Estefan returns to roots in new album
With a musical nod to Cuban culture and the 90 miles of ocean separating
Cuba and Key West, Gloria Estefan sings of yearnings on her new album
Posted on Sun, Sep. 16, 2007
BY ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@MiamiHerald.com
The 90-mile marker at the edge of Key West points south to Cuba. The
number resonates among Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits;
noventa stands for separation, for hostilities and suspicions, for
yearnings and pain, for hope.
And it's the title of Gloria Estefan's first Spanish-language album in
seven years, 90 Millas, set to be released Tuesday. 90 Millas is the
25th album in the career of Miami's biggest homegrown superstar, and it
signals Estefan's return to the public eye and ear after a blockbuster
show at AmericanAirlines Arena three years ago marked her retirement
from tours.
In spite of its name, so resonant for nostalgia-filled Cuban Americans,
90 Millas is all new material, not Cuban oldies. Still, the album is
imbued with Cuban tradition -- a who's who of Cuban musicians backs the
singer.
''[Cuban culture] is the only thing we have because we don't have our
country,'' Estefan said last month in Key West, where she was taping
performances of two of her new songs for Univisión's morning show
Despierta América, near the 90-mile marker. ``We are missing something
very important to a human being, and to share that culture is to
counteract the political image we have.''
Says her husband and producer, Emilio Estefan: ``When I came from Cuba
alone in my teens, it was the most depressing phase of my life. Without
my parents. Without income. My only release was to grab a guitar, an
accordion, percussion.''
In his Crescent Moon studios in Miami, dressed in showbiz black, Emilio
still looks like the laid-back ''godfather'' of Latin music that the
media were calling him a decade ago. ''I've fulfilled all my dreams,''
he says.
This new CD seems like a culmination of those dreams. Gloria proves she
can move freely between American pop and Latin roots, while Emilio can
provide for her a state-of-the-art production with sidemen who are
legends in their own right. A long way for a couple, Miami's most
famous, who channeled their young uprooting into a drive to reach the
top of the music scene, and who keep returning to their identity as
Cuban exiles, 90 symbolic miles from home.
NOT POLITICAL
Although the title song of 90 Millas and Esperando (Cuando Cuba Sea
Libre) -- Waiting (For Cuba to Be Free) -- are filled with exile
sentiment, Gloria insists that her new release is not a political album.
Like most children of Miami exiles, she grew up with an overabundance of
politics. ''Dad was in Bay of Pigs and was a prisoner in Cuba for two
years,'' the singer says. But her songs are not barbs aimed at the
Castro regime. They are, instead, always reflections of an inner life,
which includes the yearning of exiles to somehow make it back home.
Gloria's 25 albums have sold more than 70 million copies, topped charts
and won Grammys. 90 Millas, which, like the 1993 Grammy-winning Mi
Tierra, reinterprets typical Cuban genres, is poised to match Gloria's
past achievements.
The first radio release, No Llores, is No. 1 on Billboard's Latin
Tropical Airplay charts, after debuting nine weeks ago. Tony Campos,
programming operations manager of Spanish Broadcasting System Radio
Miami, has been playing it ''four to five times a day and on its way
up'' on both El Zol, WXDJ-FM (95.7), and Romance, WRMA-FM (106.7), since
its June 26 release.
According to Campos, a hip-hop remix of the song featuring local
Cuban-American rapper Pitbull gets a lot of requests at El Zol at night,
when the programming is aimed at a young demographic. There's also a
reggaeton version with Wisin y Yandel, and a ''tropical'' version
produced by Cuco Peña in Puerto Rico with new vocal tracks by Gloria.
Both Campos and Romance's director of programming, Gino Reyes, are
impressed by the album. The Cuban-American radio pros, who have heard
segments of the entire CD, are enthusiastic about the traditional Cuban
nature of 90 Millas.
''We needed something like this to return to the roots of Miami Latin
radio,'' Campos says.
Says Reyes: ``This is the best album in Gloria's career.''
Two years in the making, 90 Millas has quality to burn. The greatest
living Cuban musicians are featured in it, as Emilio strived for a
feeling of old-time authenticity:
• Bassist Cachao, who later this month celebrates his 80th anniversary
in the music business.
• Generoso Jiménez, the famed trombonist from Beny Moré's band.
• Trumpet player Alfredo ''Chocolate'' Armenteros, another Moré veteran,
who has had a successful career on the New York Latin scene.
• Orestes Vilató, whose timbales pumped Latin beat into the Santana band.
• Cándido Camero, a master conga player who worked with all the jazz greats.
• Saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera.
• Trumpet virtuoso Arturo Sandoval.
And for good measure, José Feliciano, Sheila E. and Carlos Santana.
BEHIND THE SCENES
This Rolls-Royce of Latin music was assembled by Emilio Estefan to
showcase his wife. And the producer, whose golden touch has sent Latin
artists like Ricky Martin and Shakira across the crossover bridge, added
his own touch: a studio-generated backbeat to marry a contemporary
groove to the classic sounds made by the musicians.
The resulting sound is ''like what Luis Miguel did with traditional
boleros,'' says El Zol's Reyes. ``It's reinventing and repopularizing
traditional music.''
A quarter-century ago, to be the centerpiece of such an impressive
production might have seemed improbable to the dreamy songwriter living
in the Kendall suburbs, married to a Bacardi sales executive whose night
gig was heading a band that played at Cuban wedding receptions.
In the early 1980s, Emilio Estefan's Miami Sound Machine was not the
only Cuban-fusion band in South Florida, nor was Gloria its only woman
singer. Carlos Oliva, Willy Chirino and Clouds were working a mix of
Cuban beats with American and other international sounds.
BREAKTHROUGH
Singing with MSM were Gloria's cousin Mercy Murciano, who died earlier
this year, and the future diva, a few pounds rounder and terribly shy.
Then came MSM's Latin-tinged Dr. Beat, topping European dance charts in
1984, and a 1986 reworking of that song, now renamed Conga, with
different lyrics, heavier Latin percussion and a hot keyboard vamp
played by veteran Cuban pianist Paquito Hechevarría. Crossover hit! She
slimmed down, bared her midriff a la Madonna and pumped out hit after hit.
The artist, who turned 50 last month, now leaves the booty moves to the
Shakiras of this world. But she's still lean, even if more covered up,
as she was at the Univisión shoot, in an all-white pantsuit, with
colored beads on her wrists.
HITTING THE ROAD
The Key West performance was only the beginning of the CD's TV
promotion. On Tuesday, Gloria will be in New York to appear on Good
Morning America.
And in that smooth transition from Univisión to ABC lies a factor that
helped transform a little-known Miami singer-songwriter into an
international superstar.
Although she sings in a variety of Cuban genres for 90 Millas, Gloria
wrote only lyrics, not the music, leaving that task to Emilio and his
team. The Spanish lyrics allowed her to give free rein to her feelings.
``You can be as romantic and dramatic as you want, while
English-language love songs have to be more cerebral,'' she says, a note
of sarcasm creeping into her tone. ``Otherwise, they accuse you of being
saccharine.''
The difficult days are far in the past. However, one dream remains,
expressed precisely in the title cut -- much of it sung in Lucumí, the
sacred Yoruba language of Santería, in duet with La India -- and in
Esperando.
''I see myself [singing] at the Plaza Cívica,'' Gloria says, explaining
that the name Plaza de la Revolución was appropriated by the Castro
regime, when in fact the Havana plaza had been built by the previous
government and designed by even earlier administrations.
''And,'' she adds, referring to the homogeneity of the current
''spontaneous'' demonstrations in the plaza, ``everybody wearing
whatever the hell they want.''
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