Comes a highly detailed, simpatico, intelligent article on the state of Cuban music (and Cuban life) in the year 2008
If this were a music video, it would start in this living room in Havana, with a tight shot of the skinny kid in the white tank top at the keyboard. He counts it off from four, and with a sort of animal ease, his fingers fly, and a montuno rhythm swells through the dented amp, surging until the drummer can't help joining in with the five-beat clave that is the backbone of all music here. And then the camera swings to the timbalero with a pink star dyed into his fade, cracking into the rhythm, and here comes the bass player--whose father and grandfather were famous singers with Orquesta Aragón--now he's thumping the ones and threes. This thing is really moving now; the horns punch in, and the camera pans across the room to the three singers by the door, with Oscar in the middle, improvising over a chorus in that high, almost nasal cant of the salsero. The camera would follow the cables from the cramped room--13 Cuban musicians jammed in a room that wouldn't fit five Americans!--out to the porch, where the roadies and techs are busy tweaking something on the big mixer because all the gear is a mix of decent parts and horrible parts, quarter-inch cables held together with used tape, Roland keyboards wobbling on rusted stands.
Here's where the camera would pan way out, from that house in the Santo Suárez neighborhood, downhill past the official state recording studio, past the House of Music on Neptune Street, catching everyone's hips as it goes, until the whole crumbling metropolis is swaying to this montuno, all the way down to the Malecón on the sea, where the world's most humid block party unfolds on the esplanade, the way it does every evening of the summer, just across the Florida Straits from the big enemigo.
That way, the video could end on one of those sly gibes that made Cuban salsa the most heroic art form on the island through the 1990s. To pan the camera toward the Florida Straits is to raise a question that can't be asked out loud: Is this the year for change? Quizás, they say in Cuba: maybe.
It's written by Nathan Thornburgh, an American who spent time in Cuba as a musician, and who knows his stuff. Thanks to Michelle for sending me the link.
