Nick Bollinger discusses a contemporary recording that recalls the golden age of Cuban dance music.
Orquesta Akokan Photo: Adrien H. Tillman
When the Buena Vista Social Club became an unexpected global phenomenon two decades ago, there was a feeling that we were hearing the last living practitioners of a great lost music, the likes of which would not be seen again.
That appeared to be confirmed when the few surviving members played here in 2015 as part of their ‘Adios’ tour.
Orquesta Akokan Photo: supplied
Yet what the Buena Vista’s success really achieved was a new demand for old music.
Orquesta Akokan are the most impressive example of a current band recreating the sound of Cuba’s golden past. Listening to their debut album, one could be convinced it was something from the 40s or 50s; the era of Cuban mambo kings like Arsenio Rodriguez or Perez Prado. It’s loud, brassy and percussive, and jumps like crazy.
In fact, Orquesta Akokan weren’t even formed in Cuba. Fronting the band is Jose ‘Pepito’ Gomez, a singer in his mid-40s, Cuban-born but lately a resident of New Jersey. His chief collaborators are the guitarist Jacob Plasse, who runs the New York Latin music label Chulo Records, and an extraordinary pianist from Phoenix, Arizona called Michael Eckroth. The sixteen-piece band is filled out with a mixture of New York and Cuban-based musicians, and they make a big fat sound. It’s fantastic.
Gomez is a wonderful singer with a big smooth voice that sustain over the blast of the band, and when he gets into mad polysyllabic stuff like he does in the opening tune, it’s with the energy and flow of a rapper.
One of the most remarkable things about Orquesta Akokan is that the material they play is all new; the result of the fruitful partnership of Eckroth, Plasse and Gomez. They are not just taking treasures out of the glass case, but adding to the already rich tradition of Cuban song.
But to get the album sounding as good as it does, Gomez and his collaborators did, in a sense, go back to that glass case. For recording, they decamped to Havana, and the same studio, Areito, where the Buena Vista album had been cut, not to mention classics by Nat King Cole and Josephine Baker, along with thousands of Cuban records, going all the way back to the 1940s.
With Castro’s revolution in 1959, the studio was nationalised and recording continued, though Ry Cooder may have been the first American to use it since the Cold War, and he was prosecute by the U.S. government for flouting the embargo. But not only is it one of the oldest surviving studios in the world; even its décor remains unchanged in more than seventy years. And its live, wooden performing space accounts for the depth and richness of these recordings.
The album is through Daptone, the label famous for soul and R&B records by the likes of Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley, which were cut direct to tape, emulating the sound and technique of the 60s classics. You could Orquesta Akokan has the Cuban music equivalent.
With the recent deaths of both Jones and Bradley, maybe this will even be Daptone’s new direction. It’s got soul, syncopation, and would seem to have a lot of life yet.
Orquesta Akokan is available on Daptone
