Remember "Buena Vista Social Club," the album? Even if you don't, now there's "Buena Vista Social Club," the musical, an exuberant blast from the past – old Cuban music for a new audience.The Broadway version is a stand-in for the city's corroded grandeur, and for the studio where, in 1996, a group of old, mostly forgotten Cuban musicians recorded the album.Justin Cunningham, as Juan de Marcos: "What follows is the story of a band.
Not ours, though we will do our best.Some of what follows is true.
Some of it only feels true." The true part: the real person this actor is playing, Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, had already located and brought together the old musicians before music producers Ry Cooder and Nick Gold showed up in Havana.When their plan to make an album pairing Cuban and West African performers fell through, they went with Plan B, and recorded with the group Juan de Marcos had assembled."I was so happy, because they were my idols," Juan said.
"You know, I grew up with, you know, listening to their music.And then suddenly, I was the bandleader."I asked, "Did any of the people involved, including you, have any idea that what became 'Buena Vista Social Club' would be something big?" "No," he replied.
"They became pop stars.It was like an unbelievable thing."The unexpected and irresistible phenomenon that resulted is the subject of the Oscar-nominated 1999 Wim Wenders documentary.
"It was just ubiquitous; I mean, you would hear this music everywhere," said music journalist and Substack contributor Judy Cantor-Navas, the author of "Cuba on Record." "To say that, 'Yes, we're listening to this old Cuban music that is suddenly selling millions of albums,' seemed like something that was very unlikely."I asked, "Why do you think people loved the music so much?" "Cuban music has really appealed to so many different kinds of people," said Cantor-Navas."They say that it has, you know, the perfect combination of the Afro-Cuban rhythms ...