The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Buena Vista Social Club · produced by Ry Cooder · engineered by Jerry Boys · World Circuit, with Nonesuch in the United States · fourteen tracks, recorded in Havana in March 1996
Mode
Received Cuban song forms played in their own manner by an ensemble in one room; fidelity to an inheritance, unhurried, the voice and the piano given room
Mythos
A pastoral journey, the countryman and his oxcart, fire as desire and the town of the east evoked; the forgotten masters and the lost club of the title held by the story of the record more than built in it
Phase
Fourteen tracks; a son to open, a tour of genres with the two danzones as hinges at the fourth and the thirteenth, and a trova of the east to close
Presentation
Album; fourteen tracks as first issued by World Circuit in 1997, recorded in Havana in a session of about a week in March 1996; later editions with outtakes not part of the object
Register
Voices of singers past seventy and eighty beside younger ones; piano, bass, laúd, trumpet, timbales and guitars, and one Californian slide guitar laid above them
Scale
Love lost and remembered, age, the countryside and its labour, the social life of a city and the nation, held song by song; history only by implication, the sacred and the state absent
Governing Proposition
An ensemble of elder Cuban musicians, gathered in Havana for a session planned as something else, plays the son, bolero, danzón and trova of the first half of the century in their own manner, unhurried, in one room. The record discloses that a tradition survives in persons rather than in institutions, and that old age can carry a music at its fullness; it turns from the present toward the past and does not turn the tradition it keeps.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with a guitar figure and four chords, and by the time Compay Segundo enters, the manner of the whole has been stated: a received Cuban form, played without hurry by an ensemble in one room, with the voice given room. Chan Chan is a son, a small pastoral of a journey named by its stations, “De Alto Cedro”, and of a pair of lovers at work, and it is sung by a man in his late eighties as if nothing in the music had aged. The opening rises at once, and it rises in the one kind of height the record knows: beauty held, warm, unhurried. Much of what follows is a variation on this first minute.
Buena Vista Social Club was recorded in Havana in March 1996, at EGREM’s Areito studio, in a session of about a week. Nick Gold of World Circuit, a small London label, set it going; Juan de Marcos González organised the Cuban side; Ry Cooder produced it and Jerry Boys engineered it. The session had been planned as a meeting of Cuban and Malian musicians, and when the Malians did not arrive it was rebuilt around the Cubans who were there. World Circuit issued the record in September 1997, with Nonesuch in the United States: fourteen tracks of son, bolero, danzón, guajira and trova, most of them older Cuban songs, the oldest from the trova of the early century. It won the Grammy for Best Tropical Latin Performance in 1998, and Wim Wenders’s documentary of the same name followed in 1999.
The company is large and shifts from track to track: Compay Segundo, Eliades Ochoa, Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Pío Leyva and Manuel “Puntillita” Licea among the singers; Rubén González at the piano, Orlando “Cachaíto” López on bass, Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabal on trumpet, Barbarito Torres on laúd, Amadito Valdés on timbales, with Ry Cooder on guitars and Joachim Cooder on percussion. Takes are kept loose, talk and count-ins are left in, and the ensemble regroups around a guitar, a voice or the piano as each song requires. That form is part of what the record knows. The object here is the record as first released, fourteen tracks in their original order; the anniversary edition of 2021, which adds outtakes, is neither credited nor charged.
Movement II
Veinte años is a bolero from the trova, a song of love outlived, and on this record it is sung by Omara Portuondo with Compay Segundo beside her. The title names twenty years as a long time, and the two singers are people for whom twenty years is a small part of a life. Nothing in the words says so; the voices do. The song holds at height for its whole length, two old voices meeting, neither of them reaching for the effect, and the meaning arrives through who is singing rather than through what is sung.
That is what the record brings into the open, and it can be stated: a tradition survives in persons, not in institutions, and old age can carry a music at its fullness rather than in its decline. The record discloses this in sound. Compay Segundo’s voice in his late eighties, Ferrer’s phrasing, González’s hands on Pueblo nuevo, playing with an authority no younger pianist would have, are the evidence, and the live room keeps them present tense. The tradition is shown as a company of the living, assembled in a studio in Havana, and the form of the session is the instrument of that showing: nothing was built after the fact that could not have happened in the room.
The words do less. They are inherited, mostly love songs and country scenes, and they state nothing the record discovers. The disclosure tips easily into mood: a nostalgia for a Havana before the revolution, which the record never names and the listener supplies. The record was made in 1996, in the hardship of the Special Period, and that history is present only by implication, in the fact of a pre-revolutionary repertoire sung by elders in that year. Love, age, the countryside, the city and the nation are held song by song; the sacred, Afro-Cuban religion, the state and the family as a structure are absent, and the orders are joined by the ensemble and by age, not by an argument.
