Did you look for controversy, ‘likes’ or promotion for your products? Will you have a chronic problem of bad taste?
Havana, Cuba. – The Italian Roberto Ferrante, of Planet Records, who attributes the dubious merit to have revolutionized the scene of Latin American music by force of Autotune and monotonous sequenced rhythms, exaggerated in the euphoria by ensuring his protected Oniel Babeshito which is the greatest Cuban artist, above Celia Cruz and Benny Moré.
Did you look for a controversial ferrant, Likes or promotion for your products? Will you have a chronic problem of bad taste? Is it supine ignorance about Cuban music that led him to say nonsense?
If this is the latter, I would suggest listening to these interpreters of Cuban music, really great. They are only 10. They would miss, among others, snowball, María Teresa Vera, Rita Montaner, Chano Pozo, Dámaso Pérez Prado, Adalberto Álvarez … many more fit on the list. But among them, I would not be remotely baby.
In my opinion, more or less in this order, they would be:
1-Cruz Culture
The Guarachera de Cuba. The Queen of Salsa. The most universal of the Cuban singers walked the son and the Guaracha around the world. Although the Castro regime wanted to none because of it “an icon of the counterrevolution”, Celia’s interpretive style has influenced many of today’s best Cuban singers, as Haila, Vania Borges, Osdalgia, Tania Pantoja and Ivette Ceped the major diva of the Son.
2-Benny Moré
The older soner. A genius of popular music, who without knowing how to read or write music, composed and spectacularly a jazz-band with all of the law, his giant band. Versatile and charismatic in his presentations, he interpreted, printing his personal seal, all the genres of Cuban popular music. No one like him sang the boleros with such a bomb.
3-Lecuona Ornesto
The greatest of Cuban composers. Virtuoso of the piano, was one of the first to cross the line between the so -called cultured and popular music: the same played accompanied by a symphonic orchestra than by the Cuban Boys Lecuona. Extremely prolific and versatile, he composed 406 songs, 53 works for the lyric theater, more than 100 pieces for piano and 35 for orchestra, and music for five ballets and 12 films.
4-Silvio Rodríguez
One of the founding parents of the new trova. For the poetic texts of his songs, contained in the twenty records he has recorded since the end of the 1960s to the present, he is considered – even for those who reproach him to have become a propaganda vehicle of Castroism – one of the most important singer -songwriters in Latin America.
4-Milanés Pablo
The other father of the new trova. Singer of excellence, with a harmoniously privileged voice, was also a magnificent interpreter of boleros and filin. He made wonderful duos with several of the best interpreters in Latin America, such as Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquín Sabina and Mercedes Sosa, among others.
5-Juan form
When in 1969 he left the Elio Revé orchestra, where he played the bass, and founded his own orchestra, Los Van Van, revolutionized Cuban dance music by incorporating trombones and electronic instruments into the format of the traditional charanga. The lyrics of his catchy songs were true chronicles of life in Cuba. Despite his death, which occurred in 2014, his orchestra, known as “El Train”, continues to be the favorite of Cuban dancers.
6-Chucho Valdés
As a pianist and composer he beat his father, the great Bebo Valdés, the creator of the Batanga rhythm. In 1972 he created the Irakere group, a superband that mixed Afro -Cuban rhythms with jazz and rock. Irakere and Van Van are the most important phenomena of Cuban music in the last six decades. In Irakere there were several of the best Jazz Cuban musicians, such as the saxophonist Paquito d’Entra and the trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. Chucho, in addition to being one of the most important cultors of Latin Jazz, is considered one of the best jazz pianists in the world.
7 -olga Guillot
She is considered the best boleros singer that Spanish America has given. Everything that sang, by force of emotion and the rhythm that imposed him, made him bolero. Like when he sang the songs of Armando Manzanero, Filin’s songs or mainly, the number that identified her and that nobody sang like her: Like me more. According to Cabrera Infante, “La Guillot is the spirit of the bolero as Billie Holliday was the spirit of the blues.”
8-Second Compay
His real name was Francisco repilad. He began by making the second voice to Lorenzo Hierrezuelo in the Los Compadres duo. At the end of the 1990s, he reached international fame as part of the Buenavist Rolling Stone). His song Chan Chan It is heard throughout the world. He stayed singing until his death, when he was 95 years old.
9- Arsenio Rodríguez
Nicknamed “The Wonderful Blind” was the best interpreter of the three. The incorporation of trumpets into the team that directed revolutionized the way of playing the son and would lay the foundations of what decades would be salsa music. Composed more than 200 songs, including The cassava of Catalina, The shepherd watch, Bruca Maniguáand the best known, Life is a dream.
10-Polo Montañez
The short career in the music of the natural guajiro was a fairy tale set in the special period. A foreign musical businessman discovered him in the Lomas de Pinar del Río and threw him to international fame. In a country where most men presume bond, dared to confess in the most popular of their songs: “In love I am an idiot that I have suffered a thousand defeats.” In the Cuban songbook, One million stars It is the apotheosis of the gallant antihero. The songs of Polo Montañez with his naive poetry instead of searches and philosophical claims, were a breath of freshness and sincerity in Cuban music, saturated with deep singer -songwriters and Chabacan salsa.
