U.S., Cuban Musicians Jam in Havana
HAVANA — The Cubans may have lost their baseball game against the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday afternoon, but it didn’t matter much that night at the Karl Marx Theater, where American and Cuban musicians were also brought together here for the first time in 40 years–only in this case, they were all playing for the same team, in concert.
As dozens of Cubans milled about outside the theater, hoping to be allowed in, 5,000 of their well-dressed compatriots attended the invitation-only concert, which featured U.S. musicians such as Bonnie Raitt, the Indigo Girls and Montell Jordan, and such Cuban artists as Jose Maria Vitier, Chucho Valdes, Isaac Delgado and Giraldo Piloto. The concert was the final showcase for songs co-written by Cuban and American musicians as part of a weeklong collaboration called “Music Bridges.”
The exchange was the fifth such event organized by Woodland Hills songwriter Alan Roy Scott–a soft-spoken, gentle man who genuinely believes music has the power to unite cultures and people. It marked the first time in nearly 40 years that musicians from the ideologically opposed nations separated by 90 miles of ocean have written songs together with the blessings of both governments.
Bonnie Raitt - Woody Harrelson - Rey Guerra - Pablo Menendez - Lucia Huergo
The first number, a group rendition of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” led by R&B singer Brenda Russell, was as sentimental as a middle school slow dance, but the evening quickly perked up with the third song of the night, “Saint Elixer,” in which Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s powerful vocal purring was nicely matched with Cuban singer Luis De La Cruz’s more ethereal sound.
Though there were many big names from the rock world of decades past, including Mick Fleetwood and Jimmy Buffett, the undisputed American stars of the show Sunday night were two relative newcomers, both of them hip-hop artists: Montell Jordan and Michael Franti.
The crowd, sort of a who’s-who of Cuban power, was polite but seemingly uninspired until the collaborations between Jordan and the beach-blond leader of the Cuban dance group Sintesis, Carlos Alfonso. “Walking on Sunshine,” a reggae-flavored love song, got the audience dancing.
Music Bridges – Cuba – March 1999
Music Bridges – Cuba – March 1999
Music Bridges – Cuba – March 1999
Music Bridges – Cuba – March 1999
But it was Jordan’s second offering, a ballad called “Unlonely,” that proved him to be a thoughtful, gymnastic vocalist. Performing only with Alfonso’s piano as backing, Jordan won the crowd over with his showmanship and his heartfelt lyrics about seeing a sad-looking man on the streets of Cuba who “looks a lot like me.”
But the most profound, insightful and daring of the night’s lyrics were those written by Franti, a socially conscious rapper who heads the group Spearhead. His song, “Can’t Stop the Bus,” was the result of Franti’s unauthorized wanderings about the streets of Havana in search of inspiration, and the lyrics spoke of the frustration he saw in the eyes of Cuban citizens who are crammed onto buses, forbidden to enter fancy hotels and beaches.
“You can’t see it, but you can feel it,” he started the song by rapping. “It’s coming, y’all.” What followed was an incisive stream of consciousness in which Franti compared current Cuba to an out-of-control bus, in which the people will eventually “go home in disgust until tomorrow’s bus comes. . . . There’s a new day coming in Cuba, y’all, another bus is on the way,” he sang.
As Franti sang in English, Communist Party members danced to the beat, seemingly unaware that Franti was voicing political opposition to their government.
“Everybody knows that the embargo just hurts the Cuban people. So I went to my guitar company and bought a bunch of guitars at cost, and I’m going to give lots away to the music school here, and the rest to people I know here.”
Bonnie Raitt
Unfortunately, not all of the collaborations were as sharp and interesting. “If You Go,” a two-chord vamp written by Gary Burr, Don Was and Cesar Portillo, was lukewarm. “I Wanna Make Love to the Music,” with Mick Fleetwood as lead singer, was passe and tedious enough to set the crowd to chatting. Buffett, who annoyed musicians from both countries by arriving late, demanding the Presidential Suite at the Hotel Nacional and missing rehearsals, made a surprise appearance on the song, but his presence added little.
Other scheduled performances included a collaboration between Cuban artists Rey Guerra and Pablo Menendez with Raitt and actor-cum-musician Woody Harrelson, and another between Kiki Corona, Chucho Valdes, Lisa Loeb and Gary Bartz.
At the halfway point of the concert, nearly all of the songs had lyrics in English, and there was very little of the traditional, and complex, Cuban rhythms to be heard. This probably was due to the superior training of the Cuban musicians–a fact noted in several jam sessions throughout the week.
Nonetheless, all Cuban and American musicians interviewed have said they were very satisfied with their creative efforts of the past week. Indeed, watching the well-intentioned, if a little naive, hugs and smiles onstage, it was hard not to be happy for everyone here.
According to Cuban singer Amaury Perez, who helped organize the event, “It’s been a beautiful experience.”
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U.S.-Cuban ‘Bridge’ Music Finally Released
Historic Havana Session Tapes Surface After Five Years in Limbo
In 1999, during a relative thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations, a group of American musicians traveled to Havana as part of an independent cultural exchange program called Music Bridges Around the World.
Bonnie Raitt, Mick Fleetwood, Gladys Knight and others met up with a group of contemporary Cuban musicians at Havana’s Hotel Nacional for a collaborative recording session. It was the largest U.S.-Cuban musical project in more than 30 years.
