Cuban music, a great singer, nostalgia—and a book!

This is a special weekend edition of TheMarioBlog.

What a night of wonderful Cuban music from the 30s, 40s, 50s.

Yes, the music that my father, Mario Garcia, played so often through his six-decade musical career that started in his native town of Placetas, Las Villas, Cuba and ended in assorted nightclubs and then his permanent 24-year gig at a cozy, very Cuban place appropriately called Habana Vieja (Old Havana) in Miami. At Habana Vieja, the musicians were veterans of that glorious Havana of the 1950s. The audience could sing along, and they did, some of them performing solo numbers. Seasoned veteran professional singers in exile dusted off their repertoire to perform it again. At la Habana Vieja, every Friday and Saturday night, it could have been a little nightclub in the La Rampa area of the Havana they knew.

Dad would love Olga Cerpa, and she knows it, making a reference to that bit of nostalgia during her show at the Miller Theater on the Columbia University campus. Olga was accompanied by the superb Las Banda Sinfonica Municipal (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)– a powerhouse of young musicians who play those old Cuban songs as if they had grown up with them, the way I did, for which I am thankful. You see, I grew up surrounded by musicians, including all my uncles with their original band, the Havana Boys—a misnomer as they did not live in Havana.

The Vereda Tropical project

Olga Cerpa brings not only her superb voice, one that was made to sing these Cuban boleros and cha chas. Olga embarked into a two-year project to bring those Cuban songs from another era to life. She did her research, traveled to Cuba, and to Mexico, and she surrounded herself with young musicians in those places, along with her fellow artists from the Canaries.

“This was a journey, from the Canaries to Cuba and Mexico,” she told the full house audience Friday night, emphasizing the strong links between the Canaries and, especially, Cuba. “It was like weaving together patches from here and there, but with a lot of love and respect for this music, the music of my parents and grandparents, the music of the last century, but, heck, I am also from the last century. Our project, Vereda Tropical, is the result of that journey, we followed a path of discovery of great Cuban artists like Beny More, Olga Guillot, Bola de Nieve, Ernesto Lecuona, but also such Latin American icons as Lucho Gatica, Pedro Infante, Agustin Lara, Lola Beltran and Miguel Aceves Mejia.”

The result is an album, Vereda Tropical, that is likely to please all, and get everyone dancing on the spot. Vereda Tropical is a fast moving piece that celebrates romantic tropical nights in idyllic locales. My grandmother sang it, and my father played it.

Olga interrupted her singing to reminisce about the era of the music she has brought together for Vereda Tropical, telling the audience:

“When you dance Vereda Tropical, or any of these numbers, you get the real thing. You can feel the person you are with, smell him, know if you like him or not, much better than meeting someone on Facebook and wondering—what is he like? Does he dance?,” she said. “I miss a lot of what this era was about, like going to record stores. I always used to go to one here in New York City, no longer there. We like albums. We like books.”

Vereda Tropical: the mini book

Below I appear with Olga as she graciously presented me with an autographed copy of the Vereda Tropical mini book, a memento of this wonderful lady, the Vereda Tropical project and the Canaries—land of my maternal ancestors—which I will always treasure.

At that point, Olga showed the audience this mini book of Vereda Tropical which tells the story of how her project came to be, with historical annotations, vintage photos and an introduction from Manuel Gonzalez Ortega, who handles communications for Olga Cerpa, and in which he writes:

“The arrangements here in Vereda Tropical are diverse and from different fathers, while preserving the historic element, but adapting to what we wanted to accomplish and going with the Big Band concept, as played by a symphonic orchestra. We thought that would be interesting, offering a varied musical palette, bringing different sets of eyes to the music to enrich our proposal.”

The audience at the Miller Theater did not want to let Olga Cerpa leave the stage. She returned twice for encores. She got two standing ovations.

I know that somewhere in heaven, my father smiled and even winked at Olga in complete approval.

Take a look at some of the retro images in the Vereda Tropical Mini Book: