Rubén Blades is a renowned vocalist, one of the emblematic salsa singer-songwriters of the seventies. But he is not as well known for his achievements in other disciplines: he is also a composer, Broadway and Hollywood actor; He has a master’s degree from Harvard Law School and was once a presidential candidate in his native Panama. And don’t you dare say he can’t swing like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett.
“In many ways we are still segregated when it comes to music,” Blades, 72, said on a video call from his home in Manhattan. Apart from a few gray hairs on his beard, not much has changed, he is even dressed in his trademark style: all in black with the hat that he never takes off. “People believe that if you are a salsero, that is what you are going to do all your life. It is as if you are a horse, that walks with blinders to only see a path, and I do not use them. For me, music is subversive, because art is subversive. You change things ”.
Blades’ ambitious new project with the Panamanian leader of a jazz orchestra, Roberto Delgado, celebrates the fruits of evolution and cultural miscegenation: the links between jazz and Afro-Cuban music. During the month of April, it was released in three packages: Salswing!, an 11-track album that freely mixes salsa classics like “Paula C.” and “Tambó” with standard jazz pieces, for example, “Pennies From Heaven” and “The Way You Look Tonight”; plus “Salsa Plus!” and “Swing!”, which highlight the tracks of the genres to which they allude.
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–Jazz has flowed through Blades’ work for a long time, longer than his fans realize. “Pedro Navaja”, possibly the most popular salsa song, is known for being a piece that the radio industry did not like at first. According to Blades, a trio of top DJs told him that Sowing, the 1978 album in which that song is included, and the one he recorded with trombonist and arranger Willie Colón, would ruin the latter’s career. The song was actually inspired by “Mack the Knife” from the musical drama. The three cent opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. As a young man in Panama, Blades had fallen in love with the successful performance of Bronx native Bobby Darin.
“I heard that version in 1959, I really liked his emotion, his attitude, his insolence,” said Blades.
Blades’ wife, Luba Mason, an also very eclectic jazz singer who he met when they both participated in the short-lived musical The Capeman by Paul Simon, argues that Blades’ mother, Anoland Díaz, is responsible for his passion for show music. “She loved the theater, playing the piano and singing,” he said. “I was a classical pianist for 13 years and I think that when he found out that, he remembered her.”
While Blades’ interest in recording in English dates back to Nothing but the Truth 1988, which includes collaborations with Elvis Costello, Lou Reed and Sting, the project of Salswing! It has its roots in a concert he gave in November 2014 with Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
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–“It had always been making Wynton dizzy with Afro-Caribbean music and he started to like it more and more,” said Carlos Henríquez, the bassist and musical director of the orchestra’s cultural exchange with the Cuban Institute of Music in 2010. I said, look, we could do all of this with Latin music and swing, and the vocalist we should work with is Rubén Blades ”.
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–For the 2014 show, in which Blades sang Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” alongside Hector Lavoe’s standard, Blades wrote, “The singer,” and with that piece he began to use the term “mixture. ”To refer to the hybridity with Latin music. Blades’s mixture is emblematic of how many artists and intellectuals have viewed Latin American culture in general: a stratified conglomeration of racial and cultural influences, an identity defined by difference. He considers himself a kind of Creole receptacle for voices from Panama, Havana and New York (the residential and business areas).
“The connection between jazz and Afro-Cuban music is very well documented,” said Blades, whose grandfather was born in Louisiana and moved to Havana to fight in Cuba’s War of Independence. The exchange of musical knowledge between New Orleans and Havana was crucial for the development of jazz and Afro-Cuban music. New Orleans – which is also Marsalis’ hometown – was “a melting pot of Cuban, French, Haitian, African-American and even Mexican musical influences,” Henríquez said. Ragtime jazz pianist and arranger Jelly Roll Morton claimed in an Alan Lomax recording that he often played with a “Spanish tinge,” actually referring to incorporating a Cuban rhythm called habanera.
Latin American musicians have also played a pivotal role in the development of jazz throughout the decades: The Harlem Hellfighters, a WWI infantry unit that became a jazz-oriented army band, was formed by a third of Afro-Puerto Ricans. Mario Bauzá, a transplanted Afro-Cuban, worked with Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Dizzy Gillespie. And avant-garde saxophonist Eric Dolphy was a Panamanian immigrant. “Luis Russell, a Panamanian pianist, was with Louis Armstrong for years,” Blades also noted.
It is becoming increasingly clear that a dominant aspect of the mixture is blackness. Afro-Puerto Rican figures have been fundamental in Blades’ career and in salsa. Blades has spoken of the singer Cheo Feliciano as his main influence. He has praised Tito Curet Alonso as the master composer of the genre. And in Salswing!, it included an energetic version of “Tambó” by Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, which is a tribute to African drums.
“Understanding the African drum is what allows you to play both styles,” said Henríquez.
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–On Salswing!, Blades creatively navigates the intersection between the last days of flamboyant and ultra-modern jazz orchestras and the austere salsa of the recessionary era. He sticks to his characteristic sonero style who sings staccato in his versions of “Contrabando” and “Tambó”, but in the bolero “Ya no me pale”, some of the higher register scats slip in, almost like Ella’s. Fitzgerald, who also does on “The Way You Look Tonight” and “Pennies From Heaven.”
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–The album also includes swing standards with elegant arrangements, such as “Paula C.”, a chronicle of a love breakup from one of Blades’ first mature relationships. He wrote it shortly after he arrived in New York in the mid-1970s, when he was working in the mailroom at Fania Records – known as the Motown of salsa – and subletting an apartment from Leon Gast, director of the classic salsa documentary. Our Latin Thing.
“It was a very inspiring time, in terms of creativity,” recalled Blades, alluding to the booming music scene of jazz and salsa. “Everyone was in their prime then, industrial zone punk rock was exploding, and you could still go to Tad’s Steaks and order a steak with potatoes and an ear of corn for $ 1.99.”
Although the material of Salswing! It has much of a retrospective, Blades remains very committed to the present and is dedicated to carrying out projects with singers he admires. He just finished a song with the revered Cuban vocalist Omara Portuondo, the effervescent Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade and the Argentine rocker León Gieco. And after a pre-pandemic concert in Puerto Rico, he even had the opportunity to sell an idea to one of the world’s biggest pop stars: Bad Bunny.
“We played three and a half hours and he arrived with his mother and father,” says Blades. “He was very respectful, not only to me, but to his parents. And then I asked him, in front of his dad: ‘Listen, I have a mortgage to pay, why don’t we do something?’ And they all laughed ”.
“He thought I was joking,” he added, “but he wasn’t.”
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