label)
World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
to record a session where two African High-life musicians from Mali
Mali
Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
were to collaborate with Cuban musicians. On Cooder's arrival (via Mexico to avoid the ongoing U.S. trade and travel embargo against Cuba
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...
), it transpired that the musicians from Africa had not received their visas and were unable to travel to Havana. Cooder and Gold changed their plans and decided to record an album of Cuban son music with local musicians.
Already on board the African collaboration project were Cuban musicians including bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, guitarist Eliades Ochoa
Eliades Ochoa
Eliades Ochoa is a Cuban guitarist and singer from Loma de la Avispa, Songo La Maya in the east of the country near Santiago de Cuba....
and musical director Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
, who had himself been organizing a similar project for the Afro-Cuban All Stars. A search for additional musicians led the team to singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, pianist Rubén González and octogenarian singer Compay Segundo, who all agreed to record for the project.
Within three days of the project's birth, Cooder, Gold and de Marcos had organized a large group of performers and arranged for recording sessions to commence at Havana's EGREM
EGREM
is the oldest Cuban record label, it is located in Havana. It was founded in 1964 following the Cuban Revolution...
Studios, formerly owned by RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
records, where the equipment and atmosphere had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Communication between the Spanish and English speakers at the studio was conducted via an interpreter, although Cooder reflected that "musicians understand each other through means other than speaking".
The album was recorded in just six days and contained fourteen tracks; opening with "Chan Chan
Chan Chan (song)
"Chan Chan" is a son composition by Cuban bandleader Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, 'Juanita' and 'Chan Chan'. The song was one of Compay's last compositions and was written in 1987...
" written by Compay Segundo, a four chord son that was to become what Cooder described as "the Buena Vista's calling card"; and ending with a rendition of "La Bayamesa", a traditional Cuban patriotic song (not to be confused with the Cuban national anthem
National anthem
A national anthem is a generally patriotic musical composition that evokes and eulogizes the history, traditions and struggles of its people, recognized either by a nation's government as the official national song, or by convention through use by the people.- History :Anthems rose to prominence...
of the same name
La Bayamesa
El Himno de Bayamo is the national anthem of Cuba. It was first performed during the Battle of Bayamo in 1868. Perucho Figueredo, who took part in the battle, wrote and composed the song. The melody, also called La Bayamesa, was composed by Figueredo in 1867...
). The sessions also produced material for the subsequent release, Introducing... Rubén González, which showcased the work of the Cuban pianist.
One of the songs that featured on the album was "Buena Vista Social Club", a song written by bass player "Cachaíto"'s uncle, Israel López
Israel López
Israel López Hernández is a Mexican football player who plays for Querétaro FC.His former clubs include UNAM Pumas, Chivas de Guadalajara, and Cruz Azul, he has also played at international levelfor Mexico....
, who also wrote Pueblo Nuevo, track 4 on the album. The song spotlighted the piano work of Rubén González and it was recorded after Cooder heard González improvising around the tune's musical theme before a day's recording session. After playing the piece, González explained to Cooder the history of the social club and that the song was the club's "mascot tune". When searching for a name for the overall project, manager Nick Gold chose the song's title. According to Cooder,
Upon release on 17 September 1997, the CD became a huge "word of mouth hit", far beyond that of most world music releases. It sold more than five million copies and won a Grammy award in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by the New York based Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine as #260 in The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Musicians
Slide guitar
Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide refers to the motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides: the necks of glass bottles...
on several songs and helped produce and mix the album, afterwards describing the sessions as "the greatest musical experience of my life". Ry Cooder had been a successful American guitarist since the 1960s, recording with Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12...
and the Rolling Stones. Known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music
Traditional music
Traditional music is the term increasingly used for folk music that is not contemporary folk music. More on this is at the terminology section of the World music article...
led him to record music from diverse genres including Tex-Mex
Tejano music
Tejano music or Tex-Mex music is the name given to various forms of folk and popular music originating among the Mexican-American populations of Central and Southern Texas...
, Hawaiian
Music of Hawaii
The music of Hawaii includes an array of traditional and popular styles, ranging from native Hawaiian folk music to modern rock and hip hop. Hawaii's musical contributions to the music of the United States are out of proportion to the state's small size. Styles like slack-key guitar are well-known...
and Tuvan
Tuvans
Tuvans or Tuvinians are Turkic peoples living in southern Siberia. They are historically known as one of the Uriankhai, from the Mongolian designation...
throat singing
Overtone singing
Overtone singing, also known as overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.The partials of a sound wave made by the human voice can be...
. He was later prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act
Trading with the Enemy Act
The Trading with the Enemy Act, sometimes abbreviated as TWEA, is a United States federal law, , enacted in 1917 to restrict trade with countries hostile to the United States. The law gives the President the power to oversee or restrict any and all trade between the U.S. and its enemies in times of...
, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...
.
Many of the Cuban musicians who featured on the album were at their musical prime in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of the 1997 record they became known in Cuba as "Los Superabuelos" (the Super-Grandfathers). Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
, a Cuban folk revivalist who was younger than the bulk of performers introduced Cooder to veteran singer Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
. Ferrer (1927–2005) had been lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso
Pacho Alonso
Pacho Alonso was a Cuban singer and bandleader from Santiago de Cuba who is attributed with creating the musical form Pilón....
, and also sang for Beny Moré, Cuba's most prominent performer in the 1940s, before his soft singing style fell out of fashion. Having found the semi-retired seventy year old Ferrer taking his daily stroll on the streets of Havana and shining shoes for extra money, González signed him up for the project. Cooder later described the discovery as something that happens "perhaps once in your life", and Ferrer as "the Cuban Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles , known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. Although an accomplished pianist, he owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform in big band and jazz genres...
". Ferrer became a prominent member of the group, and the success of the record was attributed in part to the popularity of his vocal performances. The singer went on to record a number of successful solo records and performed with contemporary acts such as the Gorillaz
Gorillaz
Gorillaz is an English musical project created in 1998 by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. This project consists of Gorillaz music itself and an extensive fictional universe depicting a "virtual band" of cartoon characters...
before his death in 2005 at the age of 78.
Virtuoso pianist Rubén González (1919–2003) also had further success releasing two solo albums after working on the initial project. González was a pianist for bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
in the 1940s, and is attributed with helping establish Cuban piano styles that were to dominate Latin music for the remainder of the century. Despite suffering from arthritis and not even owning a piano at the time of recording with Cooder, (due to an infestation of termite
Termite
Termites are a group of eusocial insects that, until recently, were classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera , but are now accepted as the epifamily Termitoidae, of the cockroach order Blattodea...
s whilst living in South America) the American guitarist described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard". After the success of the 1997 record, González recorded and toured with bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was the only musician to play on all of the songs on the Buena Vista Social Club album. "Cachaito" (1933–2009) was the son of multi-instrumentalist Orestes López
Orestes López
Orestes López was a Cuban musician and bandleader, often credited with popularizing the musical form Mambo, together with his brother Israel "Cachao" Lopez....
and the nephew of fellow bassist Israel "Cachao" López
Cachao López
Israel "Cachao" López , often known as Cachao, was a Cuban musician and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s....
, the brothers often attributed with inventing the mambo. Named after his prestigious uncle, "Cachaito" (little Cachao) was a leading Descarga musician in the 1950s and '60s, a musical form that takes its influence from modern jazz, and he became the ever present bassist at Buena Vista Social Club performances and recordings.
One of the first to come onboard the project was Compay Segundo (born Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz) (1907–2003), who at 89 years old was the oldest of the performers. During a discussion about politics, the veteran Segundo said: "Politics? This new guy [Fidel Castro] is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times."
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
voice including the self penned opening track, Chan Chan, with Eliades Ochoa as the leading voice. Cowboy hat
Cowboy hat
The cowboy hat is a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat best known as the defining piece of attire for the North American cowboy. Today it is worn by many people, and is particularly associated with ranch workers in the western and southern United States, western Canada and northern Mexico, with...
wearing Eliades Ochoa (b.1946), who had collaborated previously with Segundo and was a well established traditional Cuban folk performer, played guitar and sang for the group. Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
(b.1930), a bolero singer and the only female in the collective, sang "Veinte Años" on the record and duetted with Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer during live performances.
Other performers included singer Pío Leyva
Pío Leyva
Pío Leyva was a Cuban singer and the author of the well-known guaracha El Mentiroso . Leyva was part of the Buena Vista Social Club, and composed some of Cuba’s best known standards....
, (1917–2006) who had been working with Segundo since the early 1950s, and fellow and singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, (1927–2000), who had performed with Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz was a Cuban-American salsa singer, and was one of the most successful Salsa performers of the 20th century, having earned twenty-three gold albums...
and Benny Moré
Benny Moré
Benny Moré , or Beny, was a Cuban singer. He is often thought of as the greatest Cuban popular singer of all time. He was gifted with an innate musicality and fluid tenor voice which he colored and phrased with great expressivity...
. Additional improvised percussion was provided by Amadito Valdés
Amadito Valdés
Amadito Valdés is a Cuban percussionist, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.Valdés studied at the Havana Conservatoire and it was there that he began to develop his improvisational style on the timbales, mixing Afro rhythms in 6/8 time with the Cuban son syncopated rhythms in...
and Carlos González. The youngest established member of the group was Barbarito Torres
Barbarito Torres
thumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
, (b.1956) a virtuoso player of the laúd
Laúd
The word laúd is the Spanish word for lute. It is most commonly used to refer to a plectrum-plucked chordophone from Spain. It belongs to the cittern family of instruments. It has six double courses , similarly to the bandurria, but its neck is longer...
, a Cuban offshoot of the lute
Lute
Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
. Trumpet was provided by Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, (b. 1933) who went on to release solo records under the Buena Vista presents... title.
Film
Shortly after returning from Havana to record the Buena Vista Social Club album, Ry Cooder began working with German film director Wim WendersWim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
on the soundtrack to Wenders' film The End of Violence
The End of Violence
The End of Violence is a 1997 film by the German director Wim Wenders. The film's cast includes Bill Pullman, Gabriel Byrne, Traci Lind, Rosalind Chao, Andie MacDowell, and Loren Dean, among others. It also features a soundtrack marked with the signature sounds of Wenders regulars Jon Hassell, Ry...
, the third such collaboration between the two artists. According to Wenders, it was an effort to force Cooder to focus on the project, "He always sort of looked in the distance and smiled, and I knew he was back in Havana." Although Wenders knew nothing about Cuban music at the time, he became enthused by tapes of the Havana sessions provided by Cooder, and agreed to travel to the island to film the recording of Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer's first solo album, in 1998.
Wenders filmed the recording sessions on the recently enhanced format Digital Video
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
with the help of cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
Robert Müller, and then shot interviews with each "Buena Vista" ensemble member in different Havana locations. Wenders was also present to film the group's first performance with a full line-up in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 1999, and a second concert in Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, New York City.
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
, these scenes of "innocents abroad" were the film's most moving moments, as the contrasts between societies of Havana and New York become evident on the faces of the performers. Ferrer, from an impoverished background and staunchly anti consumerist
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
, was shown describing the city as "beautiful" and finding the experience overwhelming. Upon completion of filming, Wenders felt that the film "didn't feel really like it was a documentary anymore. It felt like it was a true character piece".
The film became a box office success, grossing $23,002,182 worldwide. Critics were generally enthusiastic about the story and especially the music, although leading U.S. film critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
and the British Film Institute's
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
Peter Curran felt that Wenders had lingered too long on Cooder during the performances; and the editing, which interspersed interviews with music, had disrupted the continuity of the songs. The film was nominated for an Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
for best documentary feature in 1999. It won best documentary at the European Film Awards and received seventeen other major accolades internationally.
Performances
The first performances by the full line up of "Buena Vista Social Club", including Cooder, were those filmed by Wenders in Amsterdam and New York. Other international shows and T.V. appearances soon followed with varying line ups. Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González performed together in Los Angeles in 1998 to an audience that included Alanis MorissetteAlanis Morissette
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, and actress. She has won 16 Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and also shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination...
, Sean Combs
Sean Combs
Sean John Combs , also known by his stage names Diddy and P. Diddy, is an American rapper, singer, record producer, actor, and entrepreneur. He has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards, and his clothing line earned a Council of Fashion Designers of America award. He was originally...
, and Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lynn Lopez is an American actress, singer, record producer, dancer, television personality, and fashion designer. Lopez began her career as a dancer on the television comedy program In Living Color. Subsequently venturing into acting, she gained recognition in the 1995 action-thriller...
, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
Lopez.
Cuban exile
The term "Cuban exile" refers to the many Cubans who have sought alternative political or economic conditions outside the island, dating back to the Ten Years' War and the struggle for Cuban independence during the 19th century...
and Cuban American
Cuban American
A Cuban American is a United States citizen who traces his or her "national origin" to Cuba. Cuban Americans are also considered native born Americans with Cuban parents or Cuban-born persons who were raised and educated in US...
community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer.Gonzalo Julio Gonzalez Fonseca was born in Havana, Cuba, May 27, 1963, into a musical family rich in the traditions of the country’s artistic past...
turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government
Opposition to Fidel Castro
The Cuban dissident movement is a political movement in Cuba whose aim is "to replace the current regime with a more democratic form of government". According to Human Rights Watch, the Cuban government represses nearly all forms of political dissent....
. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach
Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter which separates the Beach from Miami city proper...
in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van
Los Van Van
Los Van Van is a Cuban band led by bassist Juan Formell, it is one of the most recognized post-revolution Cuban bands, while Juan Formell has arguably become the most important figure in contemporary Cuban music....
drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem
Per diem
Per diem refers to a specific amount of money that an organization allows an individual to spend per day, to cover living and traveling expenses in connection with work...
(transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.
"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros
Los Zafiros
Los Zafiros were a Cuban close-harmony vocal group working from 1961–1970. The group was part of the filín movement, inspired by American doo-wop groups such as The Platters...
, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
Impact and analysis
The international success of the Buena Vista Social Club generated a revival of interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American musicLatin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music."
Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry
Tourism in Cuba
Tourism in Cuba attracts over 2 million people a year, and is one of the main sources of revenue for the island. With its favorable climate, beaches, colonial architecture and distinct cultural history, Cuba has long been an attractive destination for tourists...
of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana
Old Havana
Old Havana contains the core of the original city of Havana. The positions of the original Havana city walls are the modern boundaries of Old Havana....
it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner." Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba
Timba
Timba is a Cuban genre of music sometimes referred as salsa cubana . However, the historical development of timba has been quite independent of the development of salsa in the United States and Puerto Rico and the music has its own trademark aspects due to the Cuban embargo and strong Afro-Cuban...
, Songo
Songo music
Songo is a type of Cuban music originating in Havana which combines elements from the rumba, son Cubano, and other contemporary afro-American styles like jazz and funk...
and other musical forms on the island, such as reggaetón
Reggaeton
Reggaeton is a form of Puerto Rican and Latin American urban and Caribbean music. After its mainstream exposure in 2004, it spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton originated in Puerto Rico but is also has roots from Reggae en Español from Panama and Puerto Rico and...
by luminaries such as Raul Zeballos, the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new; they were just playing the same songs that Cubans know and have been playing for many years.
Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that some music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city of Cuba and capital city of Santiago de Cuba Province in the south-eastern area of the island, some south-east of the Cuban capital of Havana....
in the east of the island." British world music record label Tumi Music
Tumi Music
Tumi Music is a UK independent record label well-known for its Latin American , Peruvian music, and pan pipe music.Famous for releasing the CD Lamento Negro that won the Latin Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for Susana Baca in 2002.- Artists:* Afro Cuban All Stars* Andy Gola* Aragon * Buena Vista...
, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians, all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first."
Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez
Mike Gonzalez (historian)
Mike Gonzalez is a British historian and literary critic, who was Professor of Latin American Studies in the Hispanics Department of the University of Glasgow.He has written widely on Latin America...
believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion". The American Historical Review
American Historical Review
The American Historical Review is the official publication of the American Historical Association, established in 1895 "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research." It targets readers...
suggested that the Buena Vista Social Clubs mise en scène
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado y Morales was President of Cuba and a general of the Cuban War of Independence...
in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....
until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad".
Discography
- Buena Vista Social ClubBuena Vista Social Club (album)- Music :"Chan Chan", the first song on the album, is a Cuban song composition by Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, Juanita and Chan Chan. The song was one of Segundo's last compositions and was written in 1987, already having been recorded by Segundo himself various...
(16 September 1997). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. - Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall (14 October 2008). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.
Other releases
The below discography includes solo albums released since the first Buena Vista Social Club album that feature the musicians in the ensemble, and that are considered to be under the "Buena Vista Social Club" aegis.- Rubén González
- Introducing... Rubén GonzálezIntroducing...Rubén GonzálezIntroducing...Ruben Gonzalez is the debut studio album by Afro-Cuban pianist Rubén González. It was released on September 16, 1997 through World Circuit Records...
(17 September 1997). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
/AsylumAsylum RecordsAsylum Records is an American record label founded in 1971 by David Geffen, and partner Elliot Roberts, who had previously worked as agents at the William Morris Agency. Founded specifically to provide a record contract for Jackson Browne, the label signed Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell...
. - Chanchullo (17 September 2000). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
.
- Introducing... Rubén González
- Barbarito TorresBarbarito Torresthumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
- Havana Cafe (6 April 1999). Atlantic RecordsAtlantic RecordsAtlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...
.
- Havana Cafe (6 April 1999). Atlantic Records
- Ibrahim FerrerIbrahim FerrerIbrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer (8 June 1999). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. - Buenos Hermanos (18 March 2003). Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. - Mi Sueño (26 Mar 2007). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
.
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer (8 June 1999). World Circuit
- Eliades OchoaEliades OchoaEliades Ochoa is a Cuban guitarist and singer from Loma de la Avispa, Songo La Maya in the east of the country near Santiago de Cuba....
- Sublime Illusion (29 June 1999). Higher OctaveHigher OctaveHigher Octave is a sub-label imprint of Narada Productions, which is part of EMI's Blue Note Records label group, located in New York.Higher Octave was founded in 1986 as an independent record label specializing in a wide variety of uplifting music, including smooth jazz, New Age music, Latin music...
.
- Sublime Illusion (29 June 1999). Higher Octave
- Omara PortuondoOmara PortuondoOmara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Omara (25 April 2000). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. - Flor de Amor (25 May 2004). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Omara (25 April 2000). World Circuit
The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician
Music of Cuba
The Caribbean island of Cuba has developed a wide range of creolized musical styles, based on its cultural origins in Europe and Africa. Since the 19th century its music has been hugely popular and influential throughout the world...
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
and American guitarist Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.
The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club
Buena Vista Social Club (album)
- Music :"Chan Chan", the first song on the album, is a Cuban song composition by Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, Juanita and Chan Chan. The song was one of Segundo's last compositions and was written in 1987, already having been recorded by Segundo himself various...
after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 1998. German director Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, New York City for a documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
nomination for Best Documentary feature
Academy Award for Documentary Feature
The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films.- Winners and nominees:Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year...
and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.
The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music
Latin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.-Biography:...
, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laud player Barbarito Torres
Barbarito Torres
thumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.
Social club
The Buena Vista Social Club members-only club was located in the populous MarianaoMarianao
Marianao is a town and municipality in the province of the city of Havana, Cuba, 6 miles southwest of the original city of Havana, with which it is connected by the Marianao railway. , the municipality had a population of 133,016. Marianao is on a range of hills about 1500 ft. above sea level,...
neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies
Master of Ceremonies
A Master of Ceremonies , or compere, is the host of a staged event or similar performance.An MC usually presents performers, speaks to the audience, and generally keeps the event moving....
at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.-Biography:...
and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.
The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo
Cabildo (Cuba)
Cabildos de nación were African ethnic associations created in Cuba in the late 16th century based on the Spanish cofradías that were organized in Seville for the first time around the 14th century...
, a community cofradía (fraternity
Fraternal and service organizations
A "fraternal organization" or "fraternity" is a brotherhood, though the term usually connotes a distinct or formal organization. Please list college fraternities and sororities at List of social fraternities and sororities.-International:...
or guild
Guild
A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society...
) dating back to Spanish colonialism
Spanish colonization of the Americas
Colonial expansion under the Spanish Empire was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores and developed by the Monarchy of Spain through its administrators and missionaries. The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Christian faith through indigenous conversions...
. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans
Afro-Cubans
The Afro-Cubans were a latin jazz band founded by Machito in 1940; often billed as Machito and his Afro-Cubans. Their musical director, and an important musical innovator, was Mario Bauza, Machito's brother-in-law....
was institutionalized
Institutional racism
Institutional racism describes any kind of system of inequality based on race. It can occur in institutions such as public government bodies, private business corporations , and universities . The term was coined by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s...
. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao
Marianao
Marianao is a town and municipality in the province of the city of Havana, Cuba, 6 miles southwest of the original city of Havana, with which it is connected by the Marianao railway. , the municipality had a population of 133,016. Marianao is on a range of hills about 1500 ft. above sea level,...
Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.
According to American guitarist Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
, Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López
Cachao López
Israel "Cachao" López , often known as Cachao, was a Cuban musician and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s....
and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga
Charanga
Charanga is a term given to traditional ensembles of Cuban dance music. They made Cuban dance music popular in the 1940s and their music consisted of heavily son-influenced material, performed on European instruments such as violin and flute by a Charanga orchestra....
, and dance forms such as the pachanga
Pachanga
- Music :In Cuba in 1955, Los Papines fused the violin-based music of charangas and the trumpet-based music of conjuntos Eduardo Davidson's La Pachanga , recorded by Orquesta Sublime, introduced Cuba to a Colombian dance...
and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban
Afro-Cuban
The term Afro-Cuban refers to Cubans of Sub Saharan African ancestry, and to historical or cultural elements in Cuba thought to emanate from this community...
musical styles such as rumba
Cuban Rumba
In Cuban music, Rumba is a generic term covering a variety of musical rhythms and associated dances. The rumba has its influences in the music brought to Cuba by Africans brought to Cuba as slaves as well as Spanish colonizers...
and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno
Son montuno
The son montuno is a style of the Cuban son, but exactly what it means is not an easy question to answer. The son itself is the most important genre of Cuban popular music. In addition, it is perhaps the most flexible of all forms of Latin-American music...
. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music," has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Closure of musical venues and changing traditions
Shortly after the Cuban RevolutionCuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
of 1959, newly elected Cuban President Manuel Urrutia Lleó
Manuel Urrutia Lleó
Manuel Urrutia Lleó was a liberal Cuban lawyer and politician. Urrutia campaigned against the Gerardo Machado government and the second presidency of Fulgencio Batista during the 1950s, before serving as president in the first revolutionary government of 1959...
, a devout Christian and liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, began a program of closing gambling outlets, nightclubs, and other establishments associated with Havana's hedonistic lifestyle. This had an immediate impact on the livelihoods of local entertainers. As the Cuban government rapidly shifted towards the left and an effort to build a "classless and colorblind society", it struggled to define policy toward forms of cultural expression in the black community; expressions which had implicitly emphasized cultural differences. Consequently, the cultural and social centers were abolished, including the Afro-Cuban mutual aid Sociedades de Color in 1962, to make way for racially integrated societies. Private festivities were limited to weekend parties and organizers' funds were confiscated. The measures meant the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. Although the Cuban government continued to support traditional music after the revolution, certain favor was given to the politically charged nueva trova
Nueva trova
Nueva trova is a movement in Cuban music that emerged around 1967/68 after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the consequent political and social changes....
, and poetic singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez is a Cuban musician, and a leader of the nueva trova movement.He is considered Cuba's best known folk singer and known for his highly eloquent and symbolic lyrics. Many of his songs have become classics in Latin American music, such as Ojalá, Playa Girón, Unicornio and...
and Pablo Milanés
Pablo Milanés
Pablo Milanés Arias is a Cuban singer-songwriter and guitar player. He studied at a conservatory in Havana. He is considered one of the founders of the Cuban nueva trova, along with Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola...
. The emergence of pop music and salsa
Salsa music
Salsa music is a genre of music, generally defined as a modern style of playing Cuban Son, Son Montuno, and Guaracha with touches from other genres of music...
, a style derived from Cuban music but developed in the United States, meant that son music became even less common.
Cuban music experienced quite radical change in the 1960s, as National Geographic notes:
Cuban dance music also witnessed dramatic change beginning in the late 1960s, as groups explored the fusion of Cuban son with American rock, jazz and funk styles. Groups such as Los Van Van and Irakere established modern forms of Cuban music, paving the way for new rhythms and dances to emerge as well as fresh concepts in instrumentation. ... Cuba's dance music had already inspired a change from the older son-style dances, as younger Cubans broke free of step-oriented dances...
The occurrence of these closures and the change in traditions is the simplest explanation of why many musicians were out of work, and why their style of music had declined before the Buena Vista Social Club made it popular again.
Album
In 1996, American guitarist Ry Cooder had been invited to Havana by British world musicWorld music
World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...
producer
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
Nick Gold of World Circuit Records
World Circuit (record label)
World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
to record a session where two African High-life musicians from Mali
Mali
Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
were to collaborate with Cuban musicians. On Cooder's arrival (via Mexico to avoid the ongoing U.S. trade and travel embargo against Cuba
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...
), it transpired that the musicians from Africa had not received their visas and were unable to travel to Havana. Cooder and Gold changed their plans and decided to record an album of Cuban son music with local musicians.
Already on board the African collaboration project were Cuban musicians including bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, guitarist Eliades Ochoa
Eliades Ochoa
Eliades Ochoa is a Cuban guitarist and singer from Loma de la Avispa, Songo La Maya in the east of the country near Santiago de Cuba....
and musical director Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
, who had himself been organizing a similar project for the Afro-Cuban All Stars. A search for additional musicians led the team to singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, pianist Rubén González and octogenarian singer Compay Segundo, who all agreed to record for the project.
Within three days of the project's birth, Cooder, Gold and de Marcos had organized a large group of performers and arranged for recording sessions to commence at Havana's EGREM
EGREM
is the oldest Cuban record label, it is located in Havana. It was founded in 1964 following the Cuban Revolution...
Studios, formerly owned by RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
records, where the equipment and atmosphere had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Communication between the Spanish and English speakers at the studio was conducted via an interpreter, although Cooder reflected that "musicians understand each other through means other than speaking".
The album was recorded in just six days and contained fourteen tracks; opening with "Chan Chan
Chan Chan (song)
"Chan Chan" is a son composition by Cuban bandleader Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, 'Juanita' and 'Chan Chan'. The song was one of Compay's last compositions and was written in 1987...
" written by Compay Segundo, a four chord son that was to become what Cooder described as "the Buena Vista's calling card"; and ending with a rendition of "La Bayamesa", a traditional Cuban patriotic song (not to be confused with the Cuban national anthem
National anthem
A national anthem is a generally patriotic musical composition that evokes and eulogizes the history, traditions and struggles of its people, recognized either by a nation's government as the official national song, or by convention through use by the people.- History :Anthems rose to prominence...
of the same name
La Bayamesa
El Himno de Bayamo is the national anthem of Cuba. It was first performed during the Battle of Bayamo in 1868. Perucho Figueredo, who took part in the battle, wrote and composed the song. The melody, also called La Bayamesa, was composed by Figueredo in 1867...
). The sessions also produced material for the subsequent release, Introducing... Rubén González, which showcased the work of the Cuban pianist.
One of the songs that featured on the album was "Buena Vista Social Club", a song written by bass player "Cachaíto"'s uncle, Israel López
Israel López
Israel López Hernández is a Mexican football player who plays for Querétaro FC.His former clubs include UNAM Pumas, Chivas de Guadalajara, and Cruz Azul, he has also played at international levelfor Mexico....
, who also wrote Pueblo Nuevo, track 4 on the album. The song spotlighted the piano work of Rubén González and it was recorded after Cooder heard González improvising around the tune's musical theme before a day's recording session. After playing the piece, González explained to Cooder the history of the social club and that the song was the club's "mascot tune". When searching for a name for the overall project, manager Nick Gold chose the song's title. According to Cooder,
Upon release on 17 September 1997, the CD became a huge "word of mouth hit", far beyond that of most world music releases. It sold more than five million copies and won a Grammy award in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by the New York based Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine as #260 in The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Musicians
Slide guitar
Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide refers to the motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides: the necks of glass bottles...
on several songs and helped produce and mix the album, afterwards describing the sessions as "the greatest musical experience of my life". Ry Cooder had been a successful American guitarist since the 1960s, recording with Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12...
and the Rolling Stones. Known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music
Traditional music
Traditional music is the term increasingly used for folk music that is not contemporary folk music. More on this is at the terminology section of the World music article...
led him to record music from diverse genres including Tex-Mex
Tejano music
Tejano music or Tex-Mex music is the name given to various forms of folk and popular music originating among the Mexican-American populations of Central and Southern Texas...
, Hawaiian
Music of Hawaii
The music of Hawaii includes an array of traditional and popular styles, ranging from native Hawaiian folk music to modern rock and hip hop. Hawaii's musical contributions to the music of the United States are out of proportion to the state's small size. Styles like slack-key guitar are well-known...
and Tuvan
Tuvans
Tuvans or Tuvinians are Turkic peoples living in southern Siberia. They are historically known as one of the Uriankhai, from the Mongolian designation...
throat singing
Overtone singing
Overtone singing, also known as overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.The partials of a sound wave made by the human voice can be...
. He was later prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act
Trading with the Enemy Act
The Trading with the Enemy Act, sometimes abbreviated as TWEA, is a United States federal law, , enacted in 1917 to restrict trade with countries hostile to the United States. The law gives the President the power to oversee or restrict any and all trade between the U.S. and its enemies in times of...
, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...
.
Many of the Cuban musicians who featured on the album were at their musical prime in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of the 1997 record they became known in Cuba as "Los Superabuelos" (the Super-Grandfathers). Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
, a Cuban folk revivalist who was younger than the bulk of performers introduced Cooder to veteran singer Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
. Ferrer (1927–2005) had been lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso
Pacho Alonso
Pacho Alonso was a Cuban singer and bandleader from Santiago de Cuba who is attributed with creating the musical form Pilón....
, and also sang for Beny Moré, Cuba's most prominent performer in the 1940s, before his soft singing style fell out of fashion. Having found the semi-retired seventy year old Ferrer taking his daily stroll on the streets of Havana and shining shoes for extra money, González signed him up for the project. Cooder later described the discovery as something that happens "perhaps once in your life", and Ferrer as "the Cuban Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles , known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. Although an accomplished pianist, he owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform in big band and jazz genres...
