If there is one enduring external influence on the rich world of African music, it is the music of Cuba. In Africa, Cuban songs carried back to the continent by returned slaves fused with the rhythms that their ancestors had taken on the reverse journey. The English-speaking world was, in this respect, light years behind everyone else in discovering Cuban music and its pioneers. The success of these two old masters is remarkable only for the fact that it took so long. Alongside her extraordinary voice, she will be remembered for her flamboyance, her wigs and costumes and her trademark cry of ‘azucar!’ (sugar). Her popularity also derived from an astonishing repertoire which filled more than 70 albums and won countless awards. Instead she forged a career playing the memories of the large Cuban exile population, who were drawn to her in part for her strong anti-Castro stance. Unlike Compay Segundo, Celia Cruz didn’t like the ‘new guy’, Fidel Castro, and fled Cuba in 1959. Celia Cruz was less known than Compay Segundo outside the Spanish-speaking world, but was nonetheless the undisputed queen of salsa, more responsible than anyone for the genre’s popularity-a Latin-American Aretha Franklin or Ella Fitzgerald. Within days of Compay Segundo’s death, Cuban music suffered another loss. That’s when we had the really bad times.’ Ry Cooder, who helped spark the Buena Vista success story, asked him about politics in the late 1990s. This grandson of a freed slave lived a life of excess and was loved all the more for his abilities as a raconteur, for his role as a ‘great connoisseur of female energy’, and for his panama hats always tilted at a rakish angle.įor Compay Segundo music and the good life it engendered were everything and when he spoke about politics it was with his customary wit. He also wrote the song ‘Chan Chan’, which became Buena Vista Social Club’s unofficial anthem. It was the reward for a man who had known no other life than making music, even inventing his own guitar-the seven-stringed ‘armonica’-because he found normal guitars too restricting for the mellifluous Cuban son rhythms and melodies that filled his head. Mine arrived after I was 90.’Īs leader of the veteran musicians he became a cult figure, even starring in an acclaimed documentary about the group. When he was interviewed recently, he said: ‘The flowers of life come to everyone. A musician all his life, he did not become famous until in his nineties as the spiritual leader and charismatic soul of the worldwide phenomenon, the Buena Vista Social Club. In a music industry dominated by teen bands and the quest for the next young starlet, Compay Segundo was a refreshing anomaly. The first to die was Compay Segundo, aged 95. Both were Cuban and both were heroes of their people, even as they represented two wholly disparate strands of Cuban society. In one week in July this year, two of the greatest personalities of world music died.
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