It was different for me with the Africans, because they play in three-four time while we, the West, play 1, 2, 3, 4. It made me wonder what was going to happen. Are the Africans going to convert to clave? But I said, sure, whatever happens. And my wife, [son and drummer] Joaquim and I got on a plane and we went down. Originally we had a straight-ahead guitar album in mind. We fell in synch with our love for Arsenio Rodriguez.
They said it was a lost passport, although the account is disputed. Cooder: To get in [to Cuba], those days you had to come in from Mexico. We arrived at around p. I had my quartet, Cuarteto Patria, since , and was always working. They had kind of drifted away from art.
Gold : Egrem recording studio was way beyond my dreams. You walk off the street straight through these doors, through these winding stairs, and you walk into this studio which is a real crucible of Cuban music. It was just a beautiful looking room: large, wooden floors, wooden ceiling, with these funny looking wooden chairs. The actual room was very large, and the control room had a British console. On the first day of recording, the equipment went down and it was taken apart by the engineers and I was almost in tears.
Cooder: We kept having to move the grand piano away from the leaks in the roof. The other thing was, the electricity was bad. That draws a lot of power. The tape machine kept changing speed. The board operator figured out that the entire booth was going through one socket in the wall, the kind of thing you would plug your toaster in. The maintenance guy said no one ever complained about this before. At that time the group had kind of settled around the piano, and the room begins to talk to you.
A group is a group and you need to hear the group. So we had to back off the mike, as if it were classical music. You needed that mind and that voice and that feeling. It was a miracle. I would call out a song, Ibrahim did the chorus, Compay sang, Ry and Nick would listen and choose.
We recorded songs. Of course, no one said anything. Can you imagine telling Compay not to smoke? But we realized pretty early on something extraordinary was happening in the studio. How they were playing together in the room was just beautiful. It was a small ensemble and they just made this beautiful sound — and sitting in the room with them was gorgeous. Here, the songs were known. We had great players. Fantastic players. Cubans, their music is based on the ensemble concept, so we recorded them together.
Egrem was built for groups. Gold : It really clicked when we went back in the control room, and it sounded exactly the same.
It sounded like you were with the musicians. We did it in one take and everyone realized: This is important work. It was a difficult time. It was after the Soviet collapse and it was not easy. So within that, this magic was happening and people worked very, very hard. I was there just over two weeks. It was an album that was going to be important and we were so happy to do an album with a Brit and an American.
Is it good? Nick Gold : At the time, World Circuit was three of us, and up until then we had been releasing on this very carefully thought-out network of independent distributors. We essentially tried to continue doing that, but in America we went to Nonesuch.
I met with them just as I was going to record with Buena Vista, and they were interested not in the thing that became this phenomenon but in the smaller audience of the African project. The cause of death was not immediately known, but the diminutive musician had been in failing health in recent years, wracked by arthritis and suffering memory loss. He was a very kinetic player, very high energy, and had that very animated quality that Cuban musicians have Some people can play fast, some people can play loud, some people can play sad, some people can play scary, but this dancing quality, for me, has something to do with your character.
He was a happy man, Ruben. Cheerful, happy, laughing. Gonzalez was born in in Santa Clara, in central Cuba. He started working as a full-time musician in , the dawn of a golden era in Cuban music. His career would span six decades, marked by bright accomplishments and long periods of disillusionment. Gonzalez played with some of the greats in the history of Cuban music, including Arsenio Rodriguez, the legendary blind bandleader who popularized and updated the traditional son style in the s, and Enrique Jorrin, who created the cha-cha-cha in the s.
The work was not all glamorous. Gonzalez once recalled he played nightclubs in the old days from 9 p. The regimen kept his mind and fingers nimble. In , Gonzalez was featured on a series of recording sessions by Las Estrellas de Areito, an all-star Cuban lineup of the day. Prized by connoisseurs, the albums were recently reissued by World Circuit, the label behind the Buena Vista craze.
He soon retired on a pension and stopped playing. His piano crumbled after 60 years of faithful use, victim to rain, rot and termites.
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