But U.S. trade restrictions and legal tangles kept the session tapes off the market for five years. NPR’s Phillip Davis reports on the long-awaited release of Bridge to Havana on CD and DVD.
Despite the politics, the language barriers and the time pressures — the project was scheduled to last one week — the musicians wrote, arranged and recorded more than 35 original songs.
At the end of the sessions, the artists performed a marathon concert at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater.
Cinematographer Haskell Wexler caputured the event for a documentary, also titled Bridge to Havana, which is being released along with the CD.
Bridge to Havana
CD from Music Bridges Cuba 1999
Pyramid Records
2004
Music Builds a Bridge to Cuba
March 23, 1999
Embargo walls come down in exchange between Cuban and US musicians.
HAVANA — There is bound to be no shortage of touchy-feely international cheerleading about this week’s Music Bridges Around the World event at the Hotel Nacional here, a grand old structure overlooking the turquoise waters of Havana harbor.
After all, Music Bridges, the brainchild of Woodland Hills songwriter Alan Roy Scott, has teamed 45 Cuban musicians with 48 American counterparts for a week of unprecedented collaboration, which will culminate in a concert Sunday at the 5,000-seat Karl Marx Theater.
While Americans such as Ry Cooder have produced recordings by Cuban bands, and American musicians have recorded existing compositions by Cuban artists, the 37-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba has made it illegal until now for musicians from the capitalist superpower and the communist island the size of Pennsylvania 85 miles from Florida to create original work together.
The rules were loosened thanks to legwork by San Francisco attorney Bill Martinez, who has been instrumental in bringing Cuban groups such as Los Van Van to the United States for performances. Martinez represented Music Bridges before the U.S. government and was able to get permission for the event to take place.
“Times are changing quickly,” Martinez said. “It’s amazing even to me.”
So it is that both Bonnie Raitt and Cuban singer Fernando Becquer sat in the audience of a press conference here Monday, listening to Scott and others, including Alicia Perea Masa, president of the Cuban Institute of Music, hail music’s power to, as Scott said, “build bridges between different cultures as no other medium can.”
Scott should know; in the last 11 years he has organized five similar events in countries including Ireland and the former Soviet Union. The Cuba event is primarily financed by Northern California businessman Joel Gelderman. Donations also have been made through instrument companies and music licensing organizations such as BMI and ASCAP.
The musicians will spend several hours a day every day this week composing and rehearsing in groups, small and large, in practice spaces throughout Havana. In addition, the musicians will engage in a goodwill baseball game on Wednesday, and some American artists, such as Raitt, will spend free time helping dole out medical supplies donated through groups such as Los Angeles’ Operation USA to area children’s hospitals.
Nonetheless, there remain a few disturbing realities about Music Bridges, foremost among them the fact that few Cuban citizens, even those who live across the street from the Hotel Nacional, seem to know that once-forbidden musicians such as Gladys Knight, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, R&B; singer Montell Jordan, singer Duncan Sheik, Ziggy Marley, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Frampton and Lisa Loeb are only meters away, working with Cuban musicians such as Chucho Valdes, Silvio Rodriguez, Amaury Perez, Miriam Ramos and others.
“There has been no publicity here about it,” said a cabdriver from the wheel of his state-owned Mercedes. He asked that his name not be used, but added that he thought many Cubans would like to know the Americans are here.
Also befuddling: In a nation like Cuba, which spends much energy praising the advances Fidel Castro’s government has made for women here, only five of the 45 Cuban artists are female.
The U.S. balance is not much better, with only 12 women among the group of 48 artists. Additionally, Scott and other organizers seem stuck with 1970s notions of Cuba as the innocent victim of U.S. policies, and do not seem aware that the political crisis in Cuba at the moment is most deeply shouldered by the nation’s females.
Indeed, very young, usually black, prostitutes are visible here on every corner, a market that has exploded since Cuba lost its Soviet subsidies in the late 1980s. The island nation has made economic gains in the mid-’90s through state-encouraged tourism, but increased prostitution has also been a byproduct, according to a U.S. State Department report.
Then there is another theme that few will probably want to address: With all due respect to the artists involved from the States, ask a Cuban on the street for the name of their favorite American musician, and they are far more likely to say Mariah Carey or Smashing Pumpkins rather than participants Jimmy Buffett and Stewart Copeland.
The musicians have been matched by literally pulling names out of a hat. Cuban singer Amaury Perez said that this method had originally concerned the Cubans but, he added, “We know that Alan knows more than we do about this, and it has worked out fine.”
Finally, the near absence of U.S. Latino artists from the Music Bridges roster is alarming since Latin music is the fastest-growing domestic genre in the U.S. Of the 48 musicians, only one, drummer Horatio Hernandez, is Latino. When asked about this, Scott said he had invited “several people from that community,” but that “they thought it would hurt their careers to be here because of political reasons.”
Scott was likely referring to the protests of prominent Cuban exiles, such as jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who said in an interview after his recent Grammy win, “This [project] sends the wrong message. It says we’re willing to accept what Castro is doing to my country.”
The pressure may have gotten to Raul Malo, the Cuban American lead singer of the Mavericks, who had been on a preliminary list of participants, but who ultimately dropped out.
But not all Cubans or Latinos are in agreement. In an interview Saturday in Miami, producer Emilio Estefan, a Cuban exile regarded along with wife Gloria as a pillar of Latin music in the U.S., said he did not object to the Music Bridges idea.