". Ferrer became a prominent member of the group, and the success of the record was attributed in part to the popularity of his vocal performances. The singer went on to record a number of successful solo records and performed with contemporary acts such as the Gorillaz
Gorillaz
Gorillaz is an English musical project created in 1998 by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. This project consists of Gorillaz music itself and an extensive fictional universe depicting a "virtual band" of cartoon characters...
before his death in 2005 at the age of 78.
Virtuoso pianist Rubén González (1919–2003) also had further success releasing two solo albums after working on the initial project. González was a pianist for bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
in the 1940s, and is attributed with helping establish Cuban piano styles that were to dominate Latin music for the remainder of the century. Despite suffering from arthritis and not even owning a piano at the time of recording with Cooder, (due to an infestation of termite
Termite
Termites are a group of eusocial insects that, until recently, were classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera , but are now accepted as the epifamily Termitoidae, of the cockroach order Blattodea...
s whilst living in South America) the American guitarist described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard". After the success of the 1997 record, González recorded and toured with bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was the only musician to play on all of the songs on the Buena Vista Social Club album. "Cachaito" (1933–2009) was the son of multi-instrumentalist Orestes López
Orestes López
Orestes López was a Cuban musician and bandleader, often credited with popularizing the musical form Mambo, together with his brother Israel "Cachao" Lopez....
and the nephew of fellow bassist Israel "Cachao" López
Cachao López
Israel "Cachao" López , often known as Cachao, was a Cuban musician and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s....
, the brothers often attributed with inventing the mambo. Named after his prestigious uncle, "Cachaito" (little Cachao) was a leading Descarga musician in the 1950s and '60s, a musical form that takes its influence from modern jazz, and he became the ever present bassist at Buena Vista Social Club performances and recordings.
One of the first to come onboard the project was Compay Segundo (born Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz) (1907–2003), who at 89 years old was the oldest of the performers. During a discussion about politics, the veteran Segundo said: "Politics? This new guy [Fidel Castro] is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times."
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
voice including the self penned opening track, Chan Chan, with Eliades Ochoa as the leading voice. Cowboy hat
Cowboy hat
The cowboy hat is a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat best known as the defining piece of attire for the North American cowboy. Today it is worn by many people, and is particularly associated with ranch workers in the western and southern United States, western Canada and northern Mexico, with...
wearing Eliades Ochoa (b.1946), who had collaborated previously with Segundo and was a well established traditional Cuban folk performer, played guitar and sang for the group. Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
(b.1930), a bolero singer and the only female in the collective, sang "Veinte Años" on the record and duetted with Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer during live performances.
Other performers included singer Pío Leyva
Pío Leyva
Pío Leyva was a Cuban singer and the author of the well-known guaracha El Mentiroso . Leyva was part of the Buena Vista Social Club, and composed some of Cuba’s best known standards....
, (1917–2006) who had been working with Segundo since the early 1950s, and fellow and singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, (1927–2000), who had performed with Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz was a Cuban-American salsa singer, and was one of the most successful Salsa performers of the 20th century, having earned twenty-three gold albums...
and Benny Moré
Benny Moré
Benny Moré , or Beny, was a Cuban singer. He is often thought of as the greatest Cuban popular singer of all time. He was gifted with an innate musicality and fluid tenor voice which he colored and phrased with great expressivity...
. Additional improvised percussion was provided by Amadito Valdés
Amadito Valdés
Amadito Valdés is a Cuban percussionist, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.Valdés studied at the Havana Conservatoire and it was there that he began to develop his improvisational style on the timbales, mixing Afro rhythms in 6/8 time with the Cuban son syncopated rhythms in...
and Carlos González. The youngest established member of the group was Barbarito Torres
Barbarito Torres
thumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
, (b.1956) a virtuoso player of the laúd
Laúd
The word laúd is the Spanish word for lute. It is most commonly used to refer to a plectrum-plucked chordophone from Spain. It belongs to the cittern family of instruments. It has six double courses , similarly to the bandurria, but its neck is longer...
, a Cuban offshoot of the lute
Lute
Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
. Trumpet was provided by Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, (b. 1933) who went on to release solo records under the Buena Vista presents... title.
Film
Shortly after returning from Havana to record the Buena Vista Social Club album, Ry Cooder began working with German film director Wim WendersWim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
on the soundtrack to Wenders' film The End of Violence
The End of Violence
The End of Violence is a 1997 film by the German director Wim Wenders. The film's cast includes Bill Pullman, Gabriel Byrne, Traci Lind, Rosalind Chao, Andie MacDowell, and Loren Dean, among others. It also features a soundtrack marked with the signature sounds of Wenders regulars Jon Hassell, Ry...
, the third such collaboration between the two artists. According to Wenders, it was an effort to force Cooder to focus on the project, "He always sort of looked in the distance and smiled, and I knew he was back in Havana." Although Wenders knew nothing about Cuban music at the time, he became enthused by tapes of the Havana sessions provided by Cooder, and agreed to travel to the island to film the recording of Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer's first solo album, in 1998.
Wenders filmed the recording sessions on the recently enhanced format Digital Video
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
with the help of cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
Robert Müller, and then shot interviews with each "Buena Vista" ensemble member in different Havana locations. Wenders was also present to film the group's first performance with a full line-up in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 1999, and a second concert in Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, New York City.
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
, these scenes of "innocents abroad" were the film's most moving moments, as the contrasts between societies of Havana and New York become evident on the faces of the performers. Ferrer, from an impoverished background and staunchly anti consumerist
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
, was shown describing the city as "beautiful" and finding the experience overwhelming. Upon completion of filming, Wenders felt that the film "didn't feel really like it was a documentary anymore. It felt like it was a true character piece".
The film became a box office success, grossing $23,002,182 worldwide. Critics were generally enthusiastic about the story and especially the music, although leading U.S. film critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
and the British Film Institute's
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
Peter Curran felt that Wenders had lingered too long on Cooder during the performances; and the editing, which interspersed interviews with music, had disrupted the continuity of the songs. The film was nominated for an Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
for best documentary feature in 1999. It won best documentary at the European Film Awards and received seventeen other major accolades internationally.
Performances
The first performances by the full line up of "Buena Vista Social Club", including Cooder, were those filmed by Wenders in Amsterdam and New York. Other international shows and T.V. appearances soon followed with varying line ups. Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González performed together in Los Angeles in 1998 to an audience that included Alanis MorissetteAlanis Morissette
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, and actress. She has won 16 Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and also shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination...
, Sean Combs
Sean Combs
Sean John Combs , also known by his stage names Diddy and P. Diddy, is an American rapper, singer, record producer, actor, and entrepreneur. He has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards, and his clothing line earned a Council of Fashion Designers of America award. He was originally...
, and Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lynn Lopez is an American actress, singer, record producer, dancer, television personality, and fashion designer. Lopez began her career as a dancer on the television comedy program In Living Color. Subsequently venturing into acting, she gained recognition in the 1995 action-thriller...
, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
Lopez.
Cuban exile
The term "Cuban exile" refers to the many Cubans who have sought alternative political or economic conditions outside the island, dating back to the Ten Years' War and the struggle for Cuban independence during the 19th century...
and Cuban American
Cuban American
A Cuban American is a United States citizen who traces his or her "national origin" to Cuba. Cuban Americans are also considered native born Americans with Cuban parents or Cuban-born persons who were raised and educated in US...
community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer.Gonzalo Julio Gonzalez Fonseca was born in Havana, Cuba, May 27, 1963, into a musical family rich in the traditions of the country’s artistic past...
turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government
Opposition to Fidel Castro
The Cuban dissident movement is a political movement in Cuba whose aim is "to replace the current regime with a more democratic form of government". According to Human Rights Watch, the Cuban government represses nearly all forms of political dissent....
. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach
Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter which separates the Beach from Miami city proper...
in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van
Los Van Van
Los Van Van is a Cuban band led by bassist Juan Formell, it is one of the most recognized post-revolution Cuban bands, while Juan Formell has arguably become the most important figure in contemporary Cuban music....
drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem
Per diem
Per diem refers to a specific amount of money that an organization allows an individual to spend per day, to cover living and traveling expenses in connection with work...
(transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.
"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros
Los Zafiros
Los Zafiros were a Cuban close-harmony vocal group working from 1961–1970. The group was part of the filín movement, inspired by American doo-wop groups such as The Platters...
, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
Impact and analysis
The international success of the Buena Vista Social Club generated a revival of interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American musicLatin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music."
Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry
Tourism in Cuba
Tourism in Cuba attracts over 2 million people a year, and is one of the main sources of revenue for the island. With its favorable climate, beaches, colonial architecture and distinct cultural history, Cuba has long been an attractive destination for tourists...
of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana
Old Havana
Old Havana contains the core of the original city of Havana. The positions of the original Havana city walls are the modern boundaries of Old Havana....
it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner." Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba
Timba
Timba is a Cuban genre of music sometimes referred as salsa cubana . However, the historical development of timba has been quite independent of the development of salsa in the United States and Puerto Rico and the music has its own trademark aspects due to the Cuban embargo and strong Afro-Cuban...
, Songo
Songo music
Songo is a type of Cuban music originating in Havana which combines elements from the rumba, son Cubano, and other contemporary afro-American styles like jazz and funk...
and other musical forms on the island, such as reggaetón
Reggaeton
Reggaeton is a form of Puerto Rican and Latin American urban and Caribbean music. After its mainstream exposure in 2004, it spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton originated in Puerto Rico but is also has roots from Reggae en Español from Panama and Puerto Rico and...
by luminaries such as Raul Zeballos, the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new; they were just playing the same songs that Cubans know and have been playing for many years.
Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that some music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city of Cuba and capital city of Santiago de Cuba Province in the south-eastern area of the island, some south-east of the Cuban capital of Havana....
in the east of the island." British world music record label Tumi Music
Tumi Music
Tumi Music is a UK independent record label well-known for its Latin American , Peruvian music, and pan pipe music.Famous for releasing the CD Lamento Negro that won the Latin Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for Susana Baca in 2002.- Artists:* Afro Cuban All Stars* Andy Gola* Aragon * Buena Vista...
, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians, all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first."
Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez
Mike Gonzalez (historian)
Mike Gonzalez is a British historian and literary critic, who was Professor of Latin American Studies in the Hispanics Department of the University of Glasgow.He has written widely on Latin America...
believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion". The American Historical Review
American Historical Review
The American Historical Review is the official publication of the American Historical Association, established in 1895 "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research." It targets readers...
suggested that the Buena Vista Social Clubs mise en scène
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado y Morales was President of Cuba and a general of the Cuban War of Independence...
in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....
until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad".
Discography
- Buena Vista Social ClubBuena Vista Social Club (album)- Music :"Chan Chan", the first song on the album, is a Cuban song composition by Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, Juanita and Chan Chan. The song was one of Segundo's last compositions and was written in 1987, already having been recorded by Segundo himself various...
(16 September 1997). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. - Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall (14 October 2008). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.
Other releases
The below discography includes solo albums released since the first Buena Vista Social Club album that feature the musicians in the ensemble, and that are considered to be under the "Buena Vista Social Club" aegis.- Rubén González
- Introducing... Rubén GonzálezIntroducing...Rubén GonzálezIntroducing...Ruben Gonzalez is the debut studio album by Afro-Cuban pianist Rubén González. It was released on September 16, 1997 through World Circuit Records...
(17 September 1997). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
/AsylumAsylum RecordsAsylum Records is an American record label founded in 1971 by David Geffen, and partner Elliot Roberts, who had previously worked as agents at the William Morris Agency. Founded specifically to provide a record contract for Jackson Browne, the label signed Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell...
.(Guest Musicians include Ry Cooder, Manuel Galbán, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez and Manuel "El Guajiro" Mirabal.) - Chanchullo (17 September 2000). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
.(Guest musicians include Joachim Cooder, Eliades Ochoa, Ibrahim Ferrer and Amadito Valdés.)
- Introducing... Rubén González
- Barbarito TorresBarbarito Torresthumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
- Havana Cafe (6 April 1999). Atlantic RecordsAtlantic RecordsAtlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...
.(Guest musicians include Manuel "El Guajiro" Mirabal, Ibrahim Ferrer, Pío Leyva and Omara .)
- Havana Cafe (6 April 1999). Atlantic Records
- Ibrahim FerrerIbrahim FerrerIbrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer (8 June 1999). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest Musicians include Rubén González, Ry Cooder, Manuel Galbán, and Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez.) - Buenos Hermanos (18 March 2003). Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest musicians include Ry Cooder, Manuel Galbán, and Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez.) - Mi Sueño (26 Mar 2007). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
.(Guest musicians include Orlando "Cachaíto" López, Manuel Galbán, Rubén González, Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, Omara , Amadito Valdés.)
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer (8 June 1999). World Circuit
- Eliades OchoaEliades OchoaEliades Ochoa is a Cuban guitarist and singer from Loma de la Avispa, Songo La Maya in the east of the country near Santiago de Cuba....
- Sublime Illusion (29 June 1999). Higher OctaveHigher OctaveHigher Octave is a sub-label imprint of Narada Productions, which is part of EMI's Blue Note Records label group, located in New York.Higher Octave was founded in 1986 as an independent record label specializing in a wide variety of uplifting music, including smooth jazz, New Age music, Latin music...
.(Guest musicians include Ry Cooder.)
- Sublime Illusion (29 June 1999). Higher Octave
- Omara PortuondoOmara PortuondoOmara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Omara (25 April 2000). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest musicians include Pío Leyva, Rubén González, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, Eliades Ochoa, Compay Segundo and Amadito Valdés.) - Flor de Amor (25 May 2004). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Omara (25 April 2000). World Circuit
The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. In the 1990s, nearly 50 years after the club was closed, it inspired a recording made by Cuban musician
Music of Cuba
The Caribbean island of Cuba has developed a wide range of creolized musical styles, based on its cultural origins in Europe and Africa. Since the 19th century its music has been hugely popular and influential throughout the world...
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
and American guitarist Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
with traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom were veterans who had performed at the club during the height of its popularity.
The recording, named Buena Vista Social Club
Buena Vista Social Club (album)
- Music :"Chan Chan", the first song on the album, is a Cuban song composition by Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, Juanita and Chan Chan. The song was one of Segundo's last compositions and was written in 1987, already having been recorded by Segundo himself various...
after the Havana institution, became an international success, and the ensemble was encouraged to perform with a full line-up in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 1998. German director Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
captured the performance on film, followed by a second concert in Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, New York City for a documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
that included interviews with the musicians conducted in Havana. Wenders' film, also called Buena Vista Social Club, was released to critical acclaim, receiving an Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
nomination for Best Documentary feature
Academy Award for Documentary Feature
The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films.- Winners and nominees:Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year...
and winning numerous accolades including Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.
The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music
Latin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.-Biography:...
, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laud player Barbarito Torres
Barbarito Torres
thumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.
Social club
The Buena Vista Social Club members-only club was located in the populous MarianaoMarianao
Marianao is a town and municipality in the province of the city of Havana, Cuba, 6 miles southwest of the original city of Havana, with which it is connected by the Marianao railway. , the municipality had a population of 133,016. Marianao is on a range of hills about 1500 ft. above sea level,...
neighborhood, in Cuba's capital Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
. According to Juan Cruz, a former master of ceremonies
Master of Ceremonies
A Master of Ceremonies , or compere, is the host of a staged event or similar performance.An MC usually presents performers, speaks to the audience, and generally keeps the event moving....
at the Salon Rosado Benny Moré nightclub in Havana, the club was located "on Calle 41 between 46 and 48". When musicians Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.-Biography:...
and a film crew attempted to identify the location of the club in the 1990s, local people could not agree on where it had stood.
The club was run along the lines of a Cabildo
Cabildo (Cuba)
Cabildos de nación were African ethnic associations created in Cuba in the late 16th century based on the Spanish cofradías that were organized in Seville for the first time around the 14th century...
, a community cofradía (fraternity
Fraternal and service organizations
A "fraternal organization" or "fraternity" is a brotherhood, though the term usually connotes a distinct or formal organization. Please list college fraternities and sororities at List of social fraternities and sororities.-International:...
or guild
Guild
A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society...
) dating back to Spanish colonialism
Spanish colonization of the Americas
Colonial expansion under the Spanish Empire was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores and developed by the Monarchy of Spain through its administrators and missionaries. The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Christian faith through indigenous conversions...
. Cabildos in Cuba developed into Sociedades de Color, social clubs whose membership was determined by ethnicity
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
, at a time when slavery and racial discrimination against Afro-Cubans
Afro-Cubans
The Afro-Cubans were a latin jazz band founded by Machito in 1940; often billed as Machito and his Afro-Cubans. Their musical director, and an important musical innovator, was Mario Bauza, Machito's brother-in-law....
was institutionalized
Institutional racism
Institutional racism describes any kind of system of inequality based on race. It can occur in institutions such as public government bodies, private business corporations , and universities . The term was coined by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s...
. Sociedades de Negros (Black Societies) existed throughout Cuba, and Havana boasted a number of closely linked organizations including the Marianao
Marianao
Marianao is a town and municipality in the province of the city of Havana, Cuba, 6 miles southwest of the original city of Havana, with which it is connected by the Marianao railway. , the municipality had a population of 133,016. Marianao is on a range of hills about 1500 ft. above sea level,...
Social Club, Union Fraternal, Club Atenas—whose members included doctors and engineers—and the Buena Vista Social Club itself.
According to American guitarist Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
, Prominent musicians that performed at the club during the 1930s and 40s include bassist Cachao López
Cachao López
Israel "Cachao" López , often known as Cachao, was a Cuban musician and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s....
and bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
. Rodríguez's pianist Rubén González, who played piano on the 1990s recordings, described the 1940s as "an era of real musical life in Cuba, where there was very little money to earn, but everyone played because they really wanted to". The era saw the birth of the jazz influenced mambo, the charanga
Charanga
Charanga is a term given to traditional ensembles of Cuban dance music. They made Cuban dance music popular in the 1940s and their music consisted of heavily son-influenced material, performed on European instruments such as violin and flute by a Charanga orchestra....
, and dance forms such as the pachanga
Pachanga
- Music :In Cuba in 1955, Los Papines fused the violin-based music of charangas and the trumpet-based music of conjuntos Eduardo Davidson's La Pachanga , recorded by Orquesta Sublime, introduced Cuba to a Colombian dance...
and the cha-cha-cha, as well as the continued development of traditional Afro-Cuban
Afro-Cuban
The term Afro-Cuban refers to Cubans of Sub Saharan African ancestry, and to historical or cultural elements in Cuba thought to emanate from this community...
musical styles such as rumba
Cuban Rumba
In Cuban music, Rumba is a generic term covering a variety of musical rhythms and associated dances. The rumba has its influences in the music brought to Cuba by Africans brought to Cuba as slaves as well as Spanish colonizers...
and son, the latter transformed with the use of additional instruments by Arsenio Rodríguez to become son montuno
Son montuno
The son montuno is a style of the Cuban son, but exactly what it means is not an easy question to answer. The son itself is the most important genre of Cuban popular music. In addition, it is perhaps the most flexible of all forms of Latin-American music...
. Son, described as "the bedrock of Cuban music," has shaped much of twentieth-century Latin music, and had a strong impact on popular music, not only in Latin America, but also in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Closure of musical venues and changing traditions
Shortly after the Cuban RevolutionCuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
of 1959, newly elected Cuban President Manuel Urrutia Lleó
Manuel Urrutia Lleó
Manuel Urrutia Lleó was a liberal Cuban lawyer and politician. Urrutia campaigned against the Gerardo Machado government and the second presidency of Fulgencio Batista during the 1950s, before serving as president in the first revolutionary government of 1959...
, a devout Christian and liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, began a program of closing gambling outlets, nightclubs, and other establishments associated with Havana's hedonistic lifestyle. This had an immediate impact on the livelihoods of local entertainers. As the Cuban government rapidly shifted towards the left and an effort to build a "classless and colorblind society", it struggled to define policy toward forms of cultural expression in the black community; expressions which had implicitly emphasized cultural differences. Consequently, the cultural and social centers were abolished, including the Afro-Cuban mutual aid Sociedades de Color in 1962, to make way for racially integrated societies. Private festivities were limited to weekend parties and organizers' funds were confiscated. The measures meant the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. Although the Cuban government continued to support traditional music after the revolution, certain favor was given to the politically charged nueva trova
Nueva trova
Nueva trova is a movement in Cuban music that emerged around 1967/68 after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the consequent political and social changes....
