Santiago de Cuba: La Reina del ‘Son’

Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city on the gorgeous, beleaguered Caribbean island. The capital of the Santiago de Cuba province in the southeastern area of the island, it’s the city where the revolution started, where the national hero José Marti is buried and where son – the heady fusion of Spanish and African rhythms, and the precursor to salsa – was born. Thanks to Nick Gold, Ry Cooder and Juan de Marcos González, the triumvirate that brought the Buena Vista Social Club out of Havana in 1996, many of us know our son from our guaracha, our nueva trova from our chachachá. But back in 1992, a French ethnomusicologist named Francois Jouffa had been advised by his friend and colleague Francois Missen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and Cubaphile, to record musical traditions among elderly Santiagueros. Jouffa pitched up in Cuba at a point when the periodo especial, the era of economic crisis and bare-bones austerity that began in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was at its most intense. Whether that helps explain the intensity of the playing of each of the seven orchestras captured on this disc is debatable. But for 79 minutes, with songs grouped in pairs, there’s an immediacy that is spellbinding, that commands an active listen. Here is Septeto Tipico Oriental, delivering the bolero son ‘Dulce Embeleso’ by the 1930s great Miguel Matamoros, and the guitar-and-bongo-led guaracha ‘Cochero’ by Marcelino Guerra. Here are Conga De Los Hoyos doing ‘La Guantanamera’ carnival-style, with bells, drums and Chinese trumpets before launching into a fittingly raucous ‘El Paralitico’. Raw, attention-grabbing stuff.