MIAMI, United States.- In the same week, three icons of rock history met in South Florida. Enjoying them is revenge for my thirty years in dictatorship, now that I have just turned thirty, but in freedom.
During these concerts, tears heal and are inevitable when you think of the circumstances we had to discover on our own and sneakily listen to great musicians when they began to dazzle the world through a work now considered classic.
Felix Santiago writes to me on Facebook from Cuba: “What a joy to see and hear real music among so much…bad music. Thank you and greetings from battered Havana.”
These presentations were postponed due to the damn pandemic that stopped our lives for two years. The interpreters always made known the importance of the necessary reunion with the public of massive turnout to attest to the restoration of our social and cultural values.
For the second time I was faced with the sublime and technological majesty of the enfant terrible Roger Waters, bassist and composer, of irrepressible, irreverent and controversial political incorrectness, but capable of reimagining on stage the unparalleled music of the legendary group Pink Floyd.
It is difficult, however, to overcome Waters’ stormy political corollary where not one of the dictators who have devastated so many countries is mentioned, including Cuba, of course, while accusing all contemporary American presidents as war criminals.
The ideological bombardment of impressive screens, where he chooses his dispossessed and victimizers, while dismissing others, also becomes a disturbing day, but when of the 23 songs contained in the concert 17 correspond to the Pink Floyd catalog, the adventure for his ideas of extremes becomes bearable.
The group that accompanies him during this tour entitled This is Not a Drill is impeccable in their versions of classics like Wish You Where Here, Brain Damage, Shine On Your Crazy Diamonds, Eclipse, Run Like Hell and others that continue to fascinate us with its unparalleled charm and philosophical depth.
Paradoxically, the audience that filled the FTX arena in Miami was made up of almost all white people, of various ages, but very few belonged to the “exploited” ethnic groups that Waters defends with so much prosopopeia in his impertinent statements and some songs of recent composition.
I thank you for reminding us and extolling Pink Floyd, in which the rest of the other members of the group will join again one day and please us, relieved of the doctrinal chatter that weighs heavily on us Cubans for obvious reasons. .
The concert at the iTHINK Financial Amphitheater, in West Palm Beach, a less sophisticated place with large open-air green areas where the public enjoys on the grass in blankets or chairs brought for the occasion, the music had to do more with the heart and an almost spiritual joie de vivre.
The Miraculous Supernatural Tour was led by the inimitable Santana, and as a luxury introduction the group Earth, Wind and Fire, who did not act as simple opening acts, but ended up giving a recital to remember with 15 of their irreproachable hits.
Cultivators of the most diverse musical fusions: soul, pop, jazz, funk, under the original category of rhythm and blues, Earth, Wind and Fire brings a message of harmony and happiness since the seventies when they sat down with a music fortunately foreign to the cacophonous and violent current social discourses that dilute the idea of rejoicing.
During performances of Shining Star, Getaway, Sing a Song, Boggie Wonderland, September, as well as one of the most original versions of The Beatles’ Got to Get You Into My Life, people of all races and colors that surrounded me could not sit down and were impelled to dance or move at any cost.
Three of the original members of the group are accompanied by young talents who reproduce the same dream orchestra, a kind of necessary factory of bliss, which continues to lavish desires in the midst of divisions and uncertainty.
Since I arrived in exile, in cultural terms, being able to enjoy Santana was a pending task. In Cuba, dictator Fidel Castro, in order to ingratiate himself with his friend Velasco Alvarado, another intolerable military character, prohibited the dissemination of his music, paradoxically with strong Cuban roots, due, above all, to the twenty-year presence in the group of the percussionist born in Lawton Armando Peraza.
For us, in Havana it was unusual that the strongest and purest rock included texts in Spanish, as well as rhythms that were totally related to us.
After last week’s concert I confess that I still can’t get out of my amazement. At 75 years old, this true god of the guitar, who travels serenely with himself in the time machine since the “countercultural” sixties, continues to weave artistic roots from the most diverse origins in a work unclassifiable for its richness and depth.
22 songs, almost without respite or pause attest to this. What a happy coincidence that he opened the concert with Soul Sacrifice, the same piece that made him known internationally during his legendary performance at Woodstock in 1969.
The review of his work during the concert was exhaustive: Evil Ways, Black Magic Woman, Hey how it goes, Everbody’s is Everything, Europa, No One to Depend On, among others, kept the audience totally absorbed with a message of optimism and hope.
The group’s powerful drummer, Cindy Blackman, is Santana’s wife and the cubanidad is still present through the careful New York-born, Miami-raised guitarist Tommy Anthony, as well as the new conga player, Paoli Mejías, originally from Puerto Rico. Rico, who confesses to being the heir to the percussion of Carlos “Patato” Valdés and Irakere.
Santana was sparing, he dialogued with his music, but he entrusted us to practice happiness. His approach to life remains mystical and valuable. I keep it in my pantheon of light and desires where human improvement does not seem to be a chimera.
OPINION ARTICLE
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