, and poetic singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez is a Cuban musician, and a leader of the nueva trova movement.He is considered Cuba's best known folk singer and known for his highly eloquent and symbolic lyrics. Many of his songs have become classics in Latin American music, such as Ojalá, Playa Girón, Unicornio and...
and Pablo Milanés
Pablo Milanés
Pablo Milanés Arias is a Cuban singer-songwriter and guitar player. He studied at a conservatory in Havana. He is considered one of the founders of the Cuban nueva trova, along with Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola...
. The emergence of pop music and salsa
Salsa music
Salsa music is a genre of music, generally defined as a modern style of playing Cuban Son, Son Montuno, and Guaracha with touches from other genres of music...
, a style derived from Cuban music but developed in the United States, meant that son music became even less common.
Cuban music experienced quite radical change in the 1960s, as National Geographic notes:
Cuban dance music also witnessed dramatic change beginning in the late 1960s, as groups explored the fusion of Cuban son with American rock, jazz and funk styles. Groups such as Los Van Van and Irakere established modern forms of Cuban music, paving the way for new rhythms and dances to emerge as well as fresh concepts in instrumentation. ... Cuba's dance music had already inspired a change from the older son-style dances, as younger Cubans broke free of step-oriented dances...
The occurrence of these closures and the change in traditions is the simplest explanation of why many musicians were out of work, and why their style of music had declined before the Buena Vista Social Club made it popular again.
Album
In 1996, American guitarist Ry Cooder had been invited to Havana by British world musicWorld music
World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...
producer
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
Nick Gold of World Circuit Records
World Circuit (record label)
World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
to record a session where two African High-life musicians from Mali
Mali
Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
were to collaborate with Cuban musicians. On Cooder's arrival (via Mexico to avoid the ongoing U.S. trade and travel embargo against Cuba
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...
), it transpired that the musicians from Africa had not received their visas and were unable to travel to Havana. Cooder and Gold changed their plans and decided to record an album of Cuban son music with local musicians.
Already on board the African collaboration project were Cuban musicians including bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, guitarist Eliades Ochoa
Eliades Ochoa
Eliades Ochoa is a Cuban guitarist and singer from Loma de la Avispa, Songo La Maya in the east of the country near Santiago de Cuba....
and musical director Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
, who had himself been organizing a similar project for the Afro-Cuban All Stars. A search for additional musicians led the team to singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, pianist Rubén González and octogenarian singer Compay Segundo, who all agreed to record for the project.
Within three days of the project's birth, Cooder, Gold and de Marcos had organized a large group of performers and arranged for recording sessions to commence at Havana's EGREM
EGREM
is the oldest Cuban record label, it is located in Havana. It was founded in 1964 following the Cuban Revolution...
Studios, formerly owned by RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
records, where the equipment and atmosphere had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Communication between the Spanish and English speakers at the studio was conducted via an interpreter, although Cooder reflected that "musicians understand each other through means other than speaking".
The album was recorded in just six days and contained fourteen tracks; opening with "Chan Chan
Chan Chan (song)
"Chan Chan" is a son composition by Cuban bandleader Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, 'Juanita' and 'Chan Chan'. The song was one of Compay's last compositions and was written in 1987...
" written by Compay Segundo, a four chord son that was to become what Cooder described as "the Buena Vista's calling card"; and ending with a rendition of "La Bayamesa", a traditional Cuban patriotic song (not to be confused with the Cuban national anthem
National anthem
A national anthem is a generally patriotic musical composition that evokes and eulogizes the history, traditions and struggles of its people, recognized either by a nation's government as the official national song, or by convention through use by the people.- History :Anthems rose to prominence...
of the same name
La Bayamesa
El Himno de Bayamo is the national anthem of Cuba. It was first performed during the Battle of Bayamo in 1868. Perucho Figueredo, who took part in the battle, wrote and composed the song. The melody, also called La Bayamesa, was composed by Figueredo in 1867...
). The sessions also produced material for the subsequent release, Introducing... Rubén González, which showcased the work of the Cuban pianist.
One of the songs that featured on the album was "Buena Vista Social Club", a song written by bass player "Cachaíto"'s uncle, Israel López
Israel López
Israel López Hernández is a Mexican football player who plays for Querétaro FC.His former clubs include UNAM Pumas, Chivas de Guadalajara, and Cruz Azul, he has also played at international levelfor Mexico....
, who also wrote Pueblo Nuevo, track 4 on the album. The song spotlighted the piano work of Rubén González and it was recorded after Cooder heard González improvising around the tune's musical theme before a day's recording session. After playing the piece, González explained to Cooder the history of the social club and that the song was the club's "mascot tune". When searching for a name for the overall project, manager Nick Gold chose the song's title. According to Cooder,
Upon release on 17 September 1997, the CD became a huge "word of mouth hit", far beyond that of most world music releases. It sold more than five million copies and won a Grammy award in 1998. In 2003 it was listed by the New York based Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine as #260 in The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Musicians
Slide guitar
Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide refers to the motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides: the necks of glass bottles...
on several songs and helped produce and mix the album, afterwards describing the sessions as "the greatest musical experience of my life". Ry Cooder had been a successful American guitarist since the 1960s, recording with Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12...
and the Rolling Stones. Known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music
Traditional music
Traditional music is the term increasingly used for folk music that is not contemporary folk music. More on this is at the terminology section of the World music article...
led him to record music from diverse genres including Tex-Mex
Tejano music
Tejano music or Tex-Mex music is the name given to various forms of folk and popular music originating among the Mexican-American populations of Central and Southern Texas...
, Hawaiian
Music of Hawaii
The music of Hawaii includes an array of traditional and popular styles, ranging from native Hawaiian folk music to modern rock and hip hop. Hawaii's musical contributions to the music of the United States are out of proportion to the state's small size. Styles like slack-key guitar are well-known...
and Tuvan
Tuvans
Tuvans or Tuvinians are Turkic peoples living in southern Siberia. They are historically known as one of the Uriankhai, from the Mongolian designation...
throat singing
Overtone singing
Overtone singing, also known as overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.The partials of a sound wave made by the human voice can be...
. He was later prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act
Trading with the Enemy Act
The Trading with the Enemy Act, sometimes abbreviated as TWEA, is a United States federal law, , enacted in 1917 to restrict trade with countries hostile to the United States. The law gives the President the power to oversee or restrict any and all trade between the U.S. and its enemies in times of...
, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...
.
Many of the Cuban musicians who featured on the album were at their musical prime in the 1940s and 50s. After the success of the 1997 record they became known in Cuba as "Los Superabuelos" (the Super-Grandfathers). Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González
Juan de Marcos González is a Cuban bandleader and musician, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.-Biography:Resume....
, a Cuban folk revivalist who was younger than the bulk of performers introduced Cooder to veteran singer Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
. Ferrer (1927–2005) had been lead vocalist for bandleader Pacho Alonso
Pacho Alonso
Pacho Alonso was a Cuban singer and bandleader from Santiago de Cuba who is attributed with creating the musical form Pilón....
, and also sang for Beny Moré, Cuba's most prominent performer in the 1940s, before his soft singing style fell out of fashion. Having found the semi-retired seventy year old Ferrer taking his daily stroll on the streets of Havana and shining shoes for extra money, González signed him up for the project. Cooder later described the discovery as something that happens "perhaps once in your life", and Ferrer as "the Cuban Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles , known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. Although an accomplished pianist, he owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform in big band and jazz genres...
". Ferrer became a prominent member of the group, and the success of the record was attributed in part to the popularity of his vocal performances. The singer went on to record a number of successful solo records and performed with contemporary acts such as the Gorillaz
Gorillaz
Gorillaz is an English musical project created in 1998 by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. This project consists of Gorillaz music itself and an extensive fictional universe depicting a "virtual band" of cartoon characters...
before his death in 2005 at the age of 78.
Virtuoso pianist Rubén González (1919–2003) also had further success releasing two solo albums after working on the initial project. González was a pianist for bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
in the 1940s, and is attributed with helping establish Cuban piano styles that were to dominate Latin music for the remainder of the century. Despite suffering from arthritis and not even owning a piano at the time of recording with Cooder, (due to an infestation of termite
Termite
Termites are a group of eusocial insects that, until recently, were classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera , but are now accepted as the epifamily Termitoidae, of the cockroach order Blattodea...
s whilst living in South America) the American guitarist described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard". After the success of the 1997 record, González recorded and toured with bassist Orlando "Cachaito" López, who was the only musician to play on all of the songs on the Buena Vista Social Club album. "Cachaito" (1933–2009) was the son of multi-instrumentalist Orestes López
Orestes López
Orestes López was a Cuban musician and bandleader, often credited with popularizing the musical form Mambo, together with his brother Israel "Cachao" Lopez....
and the nephew of fellow bassist Israel "Cachao" López
Cachao López
Israel "Cachao" López , often known as Cachao, was a Cuban musician and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s....
, the brothers often attributed with inventing the mambo. Named after his prestigious uncle, "Cachaito" (little Cachao) was a leading Descarga musician in the 1950s and '60s, a musical form that takes its influence from modern jazz, and he became the ever present bassist at Buena Vista Social Club performances and recordings.
One of the first to come onboard the project was Compay Segundo (born Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz) (1907–2003), who at 89 years old was the oldest of the performers. During a discussion about politics, the veteran Segundo said: "Politics? This new guy [Fidel Castro] is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times."
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
voice including the self penned opening track, Chan Chan, with Eliades Ochoa as the leading voice. Cowboy hat
Cowboy hat
The cowboy hat is a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat best known as the defining piece of attire for the North American cowboy. Today it is worn by many people, and is particularly associated with ranch workers in the western and southern United States, western Canada and northern Mexico, with...
wearing Eliades Ochoa (b.1946), who had collaborated previously with Segundo and was a well established traditional Cuban folk performer, played guitar and sang for the group. Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo
Omara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
(b.1930), a bolero singer and the only female in the collective, sang "Veinte Años" on the record and duetted with Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer during live performances.
Other performers included singer Pío Leyva
Pío Leyva
Pío Leyva was a Cuban singer and the author of the well-known guaracha El Mentiroso . Leyva was part of the Buena Vista Social Club, and composed some of Cuba’s best known standards....
