www.ambiente.us APRIL / ABRIL 2008
CACHAO, 1918-2008
Legendary Cuban musician dies
by Enrique Fernandez
March 22, 2008- Known to the world simply by his
nickname -- Cachao -- bassist, composer and
bandleader Israel López died Saturday morning at
Coral Gables Hospital of complications resulting
from kidney failure. He was 89.
Cachao was one of the most important living figures
in Cuban music, on or off the island, and ''arguably
the most important bassist in twentieth-century
popular music,'' according to Cuban-music historian
Ned Sublette. He not only innovated Cuban music
but also influenced the now familiar bass lines of
American R&B, ''which have become such a part
of the environment that we don't even think where they came from,'' Sublette said.
Cachao and his brother Orestes are most widely known for their late-1930s invention of the mambo, a hot
coda to the popular but stately danzón that allowed the dancers to break loose at the end of a piece.
It debuted in a chic Havana night club -- and flopped.
''Nothing happened,'' Cachao told The Miami Herald in 1992. ``Here was this 180-degree turn. The whole
orchestra was out of work for six months after that because people didn't understand that type of music.''
Typically modest, Cachao always credited bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado for making the beat
world-famous in the 1950s.
''People think there could've been some antagonism,'' Cachao said. But ``if it weren't for him, the mambo
wouldn't be known around the world.''
A possibly more important musical moment took place in 1957, when Cachao gathered a group of
musicians in the early morning hours, pumped from playing gigs at Havana's popular nightclubs, for an
impromptu jam at a recording studio. The resulting descargas, known to music aficionados worldwide as
Cuban jam sessions, revolutionized Afro-Cuban popular music. Under Cachao's direction, these masters
improvised freely in the manner of jazz, but their vocabulary was Cuba's popular music. This was the model
that wold make live performances of Afro-Cuban based genres, from salsa to Latin jazz, so incredibly hot.
This majestic influence came from a man of sweet demeanor and unassailable sense of humor. Fronting
his band at a fancy dance in Coral Gables when he was already in his late 80s, he seemed so frail that he
had to lean his whole body on the contrabass to keep from falling. But his beatific smile and closed eyes
proved that he was in heaven already, embracing his instrument like a lover, like a strong friend.
Yet he no longer owned a bass.
''That's outrageous,'' said jazz legend Charlie Haden when he heard this at the time. ``I'll give him one of
mine.''
But a contrabass took up too much room in his small Coral Gables apartment. Besides, what need did he
have to rehearse? Cachao carried his bass, his music, inside him.
A marvel of the 20th century, Cachao was born in 1918 in the same Havana house where Cuban poet and
patriot José Martà was born. He was the youngest of three children in a family of distinguished musicians,
many of them bassists -- around 40 and counting in his extended family.
As an 8-year-old bongo player, he joined a children's septet that included a future famous singer and
bandleader, Roberto Faz. A year later, already on bass, he provided music for silent movies in his
neighborhood theater, in the company of a pianist who would become a true superstar, the great cabaret
performer Ignacio Villa, known as Bola de Nieve (Snowball).
His parents made sure Cachoa was classically trained, first at home and then at a conservatory. When he
was 13, he joined his father and brother in the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana -- The Havana
Philharmonic -- playing contrabass under the baton of guest conductors like Herbert von Karajan, Igor
Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos. He had to stand on a box to reach the strings.
He was equally at home playing in a dance band, changing out of his coattails at the end of a concert to play
with Arcano y sus Maravillas. When they weren't playing, Cachao and his brother created some 3,000
danzones.
''One day I was in my own home and I turned on the radio,'' he told The Miami Herald. 'And I heard a danzón
that I liked. And I said `Who is that'? -- and at that moment, the announcer says it's mine.''
After a rich musical career in his home country, he left Cuba in 1962. His brother Orestes stayed on the
island. As retribution for leaving, Cachao said, the Cuban government removed his name from all of his
recordings, leaving only Orestes on the label. That, he said, was a ``big tragedy.''
Cachao eventually landed in Las Vegas because, as he admitted, ``I was a compulsive gambler.''
Though cured later in life, he nearly gambled away every penny until his wife whisked him away.
