On The Rye Festival

Back in the 1940’s, social clubs acted as place for communities to come together with the freedom to express themselves, forgetting about forms of repression. That was the exact function of the Buena Vista Social Club as musicians and dancers would regularly come together. However the venue would remain active for only a little while due to governmental changes but the impact the club would have on generations to come was monumental.

Fast forward fifty years to 1996 when guitarist Ry Cooder was invited to Havana to assist in recording a session with African high-life musicians as part of a project for World Circuit Records. However with the musicians unable to get visas in time, Cooder and producer Nick Gold improvised and instead decided to record a Cuban son album featuring twenty local musicians. Taking six days to record, the self-titled album featured some of their most popular tracks such as “Candela”, “Dos Gardenias” and the incredibly catchy “Chan Chan”. Released in 1997, the album became a phenomenon as word spread of this exciting body of work, selling over five million copies worldwide. At the 1998 Grammy Awards the album received Best Tropical Latin Performance.

Following the success of the album, German filmmaker Wim Wenders and Cooder collaborated to visually document recording sessions with the band. Featuring interviews with some of Havana’s finest musicians: Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Ruben Gonzalez and Eliades Ochoa, the film also highlighted the ensembles first live performance at the Carnegie Hall in New York, US. The film was a box office success creating what would be known as ‘Cubamania’ boosting the tourism appeal as the album became the soundtrack to bars and coffee houses in Havana, Cuba.

With a high demand for the band to perform live, the collective have travelled across the globe delivering incredibly memorable live shows. Despite the varying age range of the musicians, they’re incredibly in tune with each other accompanied by bundles of enthusiasm, energy and life which permeates into each and every single audience member as they dance the night away. Although the band have ever only released one album, it has become iconic as a piece of Cuban music history and will remain a timeless masterpiece.