“I wouldn’t go myself, but things are changing here. People’s minds are much more open than they used to be,” Estefan said.
LETTER FROM CUBA: Our Man Woody In Havana
April 2, 1999
I’m sitting in a lumpy chair in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, chatting with three Cuban journalists, the shortest of whom can’t stop asking me if I know Cameron Diaz. I tell him I do not know La Diaz, yet he presses on, certain I am concealing the truth.
Every time he says her name, his eyebrows twitch like some half-squashed caterpillar, and the broken-English mantra begins: “I like, heh heh, I like, heh heh, I like . . .
“If you see her, eh, tell her to come to Cuba,” says the journalist, Jorge Smith Mesa.
I shrug, imagining that I would never wish Cuba upon anyone, especially Cameron Diaz.
See, I was groped on my morning walk by two different men this same day, and as I sat on the sea wall resting, was approached by yet another man with his pants around his ankles and his hands upon his, um, pride and joy. I reported him to three police officers; one stared at my chest, the other told me I shouldn’t wear shorts on the street if I didn’t want to be bothered (it was 97 degrees); the third laughed. None made an attempt to catch the man who was by then running down the street, buttoning up.
Moments later, I watched as a group of eight boys beat a helpless crab to death with sticks and rocks.
Thought: Cuba, isolated for almost 40 years, has become a gigantic stage production of “Lord of the Flies,” and the men here have gone insane.
The male journalists I tell of my experiences look at me incredulously and say things like, “I’ve been coming to Cuba for 10 years, and I’ve never heard anything like that. . . . Are you sure this happened to you? . . . I’ve got lots of Cuban women friends, they never say anything like that.”
Well, duh. First of all, Cuban women are no longer shocked by this behavior. “Men will be men,” my cousin Odalys, who lives here, told me. And second, beer-swilling American male journalists are not attacked by the generally shorter, smaller Cuban men, who find them quite intimidating. Most gringa-looking women are untouchable. But me and La Diaz, half-Cuban hybrids who understand every sick come-on? Yeah.
Cameron, if you’re reading: Don’t come here.
I watch the elevators and stairs, waiting for one of the participants in the “Music Bridges” program to appear. I’m here to cover this program of artistic diplomacy, which last week brought together 48 American and 45 Cuban musicians for a week of joint songwriting in Havana. (It has been illegal for Cuban and American musicians to write original songs together for nearly 40 years.)
Bonnie Raitt, Burt Bacharach, Mick Fleetwood and Jimmy Buffett, among others, are here. I want to grill them on their collaboration, so they can tell me how “beautiful” they think the “Cuban people” are. (So far, they have all said this, in exactly this good-white-liberal-speak.) I want to ask Raitt if she, too, found cockroaches in her breakfast cereal like I did the day before.
Suddenly, he’s there. Woody Harrelson. The most unlikely invitee, the most unmusical of the musicians slung here from the States. Even the Cuban journalists, oozing with admiration, can’t bring themselves to call him a guitarist or singer. “Look,” says Mesa, jumping up, “it’s the North American . . . actor, Woody Harledsam.”
The Cubans, with their huge and ancient film equipment, give chase as “Senor Harledsam” makes his way toward the exit, where an extraordinarily well-groomed employee opens the heavy wooden door, eyeing Woody’s thin, yellowed knee socks and knobby white knees with a mixture of disgust and confusion.
I stay in my chair, watching the Cubans communicate through sign language with a goofily grinning Harrelson, who nods and nods. Mesa calls out for me to join them. “He’s going to a gym to work out,” he cries as they head out the door and down the stairs to a waiting cab. “Come on.”
INTERPRETATIONS OF WOODY
Before I know it, I am scrunched in the back of a small, red Hyundai with the Diaz fan and the North American . . . actor smashed in the middle, who is wholly unaware that I am a reporter for his hometown newspaper. (Aside from Santa Monica, Calif., he also has a home in Costa Rica.) Harrelson eats fistfuls of peanuts and chews with his mouth open. His teeth are yellow and snaggled, like a dinosaur’s. The cameraman jumps into the front passenger seat, and the driver asks, “Where to?”
Woody is not sure where he’s going. He has been there before, but he can’t really remember how they got there or where it is.
“It’s where the Cuban junior boxing team practices,” Harrelson says. “It’s near a swimming pool. And a basketball court.”
Population of Havana: 3 million.
The Cubans begin to debate in raised voices where exactly he is talking about, and decide it is in old Havana. Harrelson smiles and watches the sidewalks. For every female form in a skirt, his head snaps around and bits of peanut dribble out of his mouth. No wonder he can’t remember how he got there.
I introduce myself, and Harrelson ceases to make direct eye contact with me. I imagine he is thinking something like, “Damn paparazzi!” I’m not particularly thrilled with making eye contact with him, either. He is wearing ill-fitting shorts and a stained T-shirt, and is thinner and balder than I would imagine. I serve mostly as a translator from this point on.
The cab winds through a narrow street in old Havana. Sad, short-legged dogs dodge the wheels. The driver rolls down his window and asks some old men for directions to a gym. They begin pointing and shouting, arguing with each other about the location. Then Harrelson perks up. “This isn’t it,” he says. “It’s out in the country somewhere.”