For a while, he had two distinct musical personae. In the New York salsa scene he was revered as a music
god, with homage concerts dedicated to him, and records of his music produced by Cuban-music collector
René López. In Miami, he was an ordinary working musician who would play quinceañeras and
weddings, or back up dance bands in the notorious Latin nightclubs of the Miami Vice era.
It took a celebrity, Miami's own Andy GarcÃa, to integrate his musical personality into one: that of a
legendary master. In the '90s, GarcÃa produced the recordings known as Master Sessions, accompanied
by big concerts honoring his legacy. Cachao's star rose again.
But he remained a working musician, if at a much higher level of appreciation. Cachao continued to perform
and record with all the energy of a much younger artist. Though already frail and distraught at the funeral of
his fellow legend, trombonist Generoso Jiménez, in September 2007, he headlined a rollicking concert in
Miami a week later.
Earlier this month, just days before he was hospitalized, the multiple Grammy winner was in the Dominican
Republic receiving a lifetime achievement award. Cachao was planning an European tour in August with
violinist Federico Britos, with whom he frequently collaborated.
The day before his death, Cachao told his friend Britos, ''When am I supposed to record with you again? I
have to get out of bed.'' And he was in pre-production for a CD of new compositions.
''It was not only a great musician who died,'' said producer Emilio Estefan, who was at his bedside, ``but a
great señor -- a gentleman. Even in his deathbed he would make sure his visitors felt at ease. He
belonged to the people.''
Cachao, whose wife of 58 years, Ester Buenaventura López, died in 2004, is survived by their daughter
MarÃa Elena López, grandson Hector Luis Vega and his nephew Daniel Palacio.
From the archive | The life of the legendary Cachao
April 20, 2006
by Lydia Martin
The legendary Cachao, credited with giving Cuban music its swinging bass line, sits at Versailles sipping a
cortadito made just how he likes it - evaporated milk and Splenda. There isn't a server here who would get it
wrong.
He's trying to tell you about his earliest days at the upright bass, when he was 9 and had to stand on a crate
to reach the thing.
"You know [legendary Cuban pianist and singer] Bola de Nieve? I accompanied him in the silent movies. It
was just the pictures and our music, " he says in his soft rasp.
But he can't finish the story about the beginnings of a career that is now, remarkably, reaching the 80-year
mark. The early lunch crowd raises cafecitos in salute, they wave, they come over to shake his hand. Some
call him Señor Cachao. Most say Maestro.
Israel "Cachao" Lopez, 87, acknowledges the irony with a gentle smile. There have been upswings and
downswings. Friday he performs at the James L. Knight. On June 24, he will be honored at Carnegie Hall.
But it wasn't long ago that he was just another aging exile here at aging exile central. He drank his cortaditos
and kept to himself the fact that he helped create the mambo and later instigated the descarga, or jam
session, the thing that gave Cuban musicians license to burn the house down.
He was a musician's musician whose entire family played and who moved with ease between the Havana
Philharmonic Orchestra and dozens of bands that played the popular sound of the day. He and his brother
Orestes Lopez rushed that sound toward the future in 1937 when they started toying with the starched
danzón - an elegant form of Cuban music that dates to the late 1800s that was composed in three sections;
they sped up and syncopated the third part, but at first, few dancers could follow. "We called that part
mambo. That was la parte sabrosa (the tasty part). My brother and I would say to each other, 'Mambea,
mambea ahÃ, ' which meant to add swing to that part."
A couple of years ago, a journalist traveled to Cuba and brought back the original sheet music of the Lopez
brothers' first mambo. It hangs in Cachao's living room now. The only lyrics, in Cachao's hand: "Mambo,
mambo, mambo, sabroso mambo."
LEAVING CUBA
In 1962, politics made him drag himself to the Havana airport to leave the island for good. He had to lie to
his only daughter about where he was going that afternoon. Maria Elena was only 9. Her mother had left a
couple of years before to lay the groundwork to get her family to New York. Cachao had tried to leave Maria
Elena behind once before, in 1961. But she had cried so hard at the airport, he turned around and ran back
home. Which is why the second time, he left without a word. "Imagine how hard it was, " Cachao says,
staring down at his cortadito. "It was harder for her mother than for me. But I couldn't stay in Cuba. We knew
we had to leave to get her out later. We just didn't know how long it would take."
