Before Buena Vista: The Early Versions of "Social Club" Songs
Folk singers, big bands & Afro-Cuban jazz.
"There's a trance you get into [with traditional Cuban music] and it feels good like drugs or liquor or cigars,” Ry Cooder told me during an interview in 1998. “It's hypnotic. The thing about Cubans is that they're not bound up, they're really released in a good way. These songs are like Persian miniatures in ivory, perfectly detailed stories about feeling good, and being kind of greasy and horny all the time."
While I’d say that Cuban songs are about a lot more than being “greasy and horny,” I love this quote. And I feel what Cooder meant and how vividly he described how the songs on the biggest-selling Cuban album of all time made him feel. That’s the album he produced and played some guitar on. Buena Vista Social Club.
Those familiar songs are coming back again. A new Broadway musical titled (sí ) Buena Vista Social Club premiered on February 21 at the Schoenfeld Theatre. Cooder is not involved. But John Leguizamo is a producer. And, great news, Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos González, who selected the songs that for him were already classics when he brought them to the famous American guitarist and rounded up the artists for the BV album, is consulting.
I haven’t see the show yet. I didn’t catch it when it played Off-Broadway, but from what I’ve gathered is it’s kind of a prequel, going back to the days when the group’s oldtimers were, well, not old. When those songs that Buena Vista reprised were first recorded by other artists. Or in some cases, even by the same artists as young men. And woman. A young Omara Portuondo.
The show goes back to the 1940s and fifties, when a lot of the same songs that later ended up being covered for the Buena Vista Social Club were being recorded in Havana’s Panart studio. The same analogue studio where Buena Vista was recorded in 1996.
In those mad times for music in Havana, as we can hear now in different versions, everyone, from folk singers to big bands and jazz cats, Afro-Cuban percussionists and lounge lizards were competing to make those songs their own. To have the hit.
Here are early takes by different artists of ten songs that were later featured on the original Buena Vista Social Club album and subsequent recordings by its artists, and the stories behind them: