Here's an intimate glimpse of one of the very first performances of the first great timba band of the 21st Century - Pupy Pedroso y Los Que Son Son - with the devastating front line of Tirso Duarte, Pepito Gómez and Mandy Cantero. Visitors to Havana will recognize the venue as the "Piano Bar", a converted house down the road from the ENA conservatory where students and visitors hang out. Changuito played regularly with the band at this point and various luminaries sit in - Mayito & Robertón of Van Van, Don Pancho Terry, etc. Part 1 highlights include a Changuito solo and Mayito sitting in on Seis semanas.

Click here for the history of Pupy Pedroso, and here for Tirso Duarte.

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More historic footage from the final tour of one of Cuba's all-time greatest bands - the 1998 Paulito FG y su Élite. This video is everything that this one (http://goo.gl/DCsSCl) is not: it's not complete, has barely any songs that go all the way from beginning to end and doesn't stay on the tripod. BUT - it has better audio quality, substantially better video quality and some pretty amazing camera work. My suggestion is to study the Miami concert until you've got the gear system and then enjoy this one for the closeups and detail. This is Set 1 - Set 2 is here: http://youtu.be/v-gTbbQN9lQ

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Why is April International Timba Month? Although one cannot put an exact date on the birth of Timba, people tend to go along with the idea that it was with El Tosco & NG La Banda that took the many innovations that had been present in Cuban music and brought them together also adding a few of their own creating what we now call timba. Today NG La Banda celebrate their 27th anniversary. That is the main reason that April was chosen as International Timba Month. However both Azúcar Negra and Klímax also celebrate anniversaries in April, which just makes it that much more appropriate.

Here is an excellent video - courtesy of ex-NG drummer Calixto Oviedo - of one of my favorite NG songs "La Bruja", filmed at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. If you will be in LA this month, don't miss Calixto Oviedo & The Cuban Jazz Train at Trattoria 25! It will be a great way to spend an evening for International Timba Month.

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The audio and video quality is not quite ready for IMAX, but this is a truly historic document - the final concert of the final tour of one of the greatest bands ever assembled. After this December 1998 show at Café Cristal in Miami, conguero Tomasito Cruz and future Tiempo Libre vocalist El Kid Díaz left the group to stay in Miami, and after returning to Havana, bassist Joel Domínguez, drummer Yoel Páez and pianist Yaniel "El Majá" Matos left to join the 1999 incarnation of Issac Delgado's band (the band that played the Y2K Concert posted a few months back). The rest of the band includes El Bola Betancourt on trumpet, Carlos Pérez on trombone Juan Ceruto on sax and arrangements. and of course three future members of Havana d'Primera: Alexander Abreu, Rogelio Nápoles and Yosvel Bernal. When we discuss HdP's "resumen de los 90" mission statement - rekindling the brilliance of the timba era - there's no doubt that the PFG 98 band was their overarching inspiration. You can hear all three of these guys solo on Estamos en escena (use the hyperlinks in the video description for quick navigation).

What sets this band aside from all others is their unique approach to timba gears - Paulito quite literally "calls" each gear change with a sophisticated set of hand signals - explained in this youtube:

In 1997, when the classic album Con la conciencia tranquila was recorded (the source for most of the songs from this show), the rhythm section was the same except for Sergio Noroña on piano, but at that point they had two main timba gears - presión and bomba. In 1998 they added a third "masacote"-style timba gear dubbed (at least by Tomasito) "songo con efectos". They played this more and more over the course of 1998 and you can hear plenty of it in the Noche de Cristal audio concert posted a few months ago. That was about 3 months before this show - the last stop on the historic 1998 US tour. I will soon post another video from a few days before this one - at SOBs - it doesn't have complete songs but does have vastly superior video quality. This beauty of this particular video is that most of the songs are complete and there's very little fancy camera work so you can see Paulito and most of the rhythm section all of the time and you can watch as Paulito dishes out his hand signals and the band responds brilliantly. There's also a long version of Estamos en escena in which almost everyone gets a solo. Last but not least is the never-recorded masterpiece, Laura, and the original version of La última bala, later recorded as Una vez más on the 2000 album of the same name.

This is the same band that played this concert in Havana a few months earlier: 

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