Haydée Milanés is one of the most versatile musicians of her generation. She is sitting in her living room at home in the Havana municipality of Nuevo Vedado. She’s dressed completely in black wearing a T-shirt with the Russian cartoon characters Bolek and Lolek, so beloved by those born in the ’80s. Next to her is her husband and manager, photographer Alejandro Gutiérrez. They’ve just finished filming some video clips requested by the iTunes platform as promotional material for her new album, Amor Deluxe. We begin our conversation and right away she talks about her father, Pablo Milanés, founder of the Cuban nueva trova (also known as the New Song Movement) and an indispensable singer-songwriter for several generations of Cubans. “I especially remember one afternoon. I sang very softly,” she says, “and I was very shy. I was afraid to sing. We were at a party at my dad’s house with a lot of important musicians. There was a piano player and my dad asked me to sing a song. Then he came up to me in front of everyone to tell me to project my voice, as if he thought nobody was watching us. It was hard, but it...

Habana Abierta was an explosion in the Cuban underground scene. The members of this creative group recorded, after settling in Spain in the 1990s, the album 24 Horas (1999), which was all the rage in Cuba's alternative circuit in pirated copies that went from hand to hand as if they treasured many young Cubans’ personal and shared memory. The album transcended its purely musical fate to become a generational document. It restated the insular reality, endowed it with new symbols and showed the underside of its social dynamics to bring to the surface the multiplicity of anxieties, wants and spiritual needs of thousands of young people, who immediately identified themselves with songs that spoke of that country’s street poetry that generally did not have a foothold in the established discourses. The Habana Abierta phenomenon was growing at the speed of a cruise ship on the island. It did it until it finally became the soundtrack and the booming voice of a generation, as had happened before with albums like Como los peces, by Carlos Varela, or Santiago Feliú's Futuro inmediato, just to mention two discs fairly close in time to the expansion of this band of irreverent globetrotters that was...

There is a song that forever united Isaac Delgado with Celia Cruz. The legendary salsa singer had recorded "La vida es un carnaval" but she didn’t give it prominence in her battle repertoire. However, everything changed suddenly when they surprised her with the news that Issac, from Havana, was turning it into a success that strongly jumped to the first places in the world’s hit parades. "I was on a tour of Europe with Celia and my orchestra. She had recorded the song 'La vida es un carnival,' by Argentine Víctor Daniel, but she did not want to sing it live because it was very long. When I returned to Havana, the musicians in my orchestra encouraged me to perform 'El carnavalito,' as they called the song, during a concert at La Casa de la Música. "I was surprised with its success. So much so, that I played it again at the end of the concert. Then we rapidly went to record it at the Sonocaribe studio of the ICRT and it became a total success. "When Ralph Mercado saw the popularity of the song, he recorded it for Latin America and Celia started singing it," says Isaac, who is...

Cimafunk’s success during his debut in the United States was no surprise. The musician landed after having jam-packed every space that opened its doors to him in the Cuban circuit. It’s a known fact that filling a theater or an open-air square is not, by itself, an example of an artist defending a work of quality that withstands the passage of time. There are many examples of this kind in Cuban music. Cimafunk, however, has managed to combine popularity with a work that, while still taking shape, has shown that he was born with an original creative sense and an interest in being part of something new in the contemporary scene. His repertoire, consisting of his debut album Terapia, was born from his research of the classics of Cuban music history and the reinterpretation of phenomena such as the historical James Brown or Funkadelic. And from that amalgam, developed with full awareness, the work of Cimafunk, who is already recording his second album with the certainty that he himself has set a very high bar and must then be up to the circumstances, has been sustained. Erick Iglesias, who left his name behind along the way to adopt, with a...

Bordering a scarcely paved street, with small houses worn out by the years, is the gallery of Michel Mirabal, one of the Cuban painters with the greatest international projection in the last years. Mirabal decided to set up his studio on the outskirts of the Havana town of Guanabo, on a plot of land where there had been nothing before. Only dust, dirt and a steep slope. He did it for a reason that resides on his roots. He named his studio Finca Calunga. "I was born in a marginal neighborhood. I know what it is to live in a place where there are daily problems. When I started in the world of art and sold my first works I always said that I would love to work with children," Mirabal said to OnCuba in one of the corners of his gallery. "I had a grandfather who always taught me that children are the most important thing. That's why I founded this place to welcome children and young people. This was a mountain where there was nothing and little by little, with a lot of effort, we built this dream that today is a reality," he added. Work by Cuban...

Pablo Milanés arrived on dot at noon at the PM Records studio with his wife, Nancy, to continue the pre-rehearsals of two concerts this Friday and Saturday with Carlos Varela at the Flamingo Theater Bar, Miami. Carlos was waiting for him in his usual black clothes and with a guitar from which he plucks some chords. The meeting seems like a party. Carlitos, as Pablo calls him, makes a few jokes to his friend, who starts to laugh like a child. They hug each other, talk a little about the topics they will review and lock themselves in the studio for almost an hour. The singer-songwriters are separated from the sound table by a glass pane. From the room you can hear Pablo’s and Varela’s songs played indistinctly by both musicians. Those of us who listen to "Como los Peces" in Pablo's voice and "El breve espacio en que no estás" by Carlos Varela, know that what is happening there is something memorable. They are two musicians who have defined the spirit of several generations, each of their songs carries a strong symbolic charge that represents us and continue to stand as testimony of their lives, ours and that of...

