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What kind of musical landscape will the wind quintet from the Florida Orchestra find in Cuba?
"It'll be, for everyone involved, the trip of a lifetime," said John Radanovich, biographer of Benny Moré, the great Cuban singer. "Cuba is the most musical country on earth, so that language is going to be spoken very well. Peanut vendors and knife sharpeners still sing their songs on the street."
Cuba has a rich classical music culture, with Amadeo Roldan and Alejandro Garcia Caturla probably being the most important composers in symphonic music. But let's face it, what the world most cherishes about Cuban music is the propulsive rhythms of pop and jazz stars such as singer Celia Cruz and bandleaders Perez Prado and Machito. And no Cuban musician is more beloved than Moré.
"It's not hyperbole to say that Benny was the Frank Sinatra of Cuban music, because he had such an influence on all salsa singers who came after him," said Radanovich, author of Wildman of Rhythm: The Life & Music of Benny Moré.
Moré's heyday was the 1940s and '50s, and he performed several times in Tampa. After the revolution, he was somewhat forgotten, even in Cuba, where he died at 43 of cirrhosis (Moré was an alcoholic) in 1963.
To some extent, Moré is most remembered in the United States for his sappy, sentimental songs, treasured by Cuban exiles as remembrances of things past. But his many RCA recordings include countless classics of Afro-Cuban jazz, especially with his Banda Gigante from 1953 to 1960.
Radanovich points to one of the singer's biggest hits as an example.
"Mi Amor Fugaz has a darkly beautiful breakneck introduction that sets up Benny's soaring, dizzying and completely operatic performance," he writes. "Not only is (it) among his personal best, it is possibly the best performance on any bolero in the annals of Cuban music."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Tito Puente was incorrectly identified as a Cuban musician. Puente was born in New York of Puerto Rican parents.
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