Street-Trained Virtuoso Pedrito Martinez Returns to Havana to Record a Historic Album
Street-Trained Virtuoso Pedrito Martinez Returns to Havana to Record a Historic Album
Tuesday, June 7, 2016 at 10:30 a.m.
By Siddhartha Mitter
Martinez put in many hours at Cuba’s legendary EGREM studios.
Danielle Moir
By the time he got to Cuba last October, the word had spread: Pedrito Martinez was in town to make an album. Old and young rumberos thronged to the EGREM studios in Havana to welcome one of their own. Martinez, the New York–based percussionist and Grammy nominee, had known the instant the United States and Cuba agreed to restore diplomatic ties that his group's second album would be made back home.
Habana Dreams, out this week, is the product of intense studio time with Cuban guests on the tracks — singers Descemer Bueno and Issac Delgado, rapper Telmary Diaz — and a whole community in support. "Each day there were forty people in the studio giving you twenty thousand hugs," says co-producer Willie Torres. "Pedrito was in heaven."
The most poignant moment arose in the recording of "Recuerdos" (Memories), which features no fewer than six Afro-Cuban drummers: Martinez; his musical and spiritual mentor Roman Diaz; bandmate Jhair Sala; and even his brothers Adrian, Mario, and Antonio, all three working percussionists in Cuba. Martinez dedicates the thrilling, explosive track to the tamboreros and rumberos who've gone to heaven, the más allá. "It came out crazy beautiful," he says. "So powerful, so much passion."
This apotheosis has been a long time coming for Martinez, who grew up in a working-class Havana neighborhood surrounded by elder drummers steeped in rumba, charanga, and són — the core styles of twentieth-century Cuban popular music, exemplified by classic bands such as Orquesta Aragón and Los Van Van. A street-trained virtuoso with no formal music education, Martinez deepened his craft in New York City, picking up work with Latin and jazz acts and quickly getting noticed by the likes of Wynton Marsalis, whom he considers a close friend and mentor, and Sting. New York also gave him space to practice Santería, the Afro-Cuban traditional religion with roots in the Yoruba culture of West Africa, which was held in dim regard at the time by Cuba's government.
More:
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/street-trained-virtuoso-pedrito-martinez-returns-to-havana-to-record-a-historic-album-8705091
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