I relay this message to the driver and Cuban reporters, and they give a collective “Ah . . .” — certain now that the actor is talking about the buildings constructed in West Havana in 1991 for the Pan American Games. The cameraman turns to look at Harrelson and says, “Too-nell, too-nell,” over and over. Harrelson looks over his shoulder, then looks back at the cameraman and shrugs.
“What’s he saying?” he asks me.
“I haven’t a clue,” I answer.
Within seconds, we are going through a tunnel.
“Tunnel,” Harrelson says. The cameraman bounces in his seat like a happy little boy, and repeats, “Too-nell.”
Suddenly, Harrelson has encountered something unpleasant in his mouth. He leans over the Diaz fan and spits out the window, toward the tunnel wall. The only problem is that we are in a moving vehicle, and the peanut paste ends up sprayed across the Cuban journalist’s eyeglasses.
“Sorry,” Harrelson says. The Diaz fan pretends not to know what Harrelson is talking about, and smiles graciously. A North American actor has spit on him, and he is too polite to wipe it off.
I ask Harrelson if he’s ever been to Cuba before, and he shakes his head. “First time,” he says. I ask him what he thinks. “I love it here,” he says. I ask him why. “The people are so cool,” he says. “They’re really open and warm. Like these guys. I could sit and listen to them talk all day.”
I ask Harrelson how his musical collaboration is going. He is teamed with Raitt and some Cuban musicians; he remembers only their first names. “It’s going well,” he says. He also says he will not be playing guitar at the closing Sunday night concert. “There are already three other guitar players, and, let’s face it, I’m not, like, the world’s best guitar player or anything,” he admits, laughing.
We arrive at the athletic complex, but Harrelson says he is not sure his training partners will be here, as he is more than an hour late. “Tell the driver to just wait a minute so I can see if they’re here.” I tell the driver, who nods and keeps the meter running.
Harrelson exits the taxi, as do the Cuban journalists. Great packages of Cuban muscle in tight sweat pants walk past. Adonises. Several have jaws as square as they come. Harrelson looks like a pipsqueak in his knee socks. To top it off, no one seems to know who he is.
As feared, Harrelson has been abandoned. The room is locked, his comrades are gone. Determined to work out, however, he approaches the basketball court where a group of young, fit men play. If they had any suspicion that gringos can’t jump, Harrelson was about to prove them waaaay right.
The driver and I watch from the car, parked on a rise above the court. The driver shakes his head in pity as Harrelson scrambles his way around the court, pulling moves he no doubt learned on the set of that basketball movie he did.
After five minutes, Harrelson removes his T-shirt, exposing his soft white underbelly. The driver pretends to shield his eyes. “Oh my God,” he says. “What is he doing?” Harrelson’s shorts hang down, and his butt crack shows.
HE GOT GAME
The answer to the driver’s question is easy: He’s trying to play basketball. The Cubans dribble and shoot with relative ease, even if they are freaked out by the presence of this strange North American . . . actor. With peanut breath.
“I don’t think they know who he is,” I tell the driver.
“Who is he?” the driver asks.
“He’s a famous actor,” I say.
“Really?”
“Yes, a millionaire.”
The driver finds this hilarious.
“No way,” he says. “He doesn’t look like a millionaire.”
“He is. You should charge a lot for the ride,” I say.
The driver watches the game. “I’ll charge a lot,” he says. “But for two reasons: one, because of his wealth; and two, because of his athleticism.”
We laugh. It is cruel. Harrelson spins, jumps and trips — but does not fall.
“That’s very sad,” the driver says, his eyes flashing with the giggles. “He’s probably going to make us wait until the sun sets.”
“Charge him a lot,” I repeat.
In fact, Harrelson plays until sunset. One by one, the Cubans grow bored and leave, until Harrelson is literally left playing by himself.
When the actor and Cuban journalists finally return to the cab, I ask if he had fun, and he nods.
The driver asks where to now, and Harrelson tries out his budding Spanish.
“Yo necesito un viejo,” he says. The men in the car stare at him in disbelief, especially the older cameraman.
“You just told them you need an old man,” I inform Harrelson.
Harrelson finally makes eye contact with me. “Really?” he asks, and starts laughing. “Tell them I need to go to old Havana,” he says.
I explain this to the men, and they laugh, relieved.
“Rest easy, old man,” Harrelson says, patting the cameraman on the shoulder.
As we go back through the “too-nell,” Harrelson asks me to roll down my window. I fear he is about to spit on me, but he explains that he can’t breathe, and the smog is killing him. I tell the Cubans that the air in Havana is filthy. The Cuban journalist looks shocked.
“We have no air pollution in Havana,” he says, quite seriously. I translate for Harrelson, who can’t believe what he’s just heard. I can’t believe it, either. Havana smells like a jar of Vaseline, and if you stand outside for more than 15 minutes, your skin gets coated with black goo.
“You tell my man that he just lost a whole lot of credibility as a journalist with me,” Harrelson says. “You tell him he’s un poco loco. This is the worst air I’ve ever seen.”
I tell the Cuban. His response: “There is no industry here. And few cars.” Across the bay, an oil refinery belches black smoke into the sky. The cars on the road, either old American jalopies or Soviet Ladas, do the same. When the sea comes splashing over the sea wall, it is oily and black.
“No pollution?” I ask.
“Look, this is the problem,” the journalist says. “Woody is an environmentalist, and I am a beer-drinker. It’s all in perspective.”
I translate for Harrelson, who laughs. “If only he knew,” he says.
