Issac Delgado is scheduled to appear  in Chicago Illinois as the closing act on August 5, 2012 for the 3rd Annual Festival Cubano, which takes place Saturday, August 4 and Sunday, August 5. Issac has been around for a while, so those of you who know his work may be wondering what he sounds like these days.  Well, thanks to Michelle White, here's a taste from a live concert in Denmark earlier this year...

     
 and......

  
Now, as we said, this is a two-day festival chock full of a wide spectrum of talent from the traditional to the current. For complete information about the festival, visit the website at http://thecubanfestival.com/

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In February 2012, Los Hermanos Arango appeared live at the Berklee Performance Center in a killer concert that was streamed globally on Berklee's website.  For those of you who missed that as well as those who saw it but want a second helping, the Berklee Interdisciplanary Arts Institute's YouTube Channel later posted five video clips from that concert.   This one, El Barracon, is a must-see...

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Cuban music in the United States isn't limited to the cities on the coasts; In between a club (Coconut Beach) that has hired Charanga Habanera twice in two years along with actively pursuing other Timba bands and a locally-based band, Grupo Aché, which plays some Songo and TImba (including some Los Van Van covers) as well as the Salsa one might normally expect, Louisville Kentucky is emerging as an important  location for spreading awareness of Timba music in the central United States.   Read more about this and see concert photos of Grupo Aché  here. 

An important African source of Afrocuban music is what is now the country of Benin, and one of Benin's most important bands, Le Tout-Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, is currently on tour in North America.   We recently caught them in concert and asked the band some questions. Read the review and interview and see concert photos of the band here. 

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(para leer en español oprima aquí)
Story and photos by Bill Tilford, all rights reserved 

“What we have here is a failure to communicate…….”  

As I look at everything that has been happening in the Timba music  concert scene in the United States over the past two years, I am reminded of Aesop’s  fable about the little shepherd boy who cried “wolf”.  For those of you who are not familiar with that story, the short version is that a little shepherd boy falsely warned the villagers about a wolf attack on the sheep in order to bring them running out to the pasture.  After he did this twice, and the villagers came running both times only to learn that there really was no wolf, the villagers vowed to ignore him.  The third time that he cried out, there actually was a wolf, but the villagers ignored him because of the previous false alarms, and the flock of sheep was lost.   In a way, we are faced with a similar problem regarding potential audiences for large Timba concerts in the United States now. There is an atmosphere of understandable skepticism among many of the fans, and those of us who work professionally with the music whether as musicians, agents, promoters, managers, venue owners, writers, media figures etc., will need to put our heads together and try to figure out ways that we might be able to address that skepticism.    This problem was already present before the New York concert, which did at least end with a concert. There was also some collateral damage from this event - a lot of discussion in the industry about possible longer tours by individual bands associated with the concert failed to become actual tours.  

I have seen and heard comments in other places questioning whether some of the bands originally advertised for the May/June 2012 New York concert were ever really signed in the first place.  After examining all of the evidence available to me, it appears that even if all of the original bands had truly been signed and confirmed the number of tickets actually being sold   would still not have been enough to permit a concert of the size originally announced, and it still would probably have been economically necessary for the organizers to “downsize” the concert   ( although I don’t know the actual number of tickets sold, the change from the Armory to the Copacabana would not have been practical if thousands of people had already been buying tickets).   Under these circumstances, it is difficult for me to criticize the fact that a smaller concert was the finished product. However, the handling of the public communications aspects of that process was absolutely horrible.   

Since I am also a brass musician myself, I can tell you that since the same brass section was performing throughout the concert, it was probably a good thing that they didn’t play for six full hours – unless the song list was carefully paced to give them plenty of rest, hour six would not have been pleasant for the musicians or the audience.  But here again, there was a serious communications failure between the organizers and the ticket holders.....click here to continue reading.........  

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