Movement III
Pueblo nuevo comes fourth, and the voices fall silent for the first time. It is a danzón, the formal dance of the Cuban ballroom, and Rubén González loosens its formality from inside, playing as if he had all the time he needed: ornament that never blurs the rhythm, phrases that wait and then arrive exactly. These passages, with his playing in the title danzón at the thirteenth track, are the summit of the record. The two danzones are its hinges, the only places the piano speaks alone, and the sequence is placed around them as a tour of genres, son to danzón to bolero to trova.
The other heights are sung. Dos gardenias holds Ferrer close to the microphone over a slow bolero, the song held still from its first bar to its last; Veinte años does the same with two old voices. Murmullo and Amor de loca juventud rise less. The quick sones, Candela above all, are joy rather than elevation. Height comes often across the hour and always in one kind, warm and unhurried; there is no grandeur and no terror, and nothing reaches the slowest passages of Kind of Blue, at 9.1 here. Frequency carries the axis as far as it goes.
The making is of the first rank where the playing is. González is ornamental and rhythmically exact at once; López’s bass is light under the son and firm under the danzón; the guitars of Ochoa and Compay Segundo lock with Torres’s laúd and Mirabal’s trumpet. Jerry Boys’s recording keeps the room present and each instrument clear, without polish. The costs are the record’s own manner: arrangements largely received rather than made, and takes loose in ensemble and pitch. The Made at 8.4 stands level with Ellington at Newport, below Remain in Light at 8.7 and Kind of Blue at 9.3, and above Zooropa at 8.2.
Movement IV
El cuarto de Tula comes third, a son played as a descarga, a long stretch of voices and players over one groove. Fire here is desire, as it is in Candela, and the energy is real. But the track holds its groove past what the song needs, and the long jam marks time. It is the clearest case of what the subtractive test finds across the record: a song kept at the length the session gave it rather than at the length the record required.
The frame is compelled. Chan Chan must open; La bayamesa must close; the two danzones must stand where they stand. Inside the frame much is permitted and little compelled. Orgullecida and ¿Y tú qué has hecho? could change places with songs from other records made in Havana in the same weeks with little loss, and three boleros sung by Ferrer say one thing at three tempos. The record is a songbook more than an argument, and the songs are containers: older forms carried in unchanged, so that another selection from the same week would know much the same. The Inevitable at 7.3 falls below the line the summit requires, and the record could not reach it at any aggregate.
One law governs the hour: received Cuban song forms played in their own manner, in one room, with patience. It holds across a wide range, from the ballroom formality of Pueblo nuevo to the raw guajira of El carretero, a country singer and his guitar, and from the descarga of El cuarto de Tula to the close-held bolero of Dos gardenias; six genres across sixty years of song keep one sound of the room. The one voice that does not obey is Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, a Californian sound laid over a Cuban ensemble. It sits on top of several tracks rather than inside them, and it is the record’s one addition its own physics did not call for.
Movement V
La bayamesa closes the record: a trova, a criolla of the east, the oldest kind of song the record holds. It calls up the town of Bayamo and ends the record where the tradition it plays began. The close answers the opening. Chan Chan stated the manner; La bayamesa states the source; between them an hour of son, bolero, danzón and guajira has been played as if the decades between the songs and the session had not happened. The record ends quietly, on an old song, and that is its argument about time.
Its turn is a turn toward the past. The inheritance is the music of Cuba before 1960, played in its own manner, and the departure is from the present: from the timba and salsa that Cuban popular music had become, and from the fusion the world-music market preferred, which the planned meeting with Malian musicians would itself have been. The stake was commercial and real, a small label, elderly musicians, an unfashionable repertoire, a session made in days, but the departure from the tradition is close to nil by design. The record’s best-known myth, the forgotten masters returning and the lost social club of the title, belongs mostly to the story of the session and to Wenders’s film. Its reach has been very large: it remade the international market for Cuban music, opened late careers for Ferrer, González and Portuondo, and drew a wave of traditional Cuban records. It is reach of a market and an image; no later music can be shown to have changed its making because of it.
Survival is already of the widest kind for a record of its age. In print since 1997, sold and streamed without pause, Chan Chan played by bands far from Cuba, its acoustic fabric carries little date, though part of its presence lives as a brand and an image of Havana. It stands below Ellington at Newport, at 7.8, a live record of a tradition’s elders that it ties on The Imperishable and The Made; and below Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, at 8.0, which carried a received repertoire across a line where this record keeps its own in its own manner. What holds it below Tier IV is plain: the sequence is permitted more than compelled, the swerve is slight, the myth lives outside the music and the words disclose little. What keeps it Major is equally plain: an hour of first-rank playing that shows a tradition alive in its persons, and has lasted.