We arrive at the restaurant in Old Havana where Harrelson is supposed to meet some friends. The Cuban journalists get out to accompany him. Harrelson looks at me with worried eyes.
“Do they think they’re going to follow me all night?” he asks.
I ask them the same question, and they nod, gleefully.
“Do you want them to go away?” I ask Harrelson. He nods sheepishly, afraid to hurt their feelings. “Don’t worry,” I say. I tell the Cubans that Mr. Harrelson would like some privacy, and they apologize to him and climb back into the taxi. The driver charges Harrelson $24 for nearly three hours of service. Harrelson thanks me, then ambles down the street, enjoying the relative anonymity he has here.
We begin to drive back to the hotel.
“Do you think he knows Cameron Diaz?” the Cuban asks, eyebrows vibrating.
“Yes,” I say.
“Do you think you can ask him to tell her to come to Cuba?”
Taking Another Look at Havana
After reading “Letter From Cuba: Our Man Woody in Havana”, I have to tell you that I am weary of the barrage of anti-Cuba columns that have appeared in your paper over the past several weeks. And having been in Cuba recently, I am increasingly angry at the unfair representation of Cuba and its people.
Such views are as irresponsible as are the descriptions of “cultural exchanges” in Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s impressions of her time there. To have gone to Cuba for a potentially significant event (Music Bridges, or, in the case of other columnists, the Orioles baseball game) and to have come home with nothing more significant to write about than journalists’ questions about an actress, gropes, accented English or an American actor making a fool of himself in Havana, is appalling.
I also spoke with journalists, artists, musicians, composers and a host of other Cubans during my 10 days there. Never did anyone refuse to acknowledge that life in Cuba is difficult or that when change occurs, there will be more problems before things get better. I did hear constantly of an abiding hope.
The chief obstacle to the openness that Cubans desire is the U.S. blockade, an anachronistic barrier that does nothing but keep Cubans from access to many things the rest of the world has. If those who write the columns for our papers are interested in improving the situation in Cuba, they might try writing against our longstanding and historically misguided policies.
It is tragic that one could go to a place like Cuba and, no matter what happens personally to the traveler, see nothing except eight boys who beat a crab to death with sticks and rocks (as if that, or something worse, would never happen here), hear nothing except broken English (as if we all speak intelligibly here) and feel nothing except a groped body (which doesn’t happen in a civilized society like ours?).
— Ken Nafziger
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s piece describes a Cuba I have not experienced. Having just returned from Havana, I wonder what place she is describing. First of all, the story contains stereotypical and inaccurate portraits of Cuban men, characterized as sitting around in the Hotel Nacional (which is not seedy) or groping people in the streets — which I never saw them do. Certainly neither my husband nor I found cockroaches or any other insects in any of our meals. Havana smells no more like a “jar of Vaseline” than any city in the United States, and one’s skin certainly does not get “coated with black goo.” There are no oil refineries belching black smoke, nor is the sea “oily and black.”
In “good-white-liberal-speak” (to use Valdes-Rodriguez’s term) I can say that Cuba is a very mixed bag. I was welcomed by my hosts, in this case a crafts organization that took me to the workshops and houses of many artisans and to several museums. Everyone was friendly and helpful. At the same time they despaired of the trade embargo that has gone on for 40 years, and they welcomed the increasing number of cultural exchanges and visits.
Cuba is short on consumer goods, and Havana is run down. However, there is universal medical care and education and there is no evidence of racial discord or prejudice, nor are there any slums or grinding poverty. The Cubans are struggling economically. They lack civil liberties and a free press. And some, such as noted writers and artists are, in George Orwell’s words, “more equal than others.”
I nevertheless question the report of a journalist who allows her animus against Castro’s Cuba to cloud her judgment and to distort the truth, thus damaging her reporting. As a journalist, she should stick to the facts and respect the truth.
— Caroline Ramsay Merriam
A bicultural jam
March 29, 1999
HAVANA — A Sunday night concert at the Karl Marx Theater, which paired Cuban and American stars like Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Varela, Jimmy Buffett, Jose Luis Cortes (“El Tosco”) and Joan Osborne, put an emphatic cap on a weekend buzzing with big-league baseball, international politics and music invented on the fly.
The event was the finale of Music Bridges Cuba, which brought some 80 American and Cuban musicians together for a week of songwriting, jamming and instant camaraderie.
The mix was a giddy, self-consciously historic stew — with plenty of hype, yet the real sense that for one weekend, Havana was at the center of the world’s attention.
The young and bohemian (for Cuba) crowd that streamed into the theater was hugely excited to see American pop musicians for the first time in 20 years. Few would give their names, nervous about talking to foreign journalists. Said one young man, who said he had spent more than half of his monthly salary on three tickets: “I wish this would happen twice a week, and even then, I am sure this theater wouldn’t be big enough.”
A radio programmer who regularly plays American music on his show said, “We Cubans are crazy for American musicians.”
But some of the stars that the Cubans were expecting — like Peter Frampton, James Taylor and Ziggy Marley — were last-minute cancellations. Jimmy Buffett played guitar and sang backup on one song, One World, with Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains and Todd Smallwood.
All in all, this was not an all-star American show like 1979’s Havana Jams, which almost everyone compared it to and which featured Weather Report, Rita Coolidge and Billy Joel.