The Havana World Music Festival has brought to Havana bands and artists with a rigorous proposal far removed from the commercial patterns of the industry and the massive entertainment circuit. This event has been an oasis in the middle of a cultural panorama where artists are hardly promoted with a work based on alternative concepts and discourses, which could expand the perspective on the most diverse paths of creation among many Cubans. The festival has managed to gradually consolidate itself and show that it can almost be inserted in the international circuit of events of this nature and place Cuba on the tour program of many bands of international caliber, something that spectators and local music lovers have been demanding for decades. In this edition, the program included a series of bands that performed shows full of adrenaline, combined with high-sounding and original sound mixes. Brazilians Francisco el Hombre and the veteran Californian band Ozomatli climbed to the top of that list, with a couple of concerts that crowned Havana nights. The Brazilians were a flood of energy. It seemed that from one moment to another they were going to explode on stage. In the middle of their show they...

Tomas Piard was a filmmaker who made no concessions. He got behind the cameras as if it were a method to survive and a way to bring to the limit what can be understood as freedom of expression in the cinematographic sphere. Influenced by the aesthetics of surrealism, Piard belonged to that class of filmmakers who could be considered a maker of "cult" movies. His work was especially for those who face cinema to try to decipher the most hidden mysteries of life and enjoy the harshness and spiritual conflicts that this process can entail, that exchange between the filmmaker and the spectators, between his way of interpreting the most hermetic aspects of life and reality. Piard was a filmmaker who lived according to his own rules, with his own time and based on that he exercised a profession he began in the 1970s and which he assumed, as we said, as a profession of faith. He was witness to the most tremendous and complex eras of Cuban cinema and from his uniqueness he knew how to find the formulas to direct films that helped expand the conceptual themes and artistic horizons of national cinema. In his creative record we...

The Spanish Andy y Lucas duo, which reached high levels of popularity during the past decade, will perform in Havana as part of the festival A bridge to Havana 2019, from April 22 to 29. Well known for songs like “Son de amores,” which climbed to first place on the list of Latin music hits produced by the U.S. magazine Billboard, and "Tanto la quería” and "En tú ventana," the duo will be one of the groups with the greatest drive of the festival’s program. Organized by singer and director of the Karamba group Jorge Luis Robaina, the event’s participants will include, among others, Nassiry Lugo, the vocalist of Moneda Dura, who returned to Cuba with his band after seven years of absence. The Cadiz musicians sold close to 600,000 copies of their album titled Andy y Lucas and soon released records like Andy y Lucas en su salsa and Desde mi barrio. Already at the time the duo was considered a breath of fresh air on the Spanish scene with their rhythms straddling flamenco, pop and rap and they began "invading" the U.S. market with remarkable success. https://youtu.be/n-zHCwxtpec The group was able to surpass the forecasts that considered them another...

  The life of Omara Portuondo tells part of the history of Cuban music. She captured the intensity of Havana nights during their reign in the birth of the feeling with the D’Aida Quartet, she turned the famous Tropicana Cabaret into her own paradise before a public that could not take their eyes off of her when she interpreted those songs full of glamor and hopeless loves, and she installed herself in the front row of the revival of traditional music with the Buena Vista Social Club. At 86, Omara has a ritual that accompanies her like a religion. Every morning she looks at the seaside drive from her apartment and she takes the sun if “the agenda allows it.” “On the other hand, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink and I always try to take care of my health,” commented to OnCuba the so-called Bride of the feeling, a title she earned during her long seasons in clubs, cabarets and any place that allowed her to sing those songs that have become live chronicles of bohemian Havana. Omara, living legend, does not feel the stabs of nostalgia. She has lost close friends, she has had to reinvent herself several...

Legends of the American and Cuban music will join in concert on April 30 at the Great Theater of Havana to commemorate the International Jazz Day, organized by Thelonius Monk Institute, the Cuban Institute of Music and UNESCO. The Cuban capital will be the main stage of a celebration hosted in previous years by cities such as Osaka, Paris and Washington. The poster for this 2017 – which other musicians could join in the next few days - is headed by the giants Herbie Hancock and Chucho Valdés, and integrated by other jazz greats such as Antonio Sánchez, Marcus Miller, Richard Bona and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Herbie Hancock is one of the most prominent jazz musicians in the United States. His innovative style and continued interest in experimentation led him to pursue a revolution in American jazz in the 1960s, with revamping languages ​​with which he embraced the freedom of jazz and sharpened his creative talent alongside giants like Miles Davis, that pioneer who gave meaning to the term of “fusion“ and united the languages ​​of jazz and rock. Herbie Hancock. Foto: www.mehysocks.com Over the years, this pianist and composer has expanded the American sonorous universe by collaborating with exponents of...

The Trovuntitis is one of the groups of larger size, recognition and quality in the panorama of contemporary Cuban music. But these attributes didn’t come from heaven. The truth is that these young musicians, based in the city of Santa Clara, have stayed in the tracks on the so-called “smart song” with high creative proposals in which poetry and music come together in a natural way.