The Afro-Cuban All Stars, an orchestra devoted to promoting the complete story of Cuban music, will perform at the Landmark in Port Washington on April 29.
Bandleader Juan de Marcos González, originally from Cuba, said although he’s played in Port Washington before he plans too bring his audience something new.
“I’m going to bring to my audience my new, Cuban music, and hope people enjoy it,” said González, the Buena Vista Social Club founder and bandleader. “I think the community is going to appreciate the diversity of the music, and people normally dance at my shows.”
The 14-piece big band is one of the best-known and most successful Cuban orchestras performing today, according to the official press release for the Afro Cuban All Stars 2016 tour. “For more than 20 years the ensemble captures the undeniable spirit of Afro Cuban music with a potent mix of driving percussion, a powerhouse horn section, piano, bass, tres, guitar and incomparable vocals.”
González said each and every performance is unique and dynamic designed the audience, in each show.
The current line-up consists of the finest Cuban expatriate musicians in the world today, all alumni of Cuba’s greatest bands, according to the official press release for the Afro Cuban All Stars 2016 tour.
The Afro-Cuban All Stars performance pays tribute to Cuba’s popular music marrying the past with the present.
“The impact of Buena Vista Social Club, The Afro-Cuban All Stars’ A Toda Cuba Le Gusta and Introducing Ruben González, three albums recorded by a small independent label with a modest budget in Havana in two weeks in March and April of 1996, can still be felt,” according to the official press release for the Afro Cuban All Stars 2016 tour.
Those recordings helped reintroduce the classic sound of popular Cuban music to the world, transcending long-standing, and by then already obsolete, political prohibitions and anticipating the re-establishment of relations between the two countries by two decades.
In the process, it also made global stars of a group of old but brilliant musicians, some of whom had been forgotten even back in Cuba.
The musical director of those sessions was Juan de Marcos Grammy-winning composer, arranger, producer, bandleader, entrepreneur and tres player, ‘The Quincy Jones of Cuban music,’ as Songlines, the authoritative world music magazine, once dubbed him.
Last year, González conducted a semester-long residency at the Art Institute at the University of Wisconsin Madison all while also continuing to tour and record with his Afro-Cuban All Stars.
Over the years, the band evolved from an ensemble showcasing musicians from older generations to a combination of youth and experience. While the Cuban music tradition remains the core of his work, González, who splits his time between Mexico, the United States and Cuba, continues incorporating new elements to his music.
He said he spends his time working with rappers as part of his program in Wisconsin, and adding to his ensemble non-standard instruments in Afro-Cuban music, such as vibraphone and bass clarinet, performed by daughters GliceriaAdreu, a classical pianist and orchestra conductor, and Laura Lydia.
Discussing the anniversary of the Buena Vista Social Club sessions, González said he’s still surprised at their impact.
“We never thought that recordings made for cultural reasons might have any relevance commercially,” he said. “The idea of those sessions was to pay tribute to the creators and the sound of Cuban music in the 1950s, what I consider the golden age of Cuban music.”
González said he was once a rocker who was kicked out of the Havana Conservatory after two years for being “a bit undisciplined.”
After that, he didn’t think he was going to dedicate himself to music. His father Marcos, a singer and player who had worked with several groups including the great Arsenio Rodríguez’ Septeto Boston, wasn’t keen on the idea of his son being a professional musician.
“He wanted me to be in a ‘real’ profession. He wanted me to be an engineer, a doctor or a lawyer,” González said. “And I wanted to please him.”
González studied at the Universidad Agraria de La Habana, graduating as an Agricultural Engineer in 1980. For the next ten years he was in the faculty of the university, writing science books and researching, but music was never far. He finished his studies on guitar and Cuban tres at the Ignacio Cervantes Conservatory and took a course on orchestration and conducting at Goldsmith College in London.
As a youngster, González listened to and played rock “something that was not well seen those days,” he said.
He said he remembers playing covers of groups such as King Crimson, Cream, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jethro Tull and Yes.
“Despite my passion for rock and R & B, I also listened to a lot of Cuban classics,” González said.
In 1976, while at the university, he said he decided to form a group “that would break all the established canons” and so he created Sierra Maestra, a band dedicated to recreating the sound of traditional Cuban music and the old, classic septets.
“It was a pretty ‘punk’ thing to do, getting a group of young kids to play son,” he said. “And from then on, we started to play Cuban music.”
González continued his academic career, working on his thesis and receiving a Ph.D in Agricultural Engineering from the Gidromeliorativny Institute in Moscow, Russia, in 1990.
In March that year, his father died.
“Three months later, I was working in music full time,” he said.
Sierra Maestra not only deeply reconnected him to the great tradition, he said, but led to the Buena Vista Social Club recordings.
In the 1990s, González found Nick Gold, founder and president of World Circuit, a small London-based label, an interested and enterprising partner.
González said the success of Sierra Maestra´s Dundunbanza released by Gold´s company, opened the door to an even more ambitious project.
He said the initial idea was to record two albums, one utilizing the Cuban big band format with period orchestrations, which became The Afro-Cuban All Stars´ A Toda Cuba Le Gusta. The other was going to be an acoustic recording, “a tribute to the Cuban music of the 1930s and 40s, evoking the sound of Eastern Cuba, more laid back.”
The album, produced by guitarist Ry Cooder, who also played in it, was eventually named after one of the songs selected – Buena Vista Social Club.
“Everybody fell in love with the playing of Rubén González, and because we had a little extra money, we could record him too. I wrote the arrangements right there in the studio,” González said.
A pianist with a rich musical history, González was by then retired. He said he didn’t even owned a piano.
The unplanned CD, Introducing Ruben González, became a best seller.
For González, the Havana sessions were not just a musical but a personal project.
He said that music was partly a tribute to his father and to those great musicians who created it and kept it alive, such as Francisco Repilado, also known as Compay Segundo.
“I used to go to Compay’s house all the time. The first guitar my father bought me as a kid he bought it from Compay. It was an old guitar,” he said. “After his wife died he didn’t have anybody to make him coffee so in the morning, when he was up, he would knock on the wall to let my mother know and she would prepare him coffee. And when it was ready, she would knock on the wall and they would come out to the balconies, which were side by side, and he would get his coffee and they would chat.”
Of that music and those deep personal relationships, he said a global hit was made.
“I believe those recordings are the best-selling albums by Cuban artists, except for Gloria Estefan and she is pop,” he said. “Recordings of traditional Cuban music, selling 12 million copies worldwide? Unthinkable. And inside the country, those recordings reminded a young generation of Cubans of our musical history. Many young artists and groups, hip hop bands, rappers, began to incorporate traditional elements to their music. Unfortunately, for political reasons, Cuban music lost its place in the marketplace for many years. But that wealth of music is still there. And with the Afro-Cuban All Stars we try to present it all. Our concerts are a tour of Cuban music through all its genres and its history. For me, all genres are valid. I make no distinctions. It’s all one Cuban music.”
