Only in recent years
has an audience once satisfied with overly simplified forms
of Cuban popular music become interested in the more
unvarnished, tradition-observing variants of the country's
musical expression. The unprecedented interest in the
recordings and live performances of a number of aging
practitioners of several core Cuban styles is a prime
example. Their work is marketed as a virtual brand name
under the banner of the Buena Vista Social Club collective.
The artistic and popular success of those artists and other
leading exponents of the idiom signals a yearning among
sophisticated listeners for a purer manifestation of Cuban
music. Increasingly astute popular music fans have
discovered that looking beyond the glitzy facade of Cuba's
most polished sounds to the country's more rudimentary
styles opens the door to a universe of complex, uncommonly
rewarding cultural revelations.
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Musica campesina vocalist
Maria Ochoa. |
Crossroads of the New World
Bred-in-Havana sounds have come to define Cuban music to
much of the world, but the wellspring of the country's
oldest and most revered styles is not the capital city of
three million. Rather, it is a provincial outpost of
traditional cultural sensibilities found five hundred miles
away, at the other end of the island. Santiago de Cuba, the
colony's first capital, was founded in 1514 by explorer
Diego de Vel zquez. This was a year before the Spanish flag
was raised over what would become Havana.
Surrounded by imposing mountains and blessed by a fine
natural harbor, the Bahia de Santiago, the city prospered as
a regional center of commerce. Its location made it a
natural hub of Caribbean, Mexican, and Central American
trade routes. Its proximity to the islands of Hispaniola,
Jamaica, and Puerto Rico enhanced Santiago's stature as a
mecca of trade.
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