South American music and culture magazine

In the sheltered inner rooms of an old Havana house, an earthy philosopher plucks melodies and rhythms from the air and from Cuban music’s rich soil. Working alone or with close friends and relatives, he turns dances from the sugar cane fields and troubadour trills into magical realist declarations of liberty, as grandchildren dash in and out, and chicken grills out on the veranda. Continue Reading

A haiku, as poet Octavio Paz put it, is lived poetry. For Yusa, the Cuban singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, this means the swaying of the sea, the hue and cry of the city, a toy’s rattle, a loved one’s dreams. Compared to everyone from Joan Armatrading to Erykah Badu, Yusa captures the intimate poetry lived in the changing, imminently musical Havana on her latest album Haiku (Tumi Music).
Continue Reading

Dancer and percussionist Max Pollak has performed for Fidel Castro one night and rural Cuban sugar workers the next. He has painstakingly transcribed a Mongo Santamaria timbales solo for six tap dancers and has traded moves (and shoes) with Cuba’s rumba masters. It all started when Pollak realized he not only wanted to play Afro-Cuban music, he wanted to dance it. Not dance to it; but audibly create the rhythms with his feet and hands. It’s as if Fred Astaire fell into perfect step with the Santería orishas.
Continue Reading

“He’s like Marvin Gaye, singing soul to a new generation…” – Boston Globe

“You’ll fall in love with Cuba’s untamed voice. Even if you don’t understand a lick of what he’s saying, you’ll feel him.” – New York Post

Mangoes sprouting in the tundra. The new face of Latin soul thriving in a hamlet a day’s drive north of Vancouver, British Columbia. This is the story of guitarist, singer, and songwriter Alex Cuba, who came into his musical own in the Canadian north and whose Cuban soul rock power trio flies in the face of conventional notions of what Latin music can be: gentle, hip, wry, and uplifting, with a twist of funk where Marvin Gaye meets Jaco Pastorius.
Continue Reading

There aren’t many people who can claim to have cut their musical teeth while traveling worldwide as a fisherman, been blasted onto national television as part of a taxi-driver’s collective of musicians, and had a government agency land them a gig playing for one of the top Cuban son bands of their era.  Tito Gonzales spent his young life walkabout, picking up guitar licks around the rim of the sea thanks to a Cuban-run company that sent fisherman like him far and wide to find the catch. The open water swept him into the urban narrows, and, back on dry land, he traded up for the sound of the tres (small Cuban guitar) and the Cuban son, yet his talent only led him to ordinary labor. Fate had in store for him a different destiny, a rapid ascendance from cabbie to celebrity and star of the Cuban music scene. Now, with a new life in San Francisco and the songwriter’s freedom to experiment and story-tell, Tito, a consummate master of Cuban traditional music, brings a fresh sound to a lifetime of experience. His new album, Al doblar la esquina, features a fresh take on classic Cuban son backed up by exile talent in his band, the “Son de Cuba.”
Continue Reading