Act III · The Twelve
Fourteen tracks, and the subtractive test finds a songbook more than an argument. The frame is placed with care. Chan Chan must open, four chords and a guitar figure that hold the whole record in small; La bayamesa must close, a trova of the east, the oldest kind of song the record holds, ending it where the tradition began. Pueblo nuevo and the title danzón are required as the only places the voices fall silent and the piano speaks. Inside the frame the test bites often. El cuarto de Tula holds its groove past what the song needs; Orgullecida and ¿Y tú qué has hecho? could change places with songs from other records of the same weeks with little loss; three boleros sung by Ibrahim Ferrer say one thing at three tempos. Much is permitted, little compelled.
Score: 7.3 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated: a tradition survives in persons, not in institutions, and old age can carry a music at its fullness rather than in its decline. The sound discloses this as fully as any word. On Veinte años Compay Segundo, in his late eighties, sings beside Omara Portuondo a song of love outlived, by two people for whom twenty years is a small part of a life; Rubén González plays Pueblo nuevo with an authority no younger hand would have. What holds the figure is that the words are inherited, love songs and country scenes that state nothing the record discovers, and that the disclosure tips easily into mood: a nostalgia for a Havana before the revolution, which the record never names and the listener supplies.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Height comes often and in one kind: beauty held, warm and unhurried. Chan Chan’s opening figure and Compay Segundo’s entry rise at once. Dos gardenias, Ferrer close to the microphone over a slow bolero, holds at height from its first bar to its last, and Veinte años does the same with two old voices. Rubén González’s solo passages in Pueblo nuevo and the title track are the summit of the record, the danzón’s formality loosened by a pianist playing as if he had all the time he needed. Murmullo and Amor de loca juventud rise less, and the quick sones, Candela and El cuarto de Tula, are joy rather than elevation. There is no grandeur and no terror, and nothing reaches the slowest passages of Kind of Blue, at 9.1 here.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The patterns are evoked, not built. Chan Chan carries a small pastoral: a journey named by its stations, “De Alto Cedro”, and a pair of lovers at work. El carretero is the guajiro and his oxcart, the countryman of Cuban song. Candela and El cuarto de Tula play on fire as desire, and La bayamesa calls up the town of Bayamo and the east. The figure the record is best known by, forgotten masters returning and the lost social club of its title, is the strongest myth it has, and it belongs mostly to the sleeve, the story of the session and the film that followed, not to what the music builds. Inside the sequence no passage bears weight as myth: the archetypes are inherited furniture, kept in place.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The record’s project is fidelity, and a turn toward the past is a small swerve. The inheritance is the son, bolero, danzón and trova of Cuba before 1960, and the record plays them in their own manner, with arrangements largely received. Its departure is from the present, not from the tradition: from the timba and salsa that Cuban popular music had become, and from the fusion the world-music market preferred, which the planned meeting with Malian musicians would itself have been. The stake was real and commercial: a small London label, elderly musicians, some of them retired, an unfashionable repertoire, a session put together in days. Ry Cooder’s slide guitar is an accent, not a turn. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is that the turn is slight by design.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its form is a live session in one room: a shifting company of singers and players, takes kept loose, talk and count-ins left in, the ensemble regrouping track by track around Compay Segundo’s armónico, Eliades Ochoa’s guitar, Ferrer’s voice and González’s piano. That form is the instrument of the disclosure. The tradition is shown as a company, and age as a present tense, because nothing was assembled after the fact that could not have happened in the room. The sequence is a tour of genres, son to danzón to bolero to trova, with the two danzones placed fourth and thirteenth as hinges. What holds the figure is that the songs are containers, older forms carried in unchanged, and another selection from the same week would know much the same.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence over twenty-nine years is of two kinds, and unequal. The musical yield is real: González’s playing, the bass lines of Orlando “Cachaíto” López under the sones and the laúd of Barbarito Torres reward close listening, and the record leads its listeners back into a large repertoire of older Cuban song, a yield of the record as a door more than of the record itself. The second kind of return has been about the phenomenon, not the music: debate over Cooder’s part and the record as a foreign production, over nostalgia and the image of Cuba it sold, over its effect on the economy of music in Havana. That literature keeps the record discussed without deepening it. Semantic depth is modest, and formal depth is that of the inherited forms.