Afro-Cuban All Stars – Land of the rising son
For six decades Puntillita has continued to sing; it’s all he’s ever done. Onstage in St. Louis, he becomes a godless cantor, his zoot suit glowing, his voice a powerful blend of male and female tones, urged out across the years and, as they say in Spanish, oblivion. We don’t associate that kind of existential sound with dance music, but there he is onstage, in a country that represents all the freedom in the world — yet forbids the direct import of his music — singing a song about the girl who broke his heart:
Country girl, son calls you
To dance, to joy
The first song on The Afro-Cuban All Stars’ first recording, “Amor Verdadero”, is a tune made popular in Puntillita’s heyday, but it had not been recorded in Cuba for 40 years. It’s the story of a man who falls in love, loses, and winds up drunk, doped up and in jail:
My friends abandoned me
Only my mother wept
She prayed to God
She begged him to save her only son
By the end of the song, the singer has been stripped of everything, and has only one recourse from the “darkness of evil”: his mother. Only in bluegrass music are mothers — their healing, security, and unconditional love — so deeply celebrated as they are in son.
Of all the emotional moments during the Afro-Cuban All Stars spring U.S. tour, the nightly duets between Puntillita and Teresa Garcia Caturla held the most sweetness. Teresita, as she is known, has long been the director of the female a cappella group Cuarteto de’Aida, and her career is distinguished by her having been the only female member of the definitive ’70s son group Estrellas de Arieto.
“I come from a family of musicians in Villa Clara province of Cuba,” Teresita says. “My father was a well-known musician in Cuba, and he came from an aristocratic family in a town called Remedios. He married my mother, a black woman, and so my lineage is a mixture of Spanish and African, the white and the mulatto.”
On the phone from Havana, she speaks of astrology, her neighborhood in El Vedado zone of Havana, and the “music which is the same as life” in Cuba. “What’s most important is that our music has penetrated the younger generation,” she says. “We may be a bunch of older musicians, but the kids dance to us too! And this is important because the younger generation, born after the Revolution, has created their own music, but our music still speaks to them. I don’t understand politics, I’m not a political person, but the music that was lost to the younger generation after the Revolution, well, we’ve helped recover that music and return it to Cuba. It’s our culture, our music, after all.”
With the advent of recording and radio in the 1920 and ’30s, son moved from the countryside to the city: Havana. The capital of Cuba became one of the most important musical cities in the world, and it remained that way until the Revolution of 1959. It’s not that the music stopped in Havana. Not hardly. But the nation’s ability to market, develop and finance son was curtailed. Concerts, clubs, and especially music schools flourished after the Revolution. Exports did not.
Amadito Valdes, percussionist extraordinaire and chief timbalero for the Afro-Cuban All Stars, remembers those days. “We had no promotion and we lost a market,” he says. “In fact, this was the cause for the creation of the salsa movement, which initially was really Cuban music with a different name. But all the while in Cuba the music grew, music schools developed, and talents of all kinds developed. But fewer and fewer people knew.”
In Wim Wenders’ film documentary of the Buena Vista Social Club, Valdes describes his music: “In the field of percussion, the timbale is a very limited instrument. So the person who plays it must have a sense of how to make the imagination dance.” In the ’60s and ’70s, Valdes recorded with Paquito d’Rivera, the Bene More Orchestra, and Cuarteto D’Aida. More recently he has appeared on albums by Irish ensemble the Chieftains and Mexican rap group Control Machete.
“I come from a musical family,” Valdes begins, just as every Cuban musician begins. “My father, with whom I share my name, was a well-known saxophonist and clarinetist in the ’30s until the ’80s. He was one of the pioneers in jazz orchestras in Cuba. I began to pursue percussion after studying with a great musician, Alfredo de los Reyes, who now lives in California. This happened in the ’60s. After he left for the United States, I studied in the conservatory with Fausto Garcia and Domingo Aragu. I was finally reunited with Alfredo de los Reyes during the Cuba-United States Bridge activities, a meeting of U.S. and Cuban musicians, and we worked together on a recording with Lisa Loeb and a Cuban singer, Kiki Corona.”
By linking traditional and contemporary Cuban dance music, the Afro-Cuban All Stars have forged nothing like a single identifiable sound. Rather, from song to song they sound like different bands altogether, although Valdes’s rhythmic drive is a constant, as are the voices of Licea and Caturla. “For me a record is like a novel,” Juan de Marcos says. “It has chapters, and each chapter has to be distinct, but there also has to be an overall unity.”
Although recordings by the All Stars and the rest of the Buena Vista cadre are yet not available for sale in Cuba, Gonzalez believes they have influenced Cuban culture. “The records are played on the radio, and so everyone knows them,” he says. “There’s been a change in the language of the young music. Too much American influence in Cuban music is not a good thing, just as it would be a bad thing if Cuban music overly influenced American music.”
The success of the All Stars albums has allowed Gonzalez to found his own record label and production company, Ahora, which will be releasing solo projects from Licea and a younger sonero, Felix Valoy.