Cuban music icon comes to Berkeley with new All Stars
When Juan de Marcos first assembled a group of longovershadowed Cuban musicians for Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club project in 1996 he was a generation or two younger than the brilliant cast of rekindled stars.
An essential guardian of the Cuban style known as son — the foundation of salsa and a major tributary leading to Latin jazz — de Marcos crafted arrangements for the Buena Vista Social Club that perfectly framed pre-revolution innovators such as pianist Rubén González, guitarist Manuel Galbán and vocalists Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo.
Portuondo is still with us, but the rest of those musicians are gone now, and de Marcos, 63, has taken his rightful place as an elder statesman of Cuban music. He returns to the Bay Area Tuesday and Wednesday for a stand at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage, fully comfortable in his role as the institutional memory of his 13-piece AfroCuban All Stars.
“Originally, I used to be the younger member, now I’m the oldest,” de Marcos says. “It’s a mix of generations, but it’s a younger band, and they really look it.”
De Marcos initially fell in love with American and British rock as a teen, but he ended up dedicating himself to the family business. His father, Marcos González, sang with Arsenio Rodríguez, the legendary Cuban bandleader, composer and master of the Cuban tres, the small guitarlike instrument that became de Marcos’ mainstay.
While studying at the University of Havana in 1976 he
helped found Sierra Maestra, a band dedicated to preserving Cuban roots music, particularly son, that had fallen out of favor decades earlier. De Marcos spent two decades touring and recording with the ensemble, which also featured trumpeter Jesús Alemañy, who gained international fame after launching the popular contemporary Cuban dance band Cubanismo in 1996.
That was the year World Circuit records chief Nick Gold sought out de Marcos to spearhead a collaboration between Cuban and West African musicians. When visa delays left the African artists stranded at home, de Marcos and the Afro-Cuban All Stars ended up recording “A Toda Cuba le Gusta,” an album showcasing stars from the 1940s and ’50s like Ibrahim Ferrer, Pío Leyva, Manuel “Puntillita” Licea and Rubén González.
Ry Cooder drew on the same cast of players a few weeks later for the “Buena Vista Social Club” album, which brought international attention to an array of musicians who’d languished for
years at home. De Marcos toured with various Buena Vista Social Club iterations, but his primary creative outlet has been the Afro-Cuban All Stars, which reflects his encompassing vision of Cuban culture.
“Always the goal has been to present the evolution and wealth of Cuban music,” de Marcos says. “Sometimes the presentation is more jazzy, sometimes more traditional, sometimes more classical, and sometimes more contemporary. I change the lineup every three or four years, and the challenge is to find musicians who are going to be ready to do what I want to do at the moment.”
He captured the band’s full range and power on last year’s double album “Absolutely Live II” (DM Ahora! Productions), which features a CD, “Viva Mexico!” recorded at the Cervantino International Festival in Guanajuato, and a Blu-ray disc, “Live in Maryland.”
For the Afro-Cuban AllStars’ Freight & Salvage debut, concerts that are part of the venue’s Raices series curated by percussionist John
Santos, de Marcos is presenting the band’s latest incarnation. It’s a lineup that’s particularly close to his heart, as it includes his wife, percussionist Gliceria Abreu, and their daughters Gliceria González (vibraphone, percussion and vocals) and Laura Lydia González (B-flat clarinet and bass clarinet).
Bass clarinet and vibes aren’t often heard in Cuban roots and popular music, but the All Stars seamlessly integrate the expanded instrumental palette. “You write your own arrangements in Afro-Cuban,” de Marcos says. “People are expecting us to play some classic songs, some standards, so we mix my arrangements and compositions with classic son and some compositions by band members.”
Traveling with a long-serving sound engineer, the band also maintains old-school values when it comes to dynamics. Amplifying brass and percussion is something of a lost art, and the All-Stars take pains to “mix the music on stage so the audience can hear everything and we can hear each other,” de Marcos says. “I remember the old bands, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Omara Portuondo. When Lester Young took a tenor sax solo, everyone played quietly and it sounded beautiful.”