Highlights included Joan Osborne’s sultry, bluesy Alone With You mixed with Sergio Ditier’s elegant danzon, or N’Dea Davenport, Rene Baños, Ernan Lopez Nussa and Dave Koz’s Que Importa, a funky, jazzy number that mixed Cuban and American rhythms and languages with equal panache.
But the musical bridge rarely connected: Oftentimes, the concert was American musicians doing their thing and Cuban musicians doing theirs. The sound was far more American than Cuban, with funk, rock and jazz fusion dominating. There was almost no son or other typical Cuban dance music.
Teacher disappointed
Fernando Rodriguez, a professor at the National School of Music in Havana, said he was somewhat disappointed. “Musically, there’s no cohesion,” he said. “There were some good things and good musicians, but it was like putting a bunch of different foods together — who knows what it will taste like. And it lacked the presence of real Cuban dance music. There are a lot of great dance musicians in Cuba — they should have been here.”
Jose Luis Cortes of NG La Banda, Andy Summers, Brenda Russell and Lucia Huergo delivered the only real Cuban dance number of the evening with the closing song, Esto Es Pa’ Gozar (This Is for Havin’ a Good Time), an electrifying timba jam in classic NG La Banda style. Afterward, artists and organizers from Music Bridges climbed into two Havana Tour buses and headed to a reception at the presidential palace.
To the artists, the most significant part of Music Bridges had taken place earlier in the week. “The concert is not what matters,” Cuban songwriter Kiki Corona said during a party for artists and organizers Friday night at the Hotel Nacional, where Cuba’s Orquesta Aragon and Vocal Sampling performed. “What matters is the experience we’ve had together this week. It was love at first sight.”
‘This was really great’
Peter Buck of R.E.M. looked around at the new best friends talking animatedly around the pool and sighed, “This was really great. But it’s almost sad. I can come back to Cuba, but this will never happen again.”
Those sentiments were extremely evident on stage. The artists opened with a group performance of Bridge Over Troubled Water, and the American musicians in particular repeatedly enthused about their experience and how much they loved being in Cuba.
“We came to Cuba to make friends, and it worked,” Smallwood said to the crowd. The good feelings resulted in a lot of heartfelt but cliched We Are the World-variety lyrics. Exceptions included Unlonely, a beautiful soul ballad by Montell Jordan, James Slater and Carlos Alfonso; Can’t Stop the Bus, a funky rap sung by Michael Franti; and In My Dreams, a love song in lush, three-part harmony by Carlos Varela, Beth Nielson Chapman and Santiago Felieu.
The most successful songs had lyrics that mixed personal and cultural connections. Others, like Bonnie Raitt, Woody Harrelson (who looked like he should be starring in a film called White Men Can’t Dance) and Pablo Menendez on Cuba Is Way Too Cool, delivered great blues and rock musicianship but overly obvious lyrics about a “happening little island” and “you’re just a bully throwing down,” referring to the United States.
Irreverent emcee
Tall, lanky Michael Franti of the hip-hop group Spearhead, with dreads snaking down his back, was an irreverent and ebullient emcee. After asking how many Orioles and Cubans fans there were in the house, a reference to the historic baseball game hours before, he said, “The nice thing about tonight is there’s no winning team and no losing team.”
The 25 songs performed at the show were chosen from more than 50 created in only five days, so perhaps it was to be expected that few would be a true fusion. The audience responded warmly nonetheless — especially when the artists delivered soul and showmanship, as Osborne did with the sexy blues of Alone With You, or Davenport and Baños did with their vocal virtuosity.
Although the good intentions clearly went both ways, this concert sounded much more American than it did American and Cuban. And as sincere as everyone seemed to be, they also were conscious that they were on display, that their interaction was being viewed through a powerful media microscope. The musicians repeatedly said they hoped to come back and do it all again, and the aim would seem to be to make the next Bridges a better connection.
Music Lessons In Cuba
As with any experiment that has a lot of unknown factors, the first concert in 20 years joining pop musicians from the United States and Cuba yielded unpredictable and widely varying results
Sunday night’s three-hour concert here at the 5,000-seat Karl Marx theater was the culmination of a weeklong collaboration between Cuban songwriters and performers and their U.S. counterparts. Before an audience of visiting journalists, music students, artists, Cuban music officials and invited guests, the closing concert for “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters” showed that when musicians are paired by a lottery — without regard to their interests or expertise — the outcome can range from mediocre to inspiring.
Fortunately for the organizers, some of the performances were nothing less than brilliant. These saved a show that was marred by technical problems and at times overshadowed by the musicians’ simplistic attempts to interject themselves into the foreign policy process.
Alan Roy Scott, the California songwriter and producer who dreamed up the Music Bridges project, told the audience that they were about to witness the power of music to bring people together, regardless of any other concerns that might separate them.
“All the songs are only two to three days old,” Scott said. “Although they are very new they are full of the love and friendship that we have all made this week.”
The show opened with a rendition of Paul Simon’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, apparently intended to set the stage for the night’s theme of musical harmony between performers whose governments are at odds.
The concert featured 24 of the nearly 50 songs written last week; in the first half, most of the material was uninspiring. One World, performed by Chieftains member Paddy Maloney, Todd Smallwood, Jimmy Buffett, Mick Fleetwood and Cuban singer Augusto Enriquez, was a bland number with bilingual lyrics that were hard to understand in either language.
