There comes a moment in Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club documentary, during a performance of the beautiful bolero "Silencio," where Omara Portuondo is overcome by the tune. Tears fall. "That kind of lyricism, that kind of romantic approach to the song is something that is very emotional in our culture and specifically for me," the seventy-year-old Cuban singer says. "I didn't want to cry. But there was something about the intensity of the love poem that makes me feel that way."
Portuondo has been nicknamed the "fiancTe of feeling," but don't even think of painting her as the wounded-bird brand of fragile crooner. Her spirit is quite vibrant. When asked how she is doing these days, she quickly quips "Fat!" in an unexpected ice-breaker.
She relays most of her answers through a translator, but when Portuondo sings, her eloquent, emotional phrasing makes her native Spanish understandable by any listener. She is unlike anything we have in Los Estados Unidos; comparisons fail as she embodies so many disparate qualities from a century of divas. Holiday? She can work a song with the same effect of an emotional train wreck, but she radiates positivity instead of personal tragedy. Piaf? Her voice is as large, her persona warmer. Wynette? There's more than a little country, but ditto Holiday for the inability to separate woe-is-me between song and real life. She has dashes of Aretha's presence, Bessie Smith's bluesy gusto and Emmylou Harris' class. As for her voice, phrasing and approach to a song, well, that's all her own.
"I grew up in a house where none of the people were musicians per se," Portuondo explains, but notes that, typical of many Latin households, hers was a home where music was always being played by someone. "My father was a popular baseball player [he played for the Cuban National team], but he was friends with many composers and musicians and singers who would come and share with them in an atmosphere of calm and sharing everything. My family was very poor. So basically we shared the poverty. But music was a way to transcend the material limitations. Music is one of the most important things in life for a human being. I feel that music is one of the things that keeps the spirituality and the human fiber alive in this world."
Portuondo took her love of music to the clubs of Havana in the Fifties, first singing with her sister and then helping to form the influential group Cuarteto Las D'Aida with whom she performed for more than a decade. She issued her first solo album, Magia Negra, in 1959. After that, her name and career vanished from American consciousness as relations between America and Cuba simmered up. Fast forward to 1996 and a sneaky little plan to circumvent the embargo against Cuba. By licensing a series of Cuban recordings from England, Nonesuch found a way to sneak Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club production into the states, resulting in the most unlikely of hit records.
Portuondo added a much-needed dose of female brass to the randy codgers of the Buena Vista Social Club on their album of the same name. With the release of BVSC in 1996 and Buena Vista Social Club Presents Omara Portuondo this year, suddenly the singer found herself picking up where she had left off three decades earlier. Portuondo is quick to find the silver lining in what must have been a disappointing career phenomenon and offers up a logical explanation as to why a group of elderly Cuban musicians became the most unlikely international pop stars of the millenium.
"I'm very happy that [the BVSC phenomenon] is happening because again the music nourishes the spirit," she says. "Basically there are two elements that have always captured the sensitivity of the world: happiness -- in the rhythm, dancing, and performing -- and love. And it seems to be that people need to feel connected with them and share that happiness and love that the Cuban music is bringing."
Portuondo has toured the U.S. with the BVSC as well as with Ibrahim Ferrer last year (in support of Ferrer's own BVSC release), but this fall she returns for her own tour, the first since she left a Miami hotel in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis four decades ago. The feeling at Ferrer's performances last year was bittersweet. An acute connection was established between the musicians and the fans, a connection that transcended the music alone. But following the inescapable public stink that emanated from this year's custody battle over a Cuban boy, the cries of "Thank you, America!" from last year's performances feel more complicated. But Portuondo makes an important distinction between the feelings shared over culture and over political diplomacy.
"There is not a bad feeling in general toward the United States people," she says, "because [Cubans] understand that the reason trade has not been opened yet has basically nothing to do with the regular North American person on the street. I feel the reason why the connections have not been opened is that the people who make the big decisions have never gone to see [fans and musicians] dancing and performing. If they will go to see what we are bringing -- the spirit of the Cuban people -- they may change their mind. They will feel happier."
ANDREW DANSBY
(August 12, 2000)