Recovering Old Cuban Sound

HAVANA —  The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon--perhaps the biggest surprise to hit popular music in years--would not have happened without American guitarist Ry Cooder, who decided to record an album with a group of aging Cuban musicians, or German director Wim Wenders, who figured those musicians would be great subjects for a movie. But it also certainly would not have happened without Juan de Marcos.

It was de Marcos, an established Cuban bandleader, who scoured the streets of Havana and other Cuban cities for the all-but-forgotten singers and instrumentalists. It was he who persuaded them to make music again, brought them into the studio and later launched them on their lucrative worldwide tours.

“If you want to sell something, you have to create a myth,” said de Marcos, a 45-year-old with graying dreadlocks. “The story that a white guy came to Cuba to discover these musicians, this music--it’s very comfortable. But it’s a myth. We don’t need any American to come here and discover us.”

De Marcos said the success of Buena Vista astounded everyone involved.

“Man, you just never know what people are going to want to listen to,” he said, lighting another in the unbroken chain of cigarettes he smokes after first tearing the filters off.

It turned out that people in vast numbers wanted to listen to the honeyed music of pre-revolutionary Cuba, the spicy son and the sweet bolero. Since its release in 1997, the “Buena Vista Social Club” album has sold about a million copies in the United States, according to Soundscan, and many more worldwide. The film of the same name, with its haunting images of Havana and its revealing glimpses into the musicians’ lives, also was an unexpected hit.

For such subtle and elegant music, from such a different time and place, to do so well in the hype-driven American market is extraordinary.

“In terms of the impact, one thing that’s often overlooked is just the quality of the music,” said Anthony DeCurtis, a New York-based writer who has followed trends in popular music for decades. “It has that quality of opening up a time capsule and finding strange things from an earlier period, perfectly preserved.”

DeCurtis said he believed the “Buena Vista” album came at just the right moment--a time when American listeners had begun to turn to “world music” in a search for authenticity, and when interest in Latin American culture, especially that of Cuba, was on an upswing. It helped immensely, he said, that the music was “perfectly packaged for the American market” by Cooder and Wenders.

Ibrahim Ferrer, the Buena Vista singer whose satin-smooth tenor reminded Cooder of Nat King Cole, has sold more than 300,000 copies of his solo album in the United States and, according to de Marcos, nearly 1 million worldwide. Octogenarian pianist Ruben Gonzalez, singer Omara Portuondo, lute player Barbarito Torres, guitarist Eliades Ochoa and nonagenarian guitarist Compay Segundo--seen in Wenders’ film wearing a slouch hat, smoking cigars and boasting of his virility--also have solo albums in the record stores.

In addition to the new recordings, almost all of the Buena Vista artists are on tour this summer, mostly in Europe, in various permutations.

(Torres is opening for Cesaria Evora at the Greek Theatre on June 30; Segundo is slated for the John Anson Ford Theatre on Aug. 31; and Portuondo is headlining the Salsa & Latin Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl on Oct. 7.)

Their success has helped fuel interest in other kinds of music from Cuba, including the supercharged salsa known as timba brava.

“There’s a real boom in Cuban music now, and it’s basically all due to the old guys in the Buena Vista Social Club,” said Nestor Mili, who publishes and edits a magazine called Tropicana Internacional that covers the Cuban music scene. “It’s turned into big business. Compay Segundo filled a soccer stadium recently in Colombia--and he’s 93 years old!”

De Marcos said that Ferrer, with his share of the royalties from the Buena Vista album and the success of his own CD, has become a millionaire--Cuban musicians are now free to keep the money they earn, after paying a 15% fee to a government office, somewhat analogous to an agent’s commission.

“Right now, Ibrahim Ferrer is like Frank Sinatra,” de Marcos said.

Ferrer has moved from the run-down apartment shown in the film and now lives in a larger apartment in central Havana, de Marcos said. He and the others can now afford cars, cell phones, nicer clothes.

De Marcos speaks of Cooder’s role in the boom with much appreciation and not a hint of rancor. Cooder, a slide guitarist with a golden ear for music from other lands, had the name recognition that was needed to open the door to the U.S. market, and his musical ideas were vital in shaping the Buena Vista record.

A Search Began

for the Musicians

This is how the phenomenon started: De Marcos, a civil engineer by training but a musician by calling, was leading a band called Sierra Maestra that turned its back on salsa and looked toward older, softer Cuban sounds. For years, he said, he had dreamed of bringing back some of the old stars and teaming them with younger musicians to record a kind of tribute to Cuban music.

Then de Marcos began doing business with Nick Gold, the British owner of a record label called World Circuit. Gold liked the idea of a tribute album, so de Marcos and his wife went to work finding the musicians.

“It wasn’t really all that hard,” he said--these men and women had once been famous, and people knew where they were. Ferrer, as the movie famously points out, was indeed shining shoes for a living when de Marcos came calling.

So in March 1996, de Marcos brought them into the studio and recorded an album called “The Afro-Cuban All-Stars.” It was retro but with a big, brassy, downtown-Havana sound.

Enter Cooder, who also knew and had worked with Gold. Cooder was coming to Havana to record a fusion album involving some musicians from Cuba and some from West Africa. When the Africans didn’t show, Gold sent him over to the studio where de Marcos had his all-star musicians assembled.

It was Gold and Cooder, de Marcos said, who had the inspired idea to make the Buena Vista album gentler and more acoustic, like the music of Cuba’s slow-paced eastern provinces. Musicians Ochoa and Segundo were brought in especially for the Buena Vista recording session.

De Marcos, a tall and garrulous man, is not invisible in Wenders’ film. He is seen both in the studio and onstage, and he appears to be vaguely in charge. His role, though, is never really spelled out.

For a while after the Buena Vista explosion, he was trying to manage the musical and worldly affairs of four interlocking but separate bands--the Buena Vista Social Club, Gonzalez’s ensemble, de Marcos’ old band Sierra Maestra, and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars. Recently, he dropped his day-to-day involvement with all but the All-Stars, who earlier this year released their second album, “Distinto, Diferente.” His Buena Vista proceeds, plus the money he makes from the successful All-Stars recordings and concert dates, have made him much richer.

De Marcos studied engineering because his father, a musician, did not want his son to have to spend his life scraping together a meager living. De Marcos said he dimly recalls the days before the revolution when his father would “play all night for just a couple of pesos.” But de Marcos studied guitar anyway and fell in love with the American funk groups of the 1970s. He was a university student when he discovered the rich heritage of Cuban music.

De Marcos hopes to ride the Buena Vista wave to ownership of his own record label.

“Right now, we are in the boom,” he said, “but I think the boom will be over in about one year. Still, we are going to recover the place we had in the old days, which is that people in the United States have the option to listen to Cuban music, just like any other music.

“America needs Cuban music. And we need America.”

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* The “Buena Vista Social Club” movie will be telecast on PBS July 19.