The seats of the Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris are empty. The stillness of the place is barely broken by the pinching of the double bass strings until a voice begins to envelop the surroundings with emotional, soft and clean verses. What’s it to you that I love you if you don’t love me anymore. The love that’s gone shouldn’t be remembered. Omara Portuondo (Havana, Cuba, 92 years old) rehearses on a wicker chair. He’s trying to perfect his voice for the concert that will fill the theater in Mexico City this Saturday. “She feels good, she’s lively,” her son and manager Ariel Jiménez told the newspaper a few days earlier. With the performance, Portuondo Vida resumes the tour with which he tries to give the audience a tour of some of the most relevant themes of his more than 70-year career. With the tour, which will take her around the world, the singer opens the doors to say goodbye to the big stages.
“Everything has a beginning and an end. She has always denied that she would retire, but she’s already admitting it,” says her son. Omara Portuondo doesn’t like interviews, they bore her. For her, the time of media attention is over, now she only devotes herself to singing. Despite being one of the most well-known voices in Cuban music, he dislikes throwing flowers. “He is a simple and natural person. He never thinks about how important it was as a cultural heritage, he doesn’t pay much attention to it, ”he defends himself. Luis Omar Montoya, a music historian at CIESAS, considers Portuondo to be one of the most relevant figures of the second generation of Cuban musicians of the 1950s. “She is a very long-lived woman who continues to record, who continues to create and who has the great virtue of staying current,” the historian told the newspaper.
Montoya talks about two pioneering generations of Cuban music in terms of its relationship with the press: the 1940s and the 1950s, in these two decades musicians like Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Arsenio Rodríguez or the duo Celina and Rutilium. The historian stresses the importance of historical context. The 1950s – the period before the Cuban Revolution, marked by the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista – led to Cuba’s opening to the United States. Trade relations increased the exchange of rhythms between the two countries. Cuba imported jazz and opened its doors to exporting its music to the world. The dialogue between the two countries weaved a new style of music that marked Portuondo’s career: the sentiment, composed of jazz, bolero and Cuban peasant rhythms.
On the wicker chair, Portuondo looks from one side of the stage to the other, narrows his eyes a little and rests. At the sound of the double bass, he lifts the microphone again and continues the rehearsal. Between the soft verses of the songs, he occasionally maintains a high-pitched scream. Finished, she coughs and drinks some water from the bottle her assistant brings her.
“The Friend of Feeling”
The singer began one of the broadest careers in music at a young age, aged just 17. “There are people who are born with this gift. I think she was the one who had the space and time to do what she likes the longest,” affirms her son. She adopted the nickname “La Novia del Feeling” almost from the moment she debuted, singing Havana jazz standards with her sister Haydée Portuondo. Montoya explains that jazz has two phases: exposition and improvisation. “When Omara Portuondo incorporates jazz into her music, she takes the Cuban music of the time to a different level of interpretation and quality,” she says.
Omara Portuondo during a presentation in Amsterdam, 2001. Frans Schellekens (Redferns)
With his sister Elena Burke and Moraima Secada he founded the Las D’Aida Quartet. He later released his first solo album, Magia Negra, in 1959. “His experience charge also manifests itself in his songs and in his interpretation. Cuban history is closely linked to the history of Omara. His career was also influenced by magical-religious thinking, that of the rhythms of the Yoruba – the collection of traditions and beliefs imported from Africa –,” confirms the historian. In his lyrics from the first album you can hear: There is a strange black magic in you that is like a curse for me. And in that magic that lies in your gaze, my soul is enveloped in a sensual heat.
From Cuba to the world
Montoya explains that the dialogue between the US and Cuba in the 1950s marked the first internationalization of guajira music. The second came a few years later, with the birth of the Buena Vista Social Club project in 1996. American musician and producer Ry Cooder launched the project, attracting relevant musician personalities such as Omara Portuondo himself, Ibrahim Ferrer or Compay. “The 90s project is on another level. It confirms, revalidates and does justice to this generation of Cuban artists from the ’40s and ’50s, and the album they recorded in 1997, when the World Cup was being held in France, was a worldwide, global success,” affirms the historian.
The internationalization of Cuban music represents a new position. “This project gives Cuban music a different status. It is synonymous with musical culture and good taste,” he emphasizes. Montoya believes that the Buena Vista Social Club is raising the bar for its work and transforming it into a cultural capital, the category coined by French sociologist Pierre Bordieu to explain how knowledge, education and the rest of the benefits that a person can count on give them a higher status in society.
The historic voice of the Buena Vista Social Club whispers a joke or two during rehearsals on the theater’s stage in the capital. “I want to sleep,” he says, half jokingly, half seriously.
“Give me all of it!” Portuondo suddenly calls and sits on the wicker chair.
—La Noche Cubana?— asks the pianist.
-Clear. “Of course!” I have to say, “Of course!” he jokes again.
After the D’Aida Quartet and her first solo album, Omara Portuondo’s career continued to cross the bridges that connect different musical genres, from sentiment to blues or from son to flamenco, through Brazilian pop music. “She may have skipped gospel, she’s always wanted to sing with one of those groups,” says her son. The repertoire of songs that the Cuban carries behind her back is nourished by a number of collaborations she has accumulated over her 75-year career. “He’s a star, he has a hierarchy. He shared the stage with Édith Piaf in the US, with Bola de Nieve, with Beni Morel, with Eliades Ochoa, with Natalia Lafourcade, with El Cigala… His career has always been stable upwards,” confirms Montoya.
Portuondo has always liked the intrepid as a personal challenge. Just a few months ago, the singer appeared on the latest album by Spanish artist C. Tangana with the song Te Venero. “He has the ability to engage in dialogue with different generations. He knows how to listen when it comes to art. She is able to stay up to date and adapt to fashions,” emphasizes the historian. Portuondo’s career spans more than thirty collaborations with antagonistic musicians. In 2008 he released an album together with the Brazilian Maria Bethânia under the name Omara Portuondo e Maria Bethânia. In it, Portuondo sang in Portuguese, a language in which he continues to sing in his spare time.
A pause between song and song
On stage, surrounded by drums, piano and double bass, the verses of a voice marked by the nuances of the bolero continue to fill the silence. Cuban night, beautiful brunette with a sensual soul. With your smile of the moon and the eyes of the stars, the voice of a whisper of the fronds and the lullaby of the sea. Gold hoop earrings, a blue scarf and an even bluer headband highlight the singer, who tries to rest at the end of each song. “He always likes color because it brings joy. He never wears anything sober, he doesn’t like sober clothes,” says Jiménez.
The singer is coming to Mexico with her farewell tour “Vida” Gladys Serrano
With Vida, Omara Portuondo once again fulfills her mother’s wish before her death to bring music into the world. In a few months the singer will come off the stage and stay to record albums and some more specific projects. “He will keep many things, as an artist and as a person. It will remain this beautiful memory of a legacy he left in Cuban and international music history,” concludes Ariel Jiménez.
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