Cuban musicians find their voices in exile
Omar Sosa, the noted Cuban pianist and composer whose freeflowing music fuses jazz and Afro-Cuban traditions, world music and a taste of electronics and hip-hop, had no idea when he came here in 1995 that the Bay Area was home to great Cuban musicians such as percussionists Orestes Vilató and Armando Peraza and had a rich Cuban-based Latin music scene.
Visiting from Spain with his then-wife, an Ecuadoran who had friends here, Sosa found himself jamming at Enrico’s his second night in town. Within a few weeks, he was playing with Cuban singer Fito Reinoso’s band and had connected with John Santos, the Latin music maven and bandleader who introduced him to Vilató, the legendary timbalero who, like Sosa, hails from the central Cuban city of Camaguey. Santos also encouraged Sosa to create his own music.
Fruitful years
“I thought, wow, this is the world I’m looking for! The Bay Area was a fundamental scene in my life, where my inner voice was revealed,” Sosa, 49, says on the phone from Barcelona, where he now lives with his Spanish wife and two kids. He spent three fruitful years here, performing original music with various artists and forming the timba band QBA with Cuban percussionist and singer Jesus Díaz, one of several mu- sicians here who came to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel exodus from Castro’s Cuba. Díaz still leads the grooving San Francisco ensemble.
Sosa’s Quarteto AfroCubano performed music from his sensational new recording, “Ilé,” which is flavored with flamenco and ripe with funky rumbas, ballads and jazz, at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center on April 16 and at Yoshi’s in Oakland on April 17-18. He comes back regularly to the Bay Area, which he still considers home.
Like other Cubans here, Sosa was heartened by President Obama’s announcement in December that he was moving to normalize relations between the United
States and Cuba.
“It’s a good step. It’s positive,” says Sosa, who used to listen to banned American jazz late at night, coming across crackly airwaves from a Miami radio station, while studying at Cuba’s national school of the arts in Havana.
More private business
Living here in the ’90s, Sosa would fly through Mexico to get to Cuba to visit his family. That’s not necessary anymore. He was last there in January 2014 to see his mother, who died in May, and his sister, a doctor. Among other things, he saw a lot more private business than in ’93, when he left to pursue his musical career.
“There are Cuban people in the United States who haven’t seen their family for years and years because of political reasons,” he says. “The opportunity for them to go now is beautiful news. We have to see how things are going to evolve in Cuba. But I have to be positive.”
Roberto Borrell, the elegant Berkeley dancer and percussionist who was one of the Mariel emigres, visited Cuba in December after Obama’s historic move toward rapprochement. He has a daughter, grandkids, three brothers and other relatives there.
“People there are happy America wants to establish relations, and they have hope,” says Borrell, who co-founded and performed for years with the Bay Area’s Orquesta La Moderna Tradición, a traditional Cuban charanga —a band with violins, flute, clarinet, bass, piano and percussion — that mixes graceful early 20th century
danzónes with cha-cha-chas and more contemporary Cuban styles.
“I don’t know if the Cuban government is going to be willing to open up politically, but I think it’s a good thing,” says Borrell, who left Cuba because he felt “like we lived in a big prison, and I don’t want to live that way.” He hopes change comes and people get “more freedom and more to eat.”
So does Vilató, a revered musician whose family moved to the United States in the 1950s (his father ran the American operation for Cuba’s national airline).
A seminal figure on the New York salsa scene in the ’60s and ’70s, he moved to the Bay Area in the early ’80s as a member of Carlos Santana’s band. It also featured Peraza, the brilliant Cuban bongo and conga player who settled here in the 1950s while working with Cal Tjader and George Shearing. Another notable Cuban percussionist on the scene, Francisco Aguabella, brought the tradition of sacred Afro-Cuban drumming here and later mentored passionate young local Latin musicians such as Santos and Rebeca Mauleón.
A positive thing
If the thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations means “the Cuban people will have more food and clothes to wear. That’s a positive thing,” says Vilató, 70, who lives in Martinez. He last visited the island in 1979, when he performed as a member of New York’s Fania All-Stars (named for the label that recorded salsa stars such as Celia Cruz and Eddie Palmieri).
Vilató, who just returned from a tour of Japan with the Latin Legends of Fania, doesn’t have much interest in traveling to Cuba, although he said it would be nice to see a cousin in Camaguey, a journalist with whom he communicates online from time to time. They don’t talk politics (“there’s no freedom of speech,” he says). When he asked if she has a car, she said yes, right in front of the house — where the old American sedan has been sitting broken for 20 years.
It’s about time the U.S. government took a new approach to Cuba, the percussionist says. “If we have relations with China and Russia, we should have relations with Cuba. The embargo, wanting to get Fidel out, hasn’t changed a thing. It didn’t work.” Jesse Hamlin is a freelance writer. E-mail: sadolphson@sfchronicle.com