The disc Pa ‘my three, by the singer and tres player Yartima Blanco, was presented in Havana by the EGREM label.
The phonogram includes 12 unpublished songs of his authorship, and of other Cuban composers such as Yunior Molina, César Lozada and Juan Antonio Gil, who review the repertoire of traditional and popular music.
Under the musical production Roniel Alfonso Mella, winner of a Grammy award, the album featured artists such as maestro Pancho Amat, Alain Pérez, Kelvis Ochoa, Rolando Luna and Bárbara Zamora, among others. Pancho Amat, who was in charge of the words on the album, indicated: «As a woman we should not fall into the trap of sentimentality and give her complacent applause only because of her feminine condition. Let’s look through a microscope and without indulgence at her way of playing and we will come to the conclusion that we are in the presence of an outstanding performer who, moreover, treasures a wealth of talent that, due to her youth, should make her grow even more as an artist».
Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte, Yarima Blanco has thoroughly studied the possibilities of the tres and has relied on the teachings and experience of the tres player Efraín Amador, one of the main cultivators of that instrument in Cuba, in her preparation.
It is essential to talk about the orchestrations. Roniel Alfonso, music producer and arranger of most of the songs (role shared by César Lozada in “Dos con Tres”, Tomás Pérez in “Muda mi alma” and Yarima herself, Yunior Molina and Yusmel Reyes in “Quien no ha wanted” and «Bad memory») manages to make the classic Septet appear here enriched and rejuvenated at the same time, reaching more contemporary and imaginative sonorities», indicates the press release.
«Yarima and Yusmel Reyes, the other vocalist of the group, complement the work reaching a functional and complete support so that the themes of the album and the work of the guest instrumentalists and singers flow. All of them, as a whole, contribute new nuances that contribute to beautifully color the final sound”, added the text.
Yarima Blanco is the founder and director of the Son Latino group, made up of seven musicians, a format with which she delves into a varied range of Latin and Caribbean rhythms.
The instrumentalist declared last year in an interview with OnCuba that he adopted the three for the facilities it offers him to express himself.
«The tres gives many opportunities to express yourself, despite the fact that it is a single instrument, each instrumentalist interprets it with a different discourse when improvising. Anyone is going to make you a totally different improvisation of the same song. At the same time I am very interested in being able to insert the instrument in different genres. Not only classifying it in what is known internationally as Cuban music, the son, the guaguancó, the changüí, the guaracha; but to incorporate other genres such as jazz, timba, cumbia. The instrument gives you all the possibilities and timbre-wise it adapts very well to any genre, even reggaeton”, he indicated.
The artist recently participated with her group in the prestigious Womex festival, in Porto, Portugal, as a beneficiary of the Transcultura project of UNESCO, of the European Union.