, (1917–2006) who had been working with Segundo since the early 1950s, and fellow and singer Manuel "Puntillita" Licea, (1927–2000), who had performed with Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz was a Cuban-American salsa singer, and was one of the most successful Salsa performers of the 20th century, having earned twenty-three gold albums...
and Benny Moré
Benny Moré
Benny Moré , or Beny, was a Cuban singer. He is often thought of as the greatest Cuban popular singer of all time. He was gifted with an innate musicality and fluid tenor voice which he colored and phrased with great expressivity...
. Additional improvised percussion was provided by Amadito Valdés
Amadito Valdés
Amadito Valdés is a Cuban percussionist, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.Valdés studied at the Havana Conservatoire and it was there that he began to develop his improvisational style on the timbales, mixing Afro rhythms in 6/8 time with the Cuban son syncopated rhythms in...
and Carlos González. The youngest established member of the group was Barbarito Torres
Barbarito Torres
thumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
, (b.1956) a virtuoso player of the laúd
Laúd
The word laúd is the Spanish word for lute. It is most commonly used to refer to a plectrum-plucked chordophone from Spain. It belongs to the cittern family of instruments. It has six double courses , similarly to the bandurria, but its neck is longer...
, a Cuban offshoot of the lute
Lute
Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
. Trumpet was provided by Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, (b. 1933) who went on to release solo records under the Buena Vista presents... title.
Film
Shortly after returning from Havana to record the Buena Vista Social Club album, Ry Cooder began working with German film director Wim WendersWim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
on the soundtrack to Wenders' film The End of Violence
The End of Violence
The End of Violence is a 1997 film by the German director Wim Wenders. The film's cast includes Bill Pullman, Gabriel Byrne, Traci Lind, Rosalind Chao, Andie MacDowell, and Loren Dean, among others. It also features a soundtrack marked with the signature sounds of Wenders regulars Jon Hassell, Ry...
, the third such collaboration between the two artists. According to Wenders, it was an effort to force Cooder to focus on the project, "He always sort of looked in the distance and smiled, and I knew he was back in Havana." Although Wenders knew nothing about Cuban music at the time, he became enthused by tapes of the Havana sessions provided by Cooder, and agreed to travel to the island to film the recording of Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer's first solo album, in 1998.
Wenders filmed the recording sessions on the recently enhanced format Digital Video
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
with the help of cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
Robert Müller, and then shot interviews with each "Buena Vista" ensemble member in different Havana locations. Wenders was also present to film the group's first performance with a full line-up in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 1999, and a second concert in Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, New York City.
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
, these scenes of "innocents abroad" were the film's most moving moments, as the contrasts between societies of Havana and New York become evident on the faces of the performers. Ferrer, from an impoverished background and staunchly anti consumerist
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
, was shown describing the city as "beautiful" and finding the experience overwhelming. Upon completion of filming, Wenders felt that the film "didn't feel really like it was a documentary anymore. It felt like it was a true character piece".
The film became a box office success, grossing $23,002,182 worldwide. Critics were generally enthusiastic about the story and especially the music, although leading U.S. film critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
and the British Film Institute's
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
Peter Curran felt that Wenders had lingered too long on Cooder during the performances; and the editing, which interspersed interviews with music, had disrupted the continuity of the songs. The film was nominated for an Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
for best documentary feature in 1999. It won best documentary at the European Film Awards and received seventeen other major accolades internationally.
Performances
The first performances by the full line up of "Buena Vista Social Club", including Cooder, were those filmed by Wenders in Amsterdam and New York. Other international shows and T.V. appearances soon followed with varying line ups. Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González performed together in Los Angeles in 1998 to an audience that included Alanis MorissetteAlanis Morissette
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, and actress. She has won 16 Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and also shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination...
, Sean Combs
Sean Combs
Sean John Combs , also known by his stage names Diddy and P. Diddy, is an American rapper, singer, record producer, actor, and entrepreneur. He has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards, and his clothing line earned a Council of Fashion Designers of America award. He was originally...
, and Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lynn Lopez is an American actress, singer, record producer, dancer, television personality, and fashion designer. Lopez began her career as a dancer on the television comedy program In Living Color. Subsequently venturing into acting, she gained recognition in the 1995 action-thriller...
, Ferrer dedicating the song Mami Me Gusto to the Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
Lopez.
Cuban exile
The term "Cuban exile" refers to the many Cubans who have sought alternative political or economic conditions outside the island, dating back to the Ten Years' War and the struggle for Cuban independence during the 19th century...
and Cuban American
Cuban American
A Cuban American is a United States citizen who traces his or her "national origin" to Cuba. Cuban Americans are also considered native born Americans with Cuban parents or Cuban-born persons who were raised and educated in US...
community, were rare after the release of the film due to the political climate. In the late 1990s, a concert by Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer.Gonzalo Julio Gonzalez Fonseca was born in Havana, Cuba, May 27, 1963, into a musical family rich in the traditions of the country’s artistic past...
turned into a near riot when concert goers were attacked and spat at by protesters opposed to the Cuban government
Opposition to Fidel Castro
The Cuban dissident movement is a political movement in Cuba whose aim is "to replace the current regime with a more democratic form of government". According to Human Rights Watch, the Cuban government represses nearly all forms of political dissent....
. When "Buena Vista" musicians played for a music industry conference at Miami Beach
Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter which separates the Beach from Miami city proper...
in 1998, hundreds of protesters chanted outside and the convention center hall was cleared briefly because of a bomb threat. In 1999, Ferrer and Ruben González were forced to cancel Miami shows citing fears for their safety after fellow-Cubans Los Van Van
Los Van Van
Los Van Van is a Cuban band led by bassist Juan Formell, it is one of the most recognized post-revolution Cuban bands, while Juan Formell has arguably become the most important figure in contemporary Cuban music....
drew 4,000 protesters at a previous show, and Compay Segundo was forced to cut short a 1999 Miami performance due to another bomb threat. When touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem
Per diem
Per diem refers to a specific amount of money that an organization allows an individual to spend per day, to cover living and traveling expenses in connection with work...
(transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the U.S. embargo. In 2001 a Buena Vista Social Club (with Ibrahim Ferrer) performance was recorded in Austin for PBS and broadcasted on Austin City Limits in 2002.
"Buena Vista Social Club" continue to tour throughout the world as Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, and despite the deaths of six of the original members, the collective performs with many of the remaining ensemble members including Barbarito Torres and "Guajiro" Mirabal. Ry Cooder's guitar parts are handled by Manuel Galbán, a former member of Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros
Los Zafiros
Los Zafiros were a Cuban close-harmony vocal group working from 1961–1970. The group was part of the filín movement, inspired by American doo-wop groups such as The Platters...
, who played on Ibrahim Ferrer's first solo record with Cooder and appeared in Wim Wenders' film. Following a 2007 performance in London, a reviewer at The Independent described the ensemble as "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person", adding, "It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
Impact and analysis
The international success of the Buena Vista Social Club generated a revival of interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American musicLatin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
as a whole. Musical director Juan de Marcos felt that the recordings serve "as a symbol of the power of Cuban music, and which to a certain degree have contributed to Cuban music regaining the status it always had in Latin American and world music."
Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry
Tourism in Cuba
Tourism in Cuba attracts over 2 million people a year, and is one of the main sources of revenue for the island. With its favorable climate, beaches, colonial architecture and distinct cultural history, Cuba has long been an attractive destination for tourists...
of the late 1990s benefited from this rebirth of interest. According to The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
, "In the tourist quarters of Old Havana
Old Havana
Old Havana contains the core of the original city of Havana. The positions of the original Havana city walls are the modern boundaries of Old Havana....
it can seem at times as if every Cuban with a guitar has come out to sing the songs that Buena Vista made famous. It's as if you were to go to Liverpool and find bands singing Beatles songs on every street corner." Although the songs Buena Vista sings are not their own compositions, but actually they sing some popular songs in Cuba, which people have always performed in the street. Despite the appeal of the "Buena Vista" ambience to tourists, Cubans themselves were less aware of the "Buena Vista Social Club" than international music listeners. This was due to the foreign nature of the production, and the dominance of modern Timba
Timba
Timba is a Cuban genre of music sometimes referred as salsa cubana . However, the historical development of timba has been quite independent of the development of salsa in the United States and Puerto Rico and the music has its own trademark aspects due to the Cuban embargo and strong Afro-Cuban...
, Songo
Songo music
Songo is a type of Cuban music originating in Havana which combines elements from the rumba, son Cubano, and other contemporary afro-American styles like jazz and funk...
and other musical forms on the island, such as reggaetón
Reggaeton
Reggaeton is a form of Puerto Rican and Latin American urban and Caribbean music. After its mainstream exposure in 2004, it spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton originated in Puerto Rico but is also has roots from Reggae en Español from Panama and Puerto Rico and...
by luminaries such as Raul Zeballos, the creator of the genre. Some explain that Buena Vista did not impact the Cuban audience, as they were not creating anything new; they were just playing the same songs that Cubans know and have been playing for many years.
Mari Marques, a Cuban American who leads cultural tours to Cuba, contests that the preponderance of traditional musicians was not solely a consequence of the "Buena Vista Social Club". Marques believes the notion that some music had been completely neglected in Cuba is "a romantic exaggeration that was propagated by U.S. media coverage", and the reality is that son trios have existed "everywhere in cities such as Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba
Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city of Cuba and capital city of Santiago de Cuba Province in the south-eastern area of the island, some south-east of the Cuban capital of Havana....
in the east of the island." British world music record label Tumi Music
Tumi Music
Tumi Music is a UK independent record label well-known for its Latin American , Peruvian music, and pan pipe music.Famous for releasing the CD Lamento Negro that won the Latin Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for Susana Baca in 2002.- Artists:* Afro Cuban All Stars* Andy Gola* Aragon * Buena Vista...
, who had worked with de Marcos and many of the ensemble musicians prior to Cooder, asserted that Cuba has over 50,000 musicians, all as good as, and some as old as the "Buena Vista" participants, "but these people hardly ever have the opportunity to share their talents with the outside world." The label lamented that, "for the West to pay any real attention and consume the product, you needed someone like Ry Cooder to give it a stamp of approval first."
