How Dizzy Gillespie and U.S. V.P. Dan Quayle’s Business Card Saved A Great Cuban Trumpeter
Posted June 6, 2016
by Tom Schnabel
It’s not easy to be a jazz musician – or anything but a classical musician - in Cuba. It’s like the former Soviet Union, where jazz was forbidden and banned. Stalin sent Russia’s Louis Armstrong, Eddie Rosner, to the gulag (Soviet jazz fans called Satchmo the American Eddie Rosner). It’s hard enough to even get a decent instrument if you’re a young Cuban musician; and since you have to learn classical music exclusively, try to make Bach sound good on a crappy old Petrof piano.
Orlando Valle, aka Maraca, the fabulous Cuban flute player, once told me that he had to spend ten years playing only Bach and Mozart, which only increased his love and fascination with the forbidden fruit known as jazz. Castro closed down the casinos and nightclubs where popular musicians earned their keep. Bebo Valdes, patriarch of a Cuban piano dynasty, left his job as pianist and music director of the swank Tropicana nightclub in Havana, moving to Sweden, where for years he was forgotten, earning a living as a cocktail pianist in a hotel. Beny More, the great Cuban singer, left for Mexico. Ibrahim Ferrer, vocalist with the Buena Vista Social Club, was shining shoes to get by before Ry Cooder and Nick Gold put the band together in the mid-1990′s.
Although many Cuban musicians such as Celia Cruz and mambo king Israel “Cachao” Lopez left la isla for the U.S. early on, it became more and more difficult for musicians to emigrate to the U.S. as Cuban leaders tightened the noose on dissidents and musicians parting from the classical norm. Two of the highest-profile musicians who defected were clarinetist/saxophonist Paquito d’Rivera and trumpet player Arturo Sandoval, who was persecuted for listening to listening to jazz on the Voice of America Jazz Hour, hosted by the great Willis Conniver.
read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/wc88hKXkREqUVJyCKeI9Dw
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