Ignore fun-lovin’ Huey’s wise-guy chatter, revel in the rhythms of Cuba
Huey Morgan’s Latin Music Adventure Tonight, BBC Four, 9.30pm
★★★★✩
Imagine… This House is Full of Music Sunday, BBC One 6pm
★★★★✩
HUEY MORGAN is in Cuba. Huey who? Huey is a native New Yorker and the frontman of Fun Lovin’ Criminals, whose music is a stewy brew of rock and hip-hop, plus Huey’s swagger. The swagger is the main bit of Huey’s other job, as a BBC Radio 6 Music DJ, where he plays exquisite deep cuts and splices them with wise-guy chatter. Huey can talk: as a talker, he is never knowingly understated.
So, Latin America. There are three chapters. Last week, Huey was in Brazil, getting faintly psychedelic. Tonight, it’s Cuba, a fantasy island we all understand, thanks mainly to the Buena Vista Social Club, which revived the careers of a handful of traditional musicians under the tutelage of the American Ry Cooder. It was also a film directed by a German, Wim Wenders, whose career has mostly comprised of alienated fictions about an imagined America. There was joy in Buena Vista Social Club, but sadness too. The Buena Vista musicians were playing the music of pre-revolutionary Cuba, and there were a lot what might-have-beens between the lines of their traditional laments.
But look, Havana! The cars, the architecture, the romance of revolution. “It’s just this side of falling down,” says Huey, identifying with the crumbling façades of the old town. If it’s political analysis you’re after, don’t get on Huey’s bus. He talks at one point about “the collapse of
Western communism”, which is a tricky dance to master, and his interviewees are as guarded as you might expect of artists in a dictatorship. Huey has a fondness for the notion of “authenticity” in music, a position which would be considered imperialist in Western post-Marxist circles, but he’s really talking about a feeling of rootedness, and a sense of values which are often absent in commodified Western pop.
Is he being romantic? Probably. The danger of that kind of thinking is illustrated by a clip of Pete Seeger entertaining American folkies with an assassination of Guantanamera. But Huey has an endearing explanation for the appeal of this ubiquitous Cuban tune. “It’s a three-chord joint,” he says, comparing it to La Bamba and Louie Louie.
Whatever, the music Huey encounters is magical: it goes beyond rhumba, and the ballads of the trovadors, to reggaeton and Afro-Cuban funk, and jazz artists such as Brenda Navarrete. Huey kisses many women and gets a haircut, even though he had no hair to start with.
He rides in an old American car, a Lada, and a Russian stretch limo. All the cars. It’s a treat.
In Imagine…, a socially distanced Alan Yentob observes the musical activities of the Kanneh-Mason family — seven siblings and a locked-down friend — who have survived lockdown by playing music together. Among the highlights is 21-year-old Sheku’s rendition of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry on a cello. It’s austere and beautiful, and beyond authenticity.