Buenaventura, Cachao's wife of 58 years (everybody called her Estelle for reasons Cachao himself can't
explain), died last year. She was only 15 or 16 when she swooned for one of Cachao's danzones at a party.
But when she asked to meet the composer, she wasn't impressed. "She thought I was too fat. She didn't like
me. But we became friends and a couple of years later I asked for her hand, " Cachao says with a chuckle.
After Buenaventura's death, daughter Maria Elena, now a grandmother herself, moved from the Bronx to live
with her dad. They share an unassuming two-bedroom apartment in a new building off Calle Ocho in Coral
Gables. Cachao's five Grammys sit on the entertainment center above the TV. But mostly they serve to prop
up snapshots of Cachao's two grandsons. Says Maria Elena, who finally got out of Cuba in 1967: "As many
times as I have seen him play, every time he is on stage, I cry. To see a musician so surrendered to his art
is incredible. Whether it was a baby shower or Carnegie Hall, he played with the same emotion."
What's strangely missing from Cachao's place is his instrument. "I don't need a bass at home. I rent them, "
he says. "It's hard to drag it around the airports at my age. The one I bought in 1930 for $30, I recently sold to
a collector for $25,000. It was easier not to have it. Insuring it cost $2,000 a year. And I really don't need to
practice any more."
Cachao delivered his delicious thump, thump, thump to New York's Latin jazz scene in 1964, after two years
in Spain. Later he played endless Las Vegas orchestra pits. But by 1978, Buenaventura had put her foot
down, demanding they move to Miami to get Cachao away from the gaming tables. He was hooked on
blackjack and roulette, burning through thousands of dollars while scratching his head about fellow
entertainers' casino habits.
"Frank Sinatra would arrive with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis and a mob of bodyguards. He would sit and
listen to different bands I happened to be in, because he loved Cuban music. You had to play Siboney for
him. Once he heard it, he got up and went to the tables. Liberace would play only the penny machine. And he
would get really angry when he was losing. People around him would say, 'Take it easy, take it easy.' But he
had just lost a whole dollar and he didn't care that he was a millionaire, it was a whole dollar."
ANONYMOUS BANDS
Miami is where the baby showers came in. It may have been the closest thing to Havana, but it wasn't a city
with much of a live music culture. Besides, times had changed. The mambo, even the descarga, had
become part of the sepia-toned past.
But Cachao never complained. He put everything into being the anonymous sideman in a string of
anonymous banquet hall bands.
"At least I never had to become a barber. I was still living from my music. And I never gambled again. The big
lie about gambling is that you can win. Maybe for a little while, but in the end you always lose, " says Cachao,
who admits he still buys the occasional lottery ticket. "I never spend more than $1."
What happened next everybody at Versailles knows. In the early 1990s, a Hollywood actor named Andy
Garcia, a youngster who pined for an era he was too young to have lived through himself, yanked Cachao,
one of his childhood idols, from obscurity with the help of another youngster named Emilio Estefan. In 1994,
they released Israel "Cachao" Lopez Master Sessions, Volume I, on Estefan's Crescent Moon label. It
helped spark new interest in the retro Cuban sound not just locally, but across the globe. "Those two, and
Glorita, too, are like my children, " Cachao says.
Even before Master Sessions, Garcia was obsessed with the idea of making a movie based on Guillermo
Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres. Even then, he knew Cachao's music would play a big part the The
Lost City, which opens April 28, and the soundtrack, which features several of his songs.
"I always saw the music as a protagonist, " Garcia said. "For the physical protagonist in the movie, the music
is the one thing he finds solace in in exile. It is the one thing that never betrays him. It's true for me, too.
When I close my eyes and I hear a piece of music from the past, I go back and live an era I didn't even know.
I never saw Beny Moré live. But in my imagination I have." Friday at the Knight Center, Garcia will play not
just with Cachao but with Moré's famed trombonist, Generoso Jiménez, who left Cuba in 2003. "I'll be like
a kid in candy store, " Garcia said. Generoso and Cachao go way back. In 2005, they performed at the
Grammys alongside Bebo Valdés, Arturo Sandoval and Johnny Pacheco in what the Recording Academy
billed as a "once-in-a-lifetime performance."