Writer and academic Mike Gonzalez
Mike Gonzalez (historian)
Mike Gonzalez is a British historian and literary critic, who was Professor of Latin American Studies in the Hispanics Department of the University of Glasgow.He has written widely on Latin America...
believes the ensemble provoked a backward glance to "timeless, sensual places where dreams and desire merged in a comfortable, evocative music". Gonzalez asserts that the aura evoked did not represent "the real Cuba" before the revolution of 1959, nor Cuba in the modern era, but that the Cuban government were happy for the tourist industry to "enjoy the fruits of this confusion". The American Historical Review
American Historical Review
The American Historical Review is the official publication of the American Historical Association, established in 1895 "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research." It targets readers...
suggested that the Buena Vista Social Clubs mise en scène
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
fueled nostalgic, idealistic feelings not only of many Americans and Cubans in the United States who remember the Havana of the 1950s, but also of Cubans in Cuba. The result was a reminiscence about the pre-revolutionary era—dominated by the politics of Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado y Morales was President of Cuba and a general of the Cuban War of Independence...
in the 1920s–30s and then General Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....
until 1959—which "no longer seems so bad".
Discography
- Buena Vista Social ClubBuena Vista Social Club (album)- Music :"Chan Chan", the first song on the album, is a Cuban song composition by Compay Segundo, revolving around two central characters, Juanita and Chan Chan. The song was one of Segundo's last compositions and was written in 1987, already having been recorded by Segundo himself various...
(16 September 1997). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. - Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall (14 October 2008). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.
Other releases
The below discography includes solo albums released since the first Buena Vista Social Club album that feature the musicians in the ensemble, and that are considered to be under the "Buena Vista Social Club" aegis.- Rubén González
- Introducing... Rubén GonzálezIntroducing...Rubén GonzálezIntroducing...Ruben Gonzalez is the debut studio album by Afro-Cuban pianist Rubén González. It was released on September 16, 1997 through World Circuit Records...
(17 September 1997). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
/AsylumAsylum RecordsAsylum Records is an American record label founded in 1971 by David Geffen, and partner Elliot Roberts, who had previously worked as agents at the William Morris Agency. Founded specifically to provide a record contract for Jackson Browne, the label signed Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell...
.(Guest Musicians include Ry Cooder, Manuel Galbán, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez and Manuel "El Guajiro" Mirabal.) - Chanchullo (17 September 2000). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
.(Guest musicians include Joachim Cooder, Eliades Ochoa, Ibrahim Ferrer and Amadito Valdés.)
- Introducing... Rubén González
- Barbarito TorresBarbarito Torresthumb|Barbarito Torres.Bárbaro Alberto Torres Delgado, best known as Barbarito Torres , is a Cuban musician best known for his work with the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club. Torres plays the laúd, a traditional Cuban instrument of the lute family that is most associated with...
- Havana Cafe (6 April 1999). Atlantic RecordsAtlantic RecordsAtlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...
.(Guest musicians include Manuel "El Guajiro" Mirabal, Ibrahim Ferrer, Pío Leyva and Omara .)
- Havana Cafe (6 April 1999). Atlantic Records
- Ibrahim FerrerIbrahim FerrerIbrahim Ferrer was a popular Afro-Cuban singer and musician in Cuba. He performed with many musical groups including the Conjunto Sorpresa, Orquesta Chepin-Choven and Afro-Cuban All Stars...
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer (8 June 1999). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest Musicians include Rubén González, Ry Cooder, Manuel Galbán, and Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez.) - Buenos Hermanos (18 March 2003). Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest musicians include Ry Cooder, Manuel Galbán, and Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez.) - Mi Sueño (26 Mar 2007). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
.(Guest musicians include Orlando "Cachaíto" López, Manuel Galbán, Rubén González, Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, Omara , Amadito Valdés.)
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Ibrahim Ferrer (8 June 1999). World Circuit
- Eliades OchoaEliades OchoaEliades Ochoa is a Cuban guitarist and singer from Loma de la Avispa, Songo La Maya in the east of the country near Santiago de Cuba....
- Sublime Illusion (29 June 1999). Higher OctaveHigher OctaveHigher Octave is a sub-label imprint of Narada Productions, which is part of EMI's Blue Note Records label group, located in New York.Higher Octave was founded in 1986 as an independent record label specializing in a wide variety of uplifting music, including smooth jazz, New Age music, Latin music...
.(Guest musicians include Ry Cooder.)
- Sublime Illusion (29 June 1999). Higher Octave
- Omara PortuondoOmara PortuondoOmara Portuondo Peláez is a Cuban singer and dancer whose career has spanned over half a century. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and has performed with Ignacio Piñeiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragón, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Álvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista...
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Omara (25 April 2000). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest musicians include Pío Leyva, Rubén González, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, Eliades Ochoa, Compay Segundo and Amadito Valdés.) - Flor de Amor (25 May 2004). World CircuitWorld Circuit (record label)World Circuit is a world-music record label that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album...
/ Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest musicians include Barbarito Torres, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez and Manuel Galbán.)- Orlando "Cachaito" López
- Cachaito (22 May 2001). ElektraElektra RecordsElektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
/AsylumAsylum RecordsAsylum Records is an American record label founded in 1971 by David Geffen, and partner Elliot Roberts, who had previously worked as agents at the William Morris Agency. Founded specifically to provide a record contract for Jackson Browne, the label signed Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell...
.(Guest musicians include Juan de Marcos González, Amadito Valdés and Ibrahim Ferrer.)
- Amadito Valdés
Amadito ValdésAmadito Valdés is a Cuban percussionist, best known for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club.Valdés studied at the Havana Conservatoire and it was there that he began to develop his improvisational style on the timbales, mixing Afro rhythms in 6/8 time with the Cuban son syncopated rhythms in...
- Bajando Gervasio (10 December 2002). Primienta Records.(Guest musicians include Barbarito Torres.)
- Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal (4 January 2005).Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
.(Guest musicians include Ibrahim Ferrer, Pío Leyva, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, Omara , Juan de Marcos González and Manuel Galbán.)
- Various artists
- Rhythms del Mundo: CubaRhythms del MundoRhythms del Mundo is a nonprofit collaborative album, which fuses an all-star cast of Cuban musicians including Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo of the Buena Vista Social Club with tracks from US, UK and Irish artists such as Dido, Arctic Monkeys, U2, Coldplay, Sting, Jack Johnson, Maroon 5,...
(14 November 2006). Hip-O(musicians include Ibrahim Ferrer, Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, Barbarito Torres, Amadito Valdés, Omara performing alongside ColdplayColdplayColdplay are a British alternative rock band formed in 1996 by lead vocalist Chris Martin and lead guitarist Jonny Buckland at University College London. After they formed Pectoralz, Guy Berryman joined the group as a bassist and they changed their name to Starfish. Will Champion joined as a...
, Arctic MonkeysArctic MonkeysArctic Monkeys are an English indie rock band. Formed in 2002 in High Green, a suburb of Sheffield, the band currently consists of Alex Turner , Jamie Cook , Nick O'Malley and Matt Helders...
, DidoDido (singer)Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong , known as Dido, is an English singer-songwriter.Dido shot to worldwide success with her debut album, No Angel...
, Quincy JonesQuincy JonesQuincy Delightt Jones, Jr. is an American record producer and musician. A conductor, musical arranger, film composer, television producer, and trumpeter. His career spans five decades in the entertainment industry and a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend...
, Kaiser ChiefsKaiser ChiefsKaiser Chiefs are an English indie rock band from Leeds who formed in 1996. They were named after the South African football club Kaizer Chiefs....
, RadioheadRadioheadRadiohead are an English rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke , Jonny Greenwood , Ed O'Brien , Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway .Radiohead released their debut single "Creep" in 1992...
, U2U2U2 are an Irish rock band from Dublin. Formed in 1976, the group consists of Bono , The Edge , Adam Clayton , and Larry Mullen, Jr. . U2's early sound was rooted in post-punk but eventually grew to incorporate influences from many genres of popular music...
and Jack JohnsonJack Johnson (musician)Jack Johnson was born May 18, 1975 is an American folk rock singer-songwriter, surfer and musician known for his work in the soft rock and acoustic genres. In 2001, he achieved commercial success after the release of his debut album, Brushfire Fairytales. He has since released four more albums, a...
.)
See also
- AnacaonaAnacaona (all-girl band)Anacaona is the name of an all-girl orchestra, founded in 1930s Havana by Cuchito Castro and her sisters. Eventually, all 11 sisters joined the band. The band was formed during the Machado era when the political situation led to university closings, forcing Cuchito Castro to abandon her studies and...
- Tropicana ClubTropicana ClubTropicana is a world known cabaret and club in Havana, Cuba. It was launched in 1939 at Villa Mina, a six-acre suburban estate with lush tropical gardens in Havana's Marianao neighborhood.-Influence:...
- Marcelino GuerraMarcelino GuerraMarcelino Guerra, also known as "Rapindey" was a Cuban singer and songwriter who spent much of his life in the United States. His primary role was as a segunda voz, or harmony, singer....
- Afro-LatinosAfro-Latin AmericanAn Afro-Latin American is a Latin American person of at least partial Black African ancestry; the term may also refer to historical or cultural elements in Latin America thought to emanate from this community...
- List of topics related to Black and African people
- Afro-Cuban All Stars
- Buena VistaBuena VistaBuena Vista, meaning "good view" in Spanish, may refer to:*Buena Vista , a Walt Disney trademark*Buena Vista Social Club , a Cuban music club plus an album and film inspired by the club...
Further reading
- Wenders, Wim and Wenders, Donata: Buena Vista Social Club: The Book of the Film. Wim Wenders, Donata Wenders. Thames & Hudson Ltd. (Mar 2000). ISBN–10: 050028220X
- Roy, Maya: Cuban Music: From Son and Rumba to the Buena Vista Social Club and Timba Cubana. Wiener (Markus) Publishing Inc. (May 2002). ISBN–10: 1558762825
External links
- Buena Vista Social Club website.
- Buena Vista Social Club on World Circuit Records.
- Buena Vista Social Club biography at Nonesuch Records.
- Buena Vista Social Club site on PBS
- Billboard review of Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall
- "Ten Years After...Looking Back at the Buena Vista Social Club" by Ted Gioia (Jazz.com)
- Anacaona
- Orlando "Cachaito" López
- Buena Vista Social Club Presents: Omara (25 April 2000). World Circuit
