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The orchestra of these times (I)

Autor: Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera | Fuente: CUBARTE | 05 de Julio 2012

During the first five years of the sixties of the last century, I was in my twenties, which are the best years for everyone, mainly when they are seen from the distance of older age, and I was studying at the Havana University. I had become a little more serious person than the teenager who danced with the Aragon Orchestra a few years before.

In the first years of the Revolution, we Cubans, a dancing people, almost stopped dancing. There were many reasons for that. A revolution had appeared, which was changing everything, most of us believed that the change was for the better and, we suddenly had too many things to do, and too much to be concerned with. Work, study and militia guard duty didn´t leave much time for dancing. And we even had to dig in or trench several times, waiting for the invasion that finally took place in 1961.

The Revolution also revolved everything in music. Suddenly, a musician who played classical music could live out of it. Just a few years before, a violinist or a flutist could only make a living by playing in a charanga, but now, the country began to be filled with symphonic orchestras, chord quartets, chamber orchestras and others that accompanied a lyric theater that had steady companies, and paid them a salary that allowed the violinist, the flutist and even the one who played the English corn, to live without worrying about the dance in La Tropical, which provided them the money to eat, before the Revolution.

The musicians were hired: they received a salary and had to play by schedule, here and there, and the struggle “to provide entertainment” in one dance or another, became less important with time. The old musicians played the same music they had been performing since many years before, and the younger ones, who began to graduate from the art schools—which were the first works of the revolutionary culture—were eager to experiment, because that was one of the early accomplishments of the revolutionary life. Experimentation got to dodecaphonic, aleatory, serial and electronic music. My friend Rine Leal told Juan Blanco, with funny skepticism, that a music that could not be hummed would never get to be important.

The emerging young composers would also make up the renewing Nueva Trova, which was not named that way yet, and which was hardly the songs by Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez and, a little after, also by Noel Nicola.

The Cuban Orchestra of Modern Music, a jazz band with excellent performers, but with a repertory and way of playing that were little new, to the point that the sharper tongues on the streets called them the Cuban Orchestra of Ancient American Music.

Benny Moré had died early, making the music he always made—since he had decided to stay in Cuba, the RCA Víctor didn´t record his music anymore—and the Aragon orchestra still sounded the way it had sounded along its entire existence, but people wanted other things.

That orchestra appeared like a light bolt, but little by little. Because time has proved that Los Van Van are Juan Formell, but Juan Formell did not appear with Los Van Van.

I used to drop by the Caribbean, the cabaret of Havana Libre Hotel mezanine—very cheap at the time—and I listened to a young bass player there, who played with Elio Revé´s Orchestra. The Guantanamo citizen Revé wanted to rescue the Changuí rhythm, that peculiar rural variant of son music, which the peasants of Yateras region played with the instruments they had within their reach: a bin for percussion, a tress (three-stringed guitar) player, who sang besides from accompanying the other lead singer, a guayo, a güiro, which was more refined, a pair of maracas, and the inexhaustible voice of Changuí singers, who chorused and improvised up to unimaginable.

Revé took the Changuí to its much more known format of the charanga, that of his orchestra, but the young bass player aspired to other changes. Formell was also one of those young musicians who had been born with the Revolution and had the renewing spirit it had brought to the country. 

During the times when the confrontation against Cuba promoted by all the US governments from Eisenhower and Nixon was harder, the Anglo-Saxon music had vanished from the Cuban stages and radio stations. But Cuba had had a permanent music exchange with the United States, specially through New Orleans, which was the main connection with Havana, and not the Miami that appeared after the Cuban exile.

Suddenly, those who listened to Elio Revé´s orchestra—with Juan Formell in the picture—were surprised by the Changuí-shake, an original fusion by the young composer Juan Formell.

In Cuba, 1969 was named the “Year of the Decisive Effort” because it was the year of the indispensable preparation to achieve the ten million tones of sugar planned for 1970. They were not achieved, but a slogan as triumphalist as it became ours began to circulate: “Los 10 millones van” (The ten million will be achieved); which, if there was any doubt left, was ratified with another one: “Y de que van, van” (They will be achieved no matter what).

What really happened was the appearance of a musical band destined to be inscribed in the great tradition of the best Cuban orchestras, the emblematic ones, the ones that mark and define epochs: the Valenzuela´s, the Cheo Belén Puig´s, the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, the Arcaño´s, the Sonora Matancera, the Arsenio Rodríguez Ensemble, which was later Chapottin´s Ensemble, the Almendra Orchestra, the María Mercerón´s, the Riverside, the Casino Ensemble, the Ernesto Duarte´s, the Bebo Valdés Orchestra, the America, the Benny Moré´s Giant Band, the Aragón.

Formell had founded a new orchestra, which was very Cuban and inscribed in our legacy, sounded differently at the same time. And Cubans started to dance, again.

Since it was a charanga of the Revolution, Formell made it tell things of a new national period, but not in order to make propaganda, but because they were not organically inscribed in the lives of Cubans. The song entitled “De 5 a 7” (From five to seven) was about the two love hours of a couple that attended school in the evening. “La Habana joven” (The young Havana) was a celebration of the teenager student in a  countryside boarding school, who came to the city on weekends, to enjoy the urban life with his beloved:

Juventud es divino tesoro,
Yo soy joven y lo tengo todo:
Una escuela en el campo y un fin
De semana en La Habana,
(Sí señor)
Con mi amada en La Habana
(Cómo no)

(Youth is a divine treasure,
I am young and I have it all
A school in the countryside
and a weekend in Havana.
Yes, Sir,
with my beloved in Havana,
Yes, indeed)

It was Formell´s voice which counterpointed those two phrases (Sí, señor; Cómo no), which were an evocation of Miguel Matamoros, our pure tradition.

Formell did not entitled his songs fortuitously: that was the image of the emerging Havana, and was that of the future.

To be continued...

Translation: Yusimí Rodríguez (Cubarte)