It wasn’t until hip-hop star Montell Jordan took the stage that the audience glimpsed the kind of magic that’s possible when the right musicians are put together. Jordan was in his element in Walking on Sunshine, which he wrote with American arranger James Slater and Carlos Alfonso of the Afro-Cuban jazz/rock fusion group Sintesis.
Backed by the two female singers from Sintesis, Jordan blended his sense of African-American rhythm, phrasing and movement seamlessly into Alfonso’s rich Afro-Cuban stylings.
Rock singer Joan Osborne boomed out a powerful and provocative number called Alone With You, written with Cuban guitarist Rey Guerra and performed with singer-guitarist Manolito Simonet. Osborne had fun with the lyrics, singing, “I am a woman and I am in my prime, I know how to do it and take my time. I will wrap you up in all my curls. You’ll forget about the other girls.”
The song received thunderous applause, and a thumbs up from rapper Michael Franti, who served as master of ceremonies. “Muy sexy, Joan,” Franti said. “Muy sexy.”
At several points during the show, the American performers reached out to the crowd with a greeting in Spanish. Often, members of the U.S. group also commented on the political situation.
Blues rocker Bonnie Raitt let her music do the talking. The message of Cuba Is Way Too Cool, written by Raitt, actor Woody Harrelson, Cuban bandleader Pablo Menendez and Guerra, was that the United States has nothing to fear from its embargoed island neighbor.
“Why are you so worried?” Raitt sang. “Only 90 miles away, just a beautiful little island. Big Bad Wolf looking a fool. Because Cuba is way too cool.” Raitt and Menendez, the U.S.-born leader of the Cuban group Mezcla, delivered skillful guitar solos, while Cuban saxophonist Lucia Huergo improvised sophisticated jazz lines over them. Harrelson, bouncing around on the stage and clearly out of his musical depth, gave the impression that he was at a some kind of alternative rock party.
Raitt ended the song with a tribute to her audience: Viva Cuba Libre! (Long live free Cuba!)
Two numbers featuring the clean and alluring vocals of American folk-pop singer Beth Nielsen Chapman proved to be crowd-pleasers: In My Dreams, a simple love ballad she wrote with Cuban troubadour Carlos Varela and American composer-arranger Annie Roboff; and the more up-tempo Reaching Inside Myself.
Que Importa (What Does It Matter), by saxophonist Dave Koz, singer N’Dea Davenport and Cuban Ernan Lopez-Nussa, was another joy. Rene Baos, lead singer of the Cuban a cappella group Vocal Sampling, sang about all the things they each love, from food to music, and how the fact that they come from different countries with different tastes does not matter. Koz traded dueling solos with Baos, who used his voice to expertly imitate a saxophone.
Like others in the American contingent, Franti was left stunned by the Cubans’ virtuousity.
“I’ve learned two things in Cuba,” Franti said. “The first is to be a better person. And the second is if you’re an American you need to practice. Because when all the walls come down there will be no American musicians with a job.”
The concert organizers skipped a planned finale in which all the participants would sing the classic Cuban song Guantamera, instead opting for a much more significant closing musical statement.
Jose Luis Cortes, leader of the contemporary Cuban dance band NG La Banda, stepped on stage to do the honors. Cortes, who wrote the song Esto Es Pa’ Gozar (No Preguntes Mas) with Andy Summers of the Police, singer Brenda Russell and saxophonist Huergo, brought his 14-member band to back up the composers. It ended with an extended descarga, or jam session, that included an impromptu, bilingual call-and-response from the crowd.
Cortes’ group played with authority and power, bringing the house to its feet. On stage, the Music Bridges participants danced in a conga line. It was a fitting end to a week of sessions in which some of the Cuban performers essentially gave music lessons to their American and European counterparts.
Playing Music, Not Ball: Mambos and Rap in Cuba
HAVANA, March 29 — It was in the air: the thrill of the illicit and the new, the excitement of discovery and the charge of an encounter with idols. And it didn’t take place on a baseball field.
Just after the Baltimore Orioles broke ground by playing a Cuban team here, musicians by the score and fans by the thousands poured into the Karl Marx Theater on Sunday night in this city’s elegant Playa district for the Music Bridges concert, the biggest convergence of foreign and Cuban musicians since the revolution. Before that came a week of impromptu collaborations out doors and in makeshift studios.
From the United States came singers like Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Joan Osborne, Lisa Loeb, Burt Bacharach and more. The Cubans brought together musicians from the folk, rock, and popular dance music scenes. In the end the all-star concert at the Karl Marx had people dancing and cheering, and the future of this enterprise, musical or otherwise, seemed as hazy and unpredictable as anything else involving Cuban-American relations.
Music Bridges, an organization that specializes in concerts in politically sensitive countries, had spent a year and a half pulling together the legal and practical permission from the United States and Cuba.
Music Bridges, with its 40-some participating American musicians, had came to Havana and taken more than 120 rooms in the Hotel Nacional, overlooking the ocean. The organization filled the sixth-floor executive offices and the presidential suite, along with three rooms that had been converted into recording studios. For a week Cuban and American musicians were to collaborate on songs and to present the works on the final night in a long concert at the Karl Marx Theater.
At events around the city American musicians were getting a feel for the power of Cuban music and its bacchanalian spirit. In the wee hours of Thursday night at La Cecilia nightclub, Michael Franti, a rapper and band leader from San Francisco, mounted the stage with Cuba’s version of the Roilling Stones, Los Van Van, a 30-year-old institution playing hard-rocking dance music.
