Rubén González
One of the great Cuban pianists — Rubén González was the keyboard voice of the Buena Vista Social Club, a master of the danzón and son piano traditions who played with extraordinary warmth and spontaneity well into his 70s.
About
González spent his career working with major Cuban ensembles including Arsenio Rodríguez's conjunto, but was largely forgotten in Cuba by the 1990s — his piano had gone untuned for years and he had severe arthritis. When Ry Cooder brought him into the Buena Vista sessions, his playing immediately stunned everyone in the room.
His style — rooted in the danzón tradition but incorporating jazz voicings and an improvisational ease — is displayed throughout the Buena Vista recordings and Wim Wenders' documentary. He went on to record several solo albums before his death, documenting a lifetime's worth of accumulated musical intelligence that nearly went unrecorded.
Danzón was the first national dance of Cuba — the form that unified the island's popular music identity in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the ancestor of mambo"> mambo, cha-cha-chá, and ultimately timba"> timba.
Lees meer >Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean and the birthplace of some of the world's most influential music and dance traditions. African, Spanish, and French cultural streams collided here over centuries of colonial history, producing an extraordinary creative culture that exported itself across the globe.
Lees meer >The Casa de la Trova in santiago de cuba"> Santiago de Cuba is the spiritual home of Cuban traditional music — Son, Bolero, Changüí, and Trova. Founded in 1968 on Calle Heredia in the heart of Santiago's historic center, it has been the gathering place for the city's musicians for over half a century.
Lees meer >The Buena Vista Social Club was originally a members' club in Havana's Buena Vista neighborhood, active in the 1940s and 50s as a gathering place for musicians playing Son, Danzón, Bolero, and Guaracha. It closed after the Revolution but was immortalized in 1997 when Ry Cooder brought together a group of surviving veteran musicians to record an album under the same name.
Lees meer >The piano is the harmonic and rhythmic heart of Cuban popular music. In timba"> timba, it is one of the most demanding and expressive instruments in the ensemble.
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