Buena Vista Social Club. 1997

By | Published Sunday, December 16, 2012





















Listening to Buena Vista Social Club while drinking Port wine is an experience in itself but it can get a lot better when the whole thing takes place in a bar like the one above. It is not about political ideologies, it’s just about being able to touch a little bit of history, it’s just about something that cannot be put into words.
But getting back to Buena Vista Social Club, it was a social club like many others where people would gather to meet friends. Nearly 50 years after its closure its name inspired a very special album, an album that reached wide popularity against all odds. Juan de Marcos González, a Cuban musician and band leader, and the American guitarist Ry Cooder met with some traditional Cuban musicians, some of them past members from the aforementioned social club, to do some recording sessions. The result came out in 1997.  
Two years later a documentary film of the same name by Wim Wenders about the traditional music from Cuba was also released.  

As Cuban revolutions go, it was an entirely peaceable uprising - but its impact could not have been more profound. On the release of the Buena Vista Social Club album in 1997, few outside the specialist world music audience initially took much notice of the record's elegantly sculpted tunes and warm, acoustic rhythms. Then something extraordinary occurred. The album was spectacularly reviewed by a few discerning critics, but although their words of praise did Buena Vista's cause no harm, they cannot explain what subsequently happened. Good reviews create an early surge in sales, but unless it's a big pop release sustained by an expensive TV advertising campaign, the established pattern is that interest then slowly tails off. Instead, Buena Vista's sales figures kept steadily rising week by week, building almost entirely by word-of-mouth until it achieved critical mass: all who heard the record not only fell in love with Buena Vista's irresistible magic, but were then inspired to play or recommend the album to everyone they knew. It was one of those rare records that transcended the vagaries of fad and fashion to sound timeless but utterly fresh. Once you heard it, you had to have a heart of stone not to be swept away by the music's romantic impulses and uninhibited exuberance.
 
Listen to Chan Chan, a music composed by Compay Segundo. 





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