Mr. Franti started rapping and repeating a phrase, and Pedrito, one of the group’s singers, entered the fray; the two swapped nonsense syllables, but with rhythm. It would have brought down the roof, but La Cecilia is outdoors. Members of the audience — made up of faranduleros, the habitués of Havana’s nightlife scene, Music Bridges staff members and performers, and journalists — were impressed and they danced.
On Saturday at the Charlie Chaplin Theater in the Vedado district, Americans and what remains of members of Cuba’s intellectual culture had the chance to hear the Buena Vista Social Club play cha-cha-chas, mambos and boleros that have mostly fallen into disregard. The performance, which was not part of Music Bridges, offered an opportunity to hear music with extreme grace and humor, one of the great musical syntheses of the New World, where classical, jazz and African music merged into something special.
In Cuba, music drowns out politics
March 23, 1999
As U.S. and European musicians land in Havana, organizers of a cultural exchange stress harmony, not discord.
A big week for U.S.-Cuba cultural exchange opened here Monday with all sides seeking to play down the politics.
But this is Cuba, and whenever Americans gather here _ for whatever reason _ it’s bound to set tongues wagging.
A group of 44 American and European musicians checked into Havana’s majestic Hotel Nacional over the weekend for a week of jamming with some of Cuba’s best artists. On Sunday, it’s the turn of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, which will play an exhibition game against Cuba.
Not since the country’s revolution 40 years ago, perhaps, has Havana hosted so many famous faces from its enemy to the north. Among them are composer Burt Bacharach and singers Bonnie Raitt, Gladys Knight and James Taylor. Florida’s own Jimmy Buffett is due to arrive Friday to join in a weekend concert. Actor Woody Harrelson is here.
Over the years the Hotel Nacional has witnessed its fair share of odd events. Built in 1930, it is inextricably linked with the country’s politics. Its casino was a popular hangout in the 1940s and ’50s for the Mafia, including Meyer Lansky and Tampa’s Santo Trafficante, who was reputed to be a mob boss.
It was a different scene Monday as Raitt strolled through the lobby armed with an electric guitar.
In an outdoor patio bar, the Americans were getting to know their Cuban counterparts. Names on crumpled pieces of paper were drawn from two hats _ one for Americans and the other for Cubans _ in order to team up the artists for the rest of the week. “It’s like blind-dating,” explained Alan Roy Scott, president of Music Bridges Around the World, the organizers of the event.
The musicians will spend the next few days composing songs in their rooms before getting together to perform them at Havana’s Karl Marx theater Sunday.
Despite the quality of the participating musicians, it remains a matter of debate how much good music will emerge from such an unusual arrangement of artists, with Cuba’s traditional Afro-Caribbean rhythms mixed with U.S. pop, folk, rap, jazz and country.
Some U.S. musicians declined to attend for political reasons. Organizers wanted to include more big-name Hispanic artists, ideally equipped to communicate in Spanish with the Cubans. “There was some resistance from that community as to concerns that it might not be good for their careers,” said Scott.
“If we can’t make any good songs, at least we’ll drink a lot of rum for sure,” said Carlos Alfonso, leader of Sintesis, one of Cuba’s top Afro-Cuban bands.
Jokes aside, it’s hard to separate politics from the week’s events.
It took Music Bridges almost 18 months to negotiate permission to stage the event with Cuban officials and the U.S. State and Treasury departments, the main authorities responsible for enforcing the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.
With two such high-profile events in the same week, Cubans might be excused for wondering if there’s something going on politically behind the scenes. But, as everyone seems eager to point out, these are not politicians.
“I will say loud and clear, I am just here to make music,” Scott declared at a news conference. “We have absolutely no interest in the elements around us that we do not control.”
But critics say avoiding those elements ignores the realities of modern-day Cuba. Economic hard times mean that most Cubans continue to eke out a living on meager state salaries, worth barely $20 a month. Few Cubans are able to visit Havana’s popular tourist bars and nightclubs. Due to a recent crime wave, some Cuban nightspots have been closed.
Cuba’s Communist authorities also have launched a crackdown on political dissent, with stiff new penalties for any activity deemed to be supportive of U.S. policy toward the island.
Last week the Communist workers’ daily, Trabajadores, ran a tough editorial attacking terrorist threats by Cuban exiles in Miami. It was accompanied by an article denouncing the work of two Western journalists in Havana, Dennis Rousseau of the French news agency AFP and Pascal Fletcher, a British correspondent for Reuters news service and the Financial Times. The article, by a Cuban official, denounced the pair for writing “falsehoods” designed “to denigrate Cuba before the world.”
Most threatened by the new laws are Cuba’s small band of “independent” journalists who publish articles abroad critical of Cuba’s one-party Communist system.
They have welcomed the visit of the U.S. musicians and baseball players. “It’s good,” said Raul Rivero, founder of Cuba Press, a group of independent reporters. “It’s important for people to come here and see what’s going on.”
Music Bridges says that is part of its goal in fostering better cultural understanding between Cuba and the United States. While the group rejects any political role, the organizers say music can serve as a “healing force.”
It has chosen as the event’s musical theme Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water.
“It is troubled water, but the bridge is music, which is different than sitting around talking about treaties, laws and restrictions,” said Scott.
“We hope we can in a small way make a change, but it’s change coming from a creative place. It’s not getting into any of the areas we are not supposed to. I don’t care and I don’t want to be part of that.”
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