Music

In recent editions

Qva Libre: a Cuban music laboratory

By Yelena Rodríguez Velázquez

Qva Libre (pronounced Cuba Libre) is a well known group, most famous for the trademark alternative vibe that sets them apart among makers of Cuban music.

Enrique Alvarez y su Charanga Latina, A quarter century making great music

By Mercy Ramos, Photos: Courtesy of Enrique Álvarez, AME PRODUCCIONES and KMINANDO STUDIOS

For fans of Cuban popular music, La Charanga Latina is a symbol in itself. Over the twenty-six years since the band was formed it has been the audience's favourite.

ÉTIENNE DRAPEAU, In Love with Latin Music

By Mercy Ramos, Photos:Courtesy of the artist

Born in 1978 in Quebec city, Étienne Drapeau was a professional ice hockey player, now retired. Music has been his passion from a young age. He began learning the piano at the age of five and later learned guitar and harmonica too.

Fiesta del Tambor: a Celebration of Cuban soul

By Ciro Bianchi Ross

The seventeenth edition of the Fiesta del Tambor percussion festival, held annually in memory of Guillermo Barreto, took place in Havana recently, an explosion of Cuban soul. The week-long festival brought together Cuba’s best percussionists, rumberos, dance companies and popular Cuban bands at Havana’s top cultural venues.

Idania Valdés: Cuba is a way of being that lives beyond us

By Alain Valdés Sierra / Photos: Gabriel Guerra Bianchini

She asserts that singing was always her passion and the piano was her first love but nevertheless Idania Valdes’s family’s musical tradition was not the cause of her decision to follow this path. It was rather a vocation that shaped her personality from her earliest days on.

Fiesta del Tambor, A truly Cuban festival

By Alain Valdés Sierra / Photos: Gabriel Guerra Bianchini

Cuba’s rich music with its contagious beats has percussion at its heart, and it will once again be celebrated at the 17th annual Concurso y Festival Internacional Fiesta del Tambor “Guillermo Barreto in Memoriam”.

Lindiana y Mantra, A Universally Different Blend

By Alain Planells / Photos courtesy of interview

Almost ten years have passed since singersongwriter Lindiana Murphy and saxophonist Alexander Díaz plotted a course for a new musical adventure intertwining Cuban music with various foreign cultures.

World Percussionists Return to Havana

Designer image: Victor Alejandro Crespo, Photo: Roque

The 17th International Tambor Festival and Competition will take place in Havana from March 6th to 11th next year, in memory of Guillermo Barreto, consolidating the relevance of Cuban music on the international scene.

Cuba, the music that lives in Alain Pérez

By Alain Planells

It happened in a Havana café called Mama Inés, a place where Alain Pérez believes to have found a criterion and sound that define him in the Cuban musical framework.

“Cuba’s great percussionists play host to The International Jazz Day Concert”

By: Alejandro Martínez Martínez

April 30th 2017 was a very special day in Havana. Cuba’s capital city was host to the renowned International Jazz Day which featured an all-star global concert in the Gran Teatro. This electrifying event was filmed live and broadcast all around the world.

Remembering is Reliving

Mercy Ramos, Photos: José Meriño

As the popular saying goes, “remembering is reliving.” Thousands of we city dwellers relived our youth of the 1960s, when the popular John Lennon Park in Havana became the stage to pay tribute to The Beatles, one of the most famous rock groups of all time, while celebrating the 50th anniversary of their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Composing, Style Polito Ibáñez

By Ibis Frade Photos: Luis Mario Gell, Leonel Fernández Delgado and Prensa Latina

The University of Medical Sciences in Havana is one of Cuba’s most important institutions, not only for its long history but because of the social and human values that are essential to its training of healthcare professionals. Dr. Luis Alberto Pichs García is the current Rector.

Dance to my Funky Songo...

By Laura Martín

Nube Roja (Red Cloud) is a Cuban band that does audio and video experimentations with the assimilation and recontextualisation of codes of music and universal art. It marks the pulse of a generation, reflects a state of mind and draws the path of postmodernity in the current panorama of Cuban music.

Cary Diez, a voice marked with Rumba

By Jorge Petinaud Martínez

Cuban musicologist Cary Diez is hypnotizing when she speaks about rumba, a festive music and dance genre recently inscribed on the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of the United Nations Office for the Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO).

Guillermo Barreto

By Omar C. Romero Feria

Born on August 11, 1929 in Havana, he received his first musical lessons from his father, Primo Barreto, then studied piano with maestro Rafael Ortega.He started with percussion with the great maestro Obdulio Morales’s orchestra and later, in the 40s, joined the Tropicana cabaret band as drummer under the direction of the maestro of maestros, Armando Romeu, who recognized that Barreto had an exceptional musical ear.