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The field is the popular and world music of the late 1990s, and the Cuban popular music of the decade. Intrinsic force is small: the record reorganised no possibility in son or bolero, and showed only that this music, played this way by these people, could still be heard whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record remade the international market for Cuban music, opened late careers for Ferrer, González and Portuondo, who recorded and toured widely after it, drew a wave of traditional Cuban records and ensembles, and in Havana turned a share of musicians and venues back toward the old son for a visiting audience. That is reach of a market and an image more than of a practice: no later music can be shown to have changed its making because of it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as issued and has been in print since its release. Presence is of the widest kind for a record of its age: continuously sold and streamed, heard by listeners who hear no other Cuban music, its songs, Chan Chan above all, played by bands and buskers far from Cuba, and kept present by Wim Wenders’s film. Popularity is presence, not proof, and it is credited only so far. The fabric carries little date: an acoustic ensemble recorded in a live room, with nothing of the 1990s on it beyond the gloss of its mastering. One charge is light and real: part of the presence lives as a brand and an image of Havana rather than as the record heard whole.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The playing is of the first rank and placed: González’s piano, ornamental and rhythmically exact at once; López’s bass, light under the son and firm under the danzón; Ferrer’s phrasing in the boleros; the guitars of Ochoa and Compay Segundo locking with the laúd and with Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabal’s trumpet. Jerry Boys’s recording keeps the room present and each instrument clear, without polish. The costs are real. The arrangements are largely received rather than made; some takes are loose in ensemble and pitch, which the record’s manner accepts and this axis does not credit; El cuarto de Tula’s long jam marks time; and Cooder’s slide sits on top of several tracks rather than inside them.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law governs: received Cuban song forms played in their own manner by an ensemble in one room, unhurried, with room given to the voice and the piano. The two most distant elements obey it. Pueblo nuevo is an instrumental danzón, formal and born in the ballroom; El carretero is a raw guajira, a country singer and his guitar. Between them the descarga of El cuarto de Tula and the close-held bolero of Dos gardenias keep the same patience and the same sound of the room. The range is wide, six Cuban genres across sixty years of song, and the law holds across it. What costs it is the one voice that does not obey: Cooder’s slide guitar, a Californian sound laid over a Cuban ensemble, an addition the record’s physics did not call for.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. Love, mostly lost or remembered, is held fully, and age with it, carried by who sings rather than by what is sung. The countryside and its labour enter in El carretero and Chan Chan; the social life of the city in the dance forms and in the title, a members’ club of Havana; the nation in La bayamesa; desire as fire in Candela and El cuarto de Tula. History is present only by implication: a repertoire from before the revolution sung in 1996, in the hardship of the Special Period, which the record never mentions. The sacred, Afro-Cuban religion, the state and the family as a structure are absent. The orders arrive song by song and are joined by the ensemble and by age, not integrated by an argument. A record of songs holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.4 and The Sublime at 8.2. A record whole and in print after twenty-nine years, of the widest presence for its age and with a fabric that carries little date; playing of the first rank, González’s piano, López’s bass and Ferrer’s phrasing, recorded with the room present; and height that comes often across the hour in one kind, beauty held, at its summit in the two danzones and in Dos gardenias and Veinte años.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 6.8, the lowest of the twelve: a turn from the present toward an inheritance played in its own manner, its stake commercial and its departure from the tradition close to nil by design. Then The Encompassed at 6.9: love, age, the countryside, the city and the nation held song by song, history only by implication, and the sacred and the state absent. Then The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 7.3: a songbook inside a compelled frame, and archetypes evoked as inherited furniture while the record’s own myth lives on its sleeve.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 8.4 and The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 by a tenth, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.6, The Unconcealment at 7.5, The Archetypal Deep at 7.3 and The Swerve at 6.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.3, The Archetypal Deep, 7.3, and The Swerve, 6.8, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · the album as first released by World Circuit, London, in September 1997, and by Nonesuch in the United States, fourteen tracks in their original order; recorded in Havana in March 1996 at EGREM’s Areito studio, produced by Ry Cooder and engineered by Jerry Boys, with Juan de Marcos González as the Cuban organiser and Nick Gold of World Circuit as the record’s instigator. Later editions, above all the 25th-anniversary edition of 2021 with its outtakes, are not the object; their added material is neither credited nor charged. Judged from knowledge of the recording, its documented making and its reception; no recording, sleeve or lyric sheet was in hand. The words are Spanish and were read in the original. Songs are cited by title, and one fragment of Chan Chan is quoted, of four words or fewer, without translation. Sales are presence, not proof, and are not used. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact length of the session in days, the reason the Malian musicians did not arrive, the composers of the songs and the dates of the members’ own songs, the running times, the lead voices on El cuarto de Tula, Orgullecida, the title track and La bayamesa, whether the title track carries a vocal, the tracks on which Cooder’s slide guitar is heard, take counts and overdubs, and the place of Bayamo in Cuban memory, are not given.