REVOLUTIONARY CUBAN LP ART
The Soul Jazz label digs deep into the world of Revolutionary Cuban LP Art.
In 1959, Fidel Castro and his forces booted out the yankees and reorganised on Marxist principles. This made for a unique and thriving music scene: read on for high-impact visual explanations.
“…nationalist and propagandist weapons… jazz combos, experimental electro-acoustic music and AfroCuban rituals…”
STUART BAKER
LIKE ITS CARIBBEAN neighbour Jamaica, Cuba has punched well above its weight when it comes to making music to get the world dancing, a fusion of West African and Spanish influences leaving intoxicating cross-rhythmic fertilisation in its wake. But it’s fair to say that the nation’s status as a socialist country under a near-seven-decade US economic embargo has made this music harder to sample uncut.
Now Gilles Peterson and Soul Jazz label honcho Stuart Baker have made it easier to get closer to the source with their book Cuba – Music And Revolution: Original Album Cover Art Of Cuban Music (Record Sleeve Designs Of Revolutionary Cuba 1959-1990). Containing over 350 sleeves, more than two-thirds in large format, it actually begins during the Batista era, where commercial covers connote an American playground of jet-setting and exotica congas. The 1959 revolution and Cuba’s realignment to the USSR changes all that.
A fascinating parallel story of the record business in a command economy, and much else going on in that society, is told via album covers. The role of state record company
Egrem was not, says Baker, “to sell the most records… it was to produce ‘culturally valuable artefacts’.” A chapter concerning the ’60s still displays images of glamour and romance on discs by Benny Moré, Gina León, Orquesta Aragón and others. But, with all musicians now declared to be state employees, in the ’70s fun gives way to starker graphics and experimentation, politically urgent music and such militant statements as the AK-47 on the sleeve of Grupo De Experimentación Sonora Del ICAIC’s 1976 album. While record art in the ’80s seems to return to less confrontational forms, the collapse of international communism put the Cuban record industry on notice, and by 1996 it had ceased.
“That these nationalist and propagandist weapons were all released alongside música bailable (dance music), jazz combos, experimental electro-acoustic music and Afro-Cuban rituals almost defies belief,” writes Baker. “Together they help produce a fascinating document of a society.”
Further insight comes via pieces on Cuban music in New York, Santería and Communism, Latin Jazz and more, with other choice details including the fact that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was a fan of orchestra leader Pedro ‘Pello El Afrokan’
Izquierdo, whose multi-drums-with-a frying-pan Mozambique style blazed a trail in the early ’60s, and that these records were never available in the Anglosphere but were exported to friendly rumba hotspots including Hungary, China, Albania and elsewhere in the communist world.
“It would be fair to say that this book has taken a long time to publish,” says Baker, explaining that in 2015, Egrem came to an arrangement with Sony Music to distribute Cuban music on the basis that it was “informational materials” and therefore exempt from the US embargo. “Both
Sony Music and Egrem allowed us to make this book.”