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| Compay Segundo - The Cuban Heroes Collection [ CD ] (2008 г.) |
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Union Square Music Ltd.
ЦЕНА 20.00 BGN |
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Track List
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DE JATIBONICO A BOLONDRON |
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“The flowers of life come to everyone. One has to be ready not to miss them. Mine arrived after I was 90.” Francisco ‘Compay Segundo’ Repilado.
Can any band’s success have been so swiftly and terribly followed by so many obituaries on its members as the Buena Vista Social Club? One of its pre-eminent figures, Francisco Repilado died in July 2003 aged 95. The depth of his mesmerising guitar work and the perfect diction and quavering character in his voice ensured, though, that listeners felt they’d known him all their lives.
In his 90s he was still captivating new audiences around the globe. Tony Bennett or Shirley Bassey serenading festival-goers at Glastonbury simply doesn’t compare. Yet he was 95 when he died, and he had enjoyed a fantastically full existence. In fact, the longevity and indulgence of his life is a metaphor for the enduring beauty of Cuban music in its golden age of the 1940s and ’50s. An era so wonderfully recreated on those Buena Vista recordings of 1997.
Like his colleague on that set, Ibrahim Ferrer, Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz was born in the Caribbean-influenced region of Santiago de Cuba, specifically Siboney, a town immortalised in Ernesto Lecuona’s brooding late-‘20s hit of the same name. The family’s move to the region’s lively, music-drenched capital, Santiago, when Repilado was ten, was his making. Straight away a fine and versatile music student, Repilado joined the municipal band as a clarinet-player at an early age.
Just after the First World War, though, at the age of 14, he was rolling cigar leaves. For the next eight decades he would rarely be seen without a Monetcristo No. 4 in his mouth. Nor without his trademark Panama hat, which lent him the air of a grandee, befitting the son of an Andalucian, but not a poor one like his Spanish railway labourer father. His mother was a freed slave.
By the time his version of ‘Chan Chan’ – perhaps the most intoxicating cut on the Buena Vista project – was establishing itself on the sound systems of cafés, restaurants and homes worldwide in the late ’90s, he was already in his late 80s, but as twinkling as someone half his age. “He has the look of a mischievous boy, and the manners of a British lord,” someone noted. The singer-guitarist himself put his durability down to a diet of rum, women and flowers, as well as the cigars.”
In music, he soon began taking part in civic ceremonies and coming to national attention,
was introduced at an early age to the legendary Trio Matamoros and singer/guitarist - and Siboney boy - Lorenzo Hierrezuela. The latter would prove a rewarding partnership.
His career started to take off in the Thirties with a move to Havana and the formation of the influential Cuarteto Hatuey, led by Evelio Machín, with himself, Hierrezuelo, and Marcelino Guerra, with a tour of Mexico and working on two motion picture soundtracks there. In 1945 he played with the matinée idol of Cuban popular music, Beny Moré. It seemed an inexorable rise, and Repilado was making his mark in other ways. His frustration with the traditional three-stringed Cuban trés and the Spanish guitar led him to create a hybrid that he named the ‘armónico’ (harmonic) or ‘cuatro’ (four) that produced the incisive, but still distinctively rich sound he preferred. Typically, one might say for someone of such legendary libido, it featured an extra G-string. The new sound would find its niche soon enough.
Now Repilado acquired the nickname by which the world would later know him: Compay Segundo. It happened, naturally, through music. In the late 40s, the heyday of US-sponsored playboy Cuba, when RCA was recording in Havana and releasing music that would intoxicate every world port, Repilado hitched up again with Hierrezuelo and formed Los Compadres (close friends). Their deliciously interweaving fret and vocal work swiftly brought them prominence on the island’s national radio, and when one announcer dubbed them Compadre Primo (as in first vocalist Hierrezuelo) and Compadre Segundo (second vocalist, Repilado) the name stuck and was soon eroded by slang to “Compay”.
But like many musicians who witnessed the benefits of Castro's 1959 revolution that saw off the corrupt, Mafia-infested Batista regime, he found his balladic and traditional sound eclipsed by the strident new folk music of the Sixties. State control of the industry often served to stifle creativity, but his work with ‘new troubadour’ Pablo Milanes, some of which figures on this set, still sounds fresh and potent.
Never the less Compay lay down his guitar and returned to rolling cigars at the renowned H. Upmann cigar factory, reckoning to have rolled 150 smokes a day for sale over the next 20 years – and clearly demolishing the myth that the best Cuban exports are rolled on the thighs of virgins.
The tracks on this selection were all recorded at the former RCA, later state-owned Egrem studios in Havana. Naturally there are versions of the Buena Vista highlights, including a delicious ‘Chan Chan’, but also showcasing Repilado’s guitar expertise on ‘El Cuarto De Tula’.
Latin music fans will recognise ‘Francisco Guayabal’, Pío Leiva’s bustling standard that has been a hit for everyone from Beny Moré in the 1950s to Super All-Stars in 1984 and Oscar d’Leon a decade later. Many more were penned by Repilado himself – he was no mere interpreter.
Amparo Repilado, who features on several tunes here, was the replacement for Hierrezuela as her father’s partner. Her four sons Ernesto, Alejandro, Leonardo and Reinier sing with the group Ecos de Siboney in tribute to Cuban music’s classic period.
That is part of the legacy of Buena Vista.
Sierra Maestra bandleader Juan de Marcos González, who coordinated the music side, considered that the album might achieve some reasonable commercial success, selling around 400,000. But the albums sold millions and Compay Segundo became a pop star.
As a result, because of the success of a bunch of ancient musicans and singers, young Cubans returned to the musical heritage for inspiration.
It's now hoped that, like Ecos de Siboney, a new mix of the traditional with the modern will evolve, something contemporary but classic. The harmonies of the present coupled with the swing and roots of the old days. Gonzalez’s own project, Afro-Cuban All Stars, is a template for that syncretism which others are adopting.
It is no doubt an epitaph of which Compay Segundo, the man who waited for his ‘flowers of life’ to come, would approve. As he lay in the funeral parlour in Havana, fellow Buena Vistista Omara Portuondo was moved to suggest that he had meant as much to Cuban music as the national flag does to the Cuban people.
Cuban President Fidel Castro sent a wreath of flowers. Perhaps he should have sent a box of cigars and a bottle of fine rum too. |
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