A Rooster, Two Musicians, and a Kitchen in Cuba. What Buena Vista Social Club Left Behind

There are places where music is not performed but simply exists, the way light exists in the morning or water exists in a river. The barriada de Santa Amalia, in the municipality of Arroyo in Havana, is one of those places.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHA2t7-cmhg

Field Recording

This recording was made in the back patio of the home of Gonzalo Antonio Domínguez Santana—Requinto guitar and maracas: Gonzalo Antonio Domínguez Santana and Francisco Manuel Torrecilla Guerra. The song is Síctera Cubana, written by Carlos Enrique García Fernández and recorded in La Habana in 1994 by Trío Los Titanes. Thirty years separate that Havana recording from this afternoon in Santa Amalia.

This relationship between music and cultural identity is not unique to Cuba. A parallel development can be observed in Brazil, explored in The Origins and Evolution of Samba and Carnival in Brazil.

If you listen carefully, you will hear a fourth performer who was not invited but refused to stay out of it — a rooster in his cage who answered the tune as if he had been rehearsing the chorus for years. And underneath everything, from the kitchen just inside, the sounds of the women preparing lunch after the session: the particular music of a household that has opened its doors and is feeding whoever shows up.

This is one of the surviving fragments from Son Tres Son, a documentary project that ended when Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club was released in 1999. The success of that film — an entirely deserved success — took all the oxygen and all the financing available for modest enterprises working in the same territory. We stepped aside. But the recordings remained.