CUBAN SALSA EXTRA SPICY
Big band drops debut album recorded in Havana
JOSÉ “Pepito” Gómez defected from Cuba 10 years ago. But even long after he’d made a home in America, the singer never forgot Havana’s Areito Studios, where greats like Frank Sinatra and Celia Cruz recorded in the 1940s and ’50s, before Fidel Castro took power.
And so, while discussing dream projects with a couple of his New York friends, he had a brainstorm: Why not bring his old Cuban pals and his new gringo bandmates together and record there?
“It’s the only studio in Cuba that survived the revolution,” the 45-year-old Gómez tells The Post, speaking in Spanish over coffee in Midtown. “When I moved to Havana, the first studio I recorded at was Areito. So it is very special to me.”
It wasn’t easy, but Gómez and friends Jacob Plasse and Mike Eckroth lassoed 16 of the best Latin-jazz musicians in the world — 10 from Cuba — to form Orquestra Akokán (Orchesta from the heart). Their self-titled de- but comes out Friday from Daptone Records.
“It was a really beautiful experience, because it had been a long time since I’d seen some of these musicians,” says Gómez, who lives in Jersey City. “Reuniting with them — there are two who are from my same town — and playing this music from our heritage together, it was really moving.”
It took almost a year to coordinate the session and book all the musicians. Gómez reached out to his friend, pianist César “Pupy” Pedroso, in Havana to corral Cuba’s finest instrumentalists. Meanwhile, guitarist Plasse and pianist and arranger Eckroth wrote all the music for the album, basing it on traditional Cuban mambo with lots of driving horns and propulsive beats — the kind of music recorded back in Areito’s golden years.
Yet even withrelaxed CubanAmericanrelations (the group got together in November 2016, before Donald Trump partially closed America’s embassy in Havana), recording in the communist country wasn’t easy.
“People told us it wasn’t going to work, that we were going to end up losing a lot of money,” says Plasse. “There’s blackouts, people can’t make it or somebody [in charge] just says, ‘No, you can’t do this.’ I was freaking out.”
Then, a passport issue made Gómez miss the first day of recording.
“We only had three days in the studio, and when the musicians just saw Mike and me, they were concerned,” says Plasse. “But when Pepito [arrived]the second day, everyone relaxed a bit.
“It came out better than we could have ever expected,” he says.
In fact, it went so well that Orquesta Akokán plans on recording two more albums. And they’re working on getting their Cuban comrades here to New York for a US tour this summer.
“It’s not so easy with the embassy being closed,” says Pepito, whose father still lives in Cuba. “So to bring the musicians here, we have to bring them through other countries.
“But don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll make it happen!”