"It was delicious, " says Generoso. "To be with Bebo and Cachao on stage again. At our age. Imagine that. I
remember Cachao from when we were kids. I recorded a descarga album with him before he left Cuba.
Now, here we are working again together in Miami. I find myself enchanted with life as I'm about to turn 89."
Cachao, who turns 88 in September, seconds that emotion.
"To be remembered after all these years. It's beautiful."
Copyright © Miami Hearld & AMBIENTE MAGAZINE. Do not reproduce without citing these sources.
CACHAO, 1918-2008
Legendary Cuban musician dies
by Enrique Fernandez
March 22, 2008- Known to the world simply by his
nickname -- Cachao -- bassist, composer and
bandleader Israel López died Saturday morning at
Coral Gables Hospital of complications resulting
from kidney failure. He was 89.
Cachao was one of the most important living figures
in Cuban music, on or off the island, and ''arguably
the most important bassist in twentieth-century
popular music,'' according to Cuban-music historian
Ned Sublette. He not only innovated Cuban music
but also influenced the now familiar bass lines of
American R&B, ''which have become such a part
of the environment that we don't even think where they came from,'' Sublette said.
Cachao and his brother Orestes are most widely known for their late-1930s invention of the mambo, a hot
coda to the popular but stately danzón that allowed the dancers to break loose at the end of a piece.
It debuted in a chic Havana night club -- and flopped.
''Nothing happened,'' Cachao told The Miami Herald in 1992. ``Here was this 180-degree turn. The whole
orchestra was out of work for six months after that because people didn't understand that type of music.''
Typically modest, Cachao always credited bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado for making the beat
world-famous in the 1950s.
''People think there could've been some antagonism,'' Cachao said. But ``if it weren't for him, the mambo
wouldn't be known around the world.''
A possibly more important musical moment took place in 1957, when Cachao gathered a group of
musicians in the early morning hours, pumped from playing gigs at Havana's popular nightclubs, for an
impromptu jam at a recording studio. The resulting descargas, known to music aficionados worldwide as
Cuban jam sessions, revolutionized Afro-Cuban popular music. Under Cachao's direction, these masters
improvised freely in the manner of jazz, but their vocabulary was Cuba's popular music. This was the model
that wold make live performances of Afro-Cuban based genres, from salsa to Latin jazz, so incredibly hot.
This majestic influence came from a man of sweet demeanor and unassailable sense of humor. Fronting
his band at a fancy dance in Coral Gables when he was already in his late 80s, he seemed so frail that he
had to lean his whole body on the contrabass to keep from falling. But his beatific smile and closed eyes
proved that he was in heaven already, embracing his instrument like a lover, like a strong friend.
Yet he no longer owned a bass.
''That's outrageous,'' said jazz legend Charlie Haden when he heard this at the time. ``I'll give him one of
mine.''
But a contrabass took up too much room in his small Coral Gables apartment. Besides, what need did he
have to rehearse? Cachao carried his bass, his music, inside him.
A marvel of the 20th century, Cachao was born in 1918 in the same Havana house where Cuban poet and
patriot José Martà was born. He was the youngest of three children in a family of distinguished musicians,
many of them bassists -- around 40 and counting in his extended family.
As an 8-year-old bongo player, he joined a children's septet that included a future famous singer and
bandleader, Roberto Faz. A year later, already on bass, he provided music for silent movies in his
neighborhood theater, in the company of a pianist who would become a true superstar, the great cabaret
performer Ignacio Villa, known as Bola de Nieve (Snowball).
His parents made sure Cachoa was classically trained, first at home and then at a conservatory. When he
was 13, he joined his father and brother in the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana -- The Havana
Philharmonic -- playing contrabass under the baton of guest conductors like Herbert von Karajan, Igor
Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos. He had to stand on a box to reach the strings.
He was equally at home playing in a dance band, changing out of his coattails at the end of a concert to play
with Arcano y sus Maravillas. When they weren't playing, Cachao and his brother created some 3,000
danzones.
''One day I was in my own home and I turned on the radio,'' he told The Miami Herald. 'And I heard a danzón
that I liked. And I said `Who is that'? -- and at that moment, the announcer says it's mine.''
After a rich musical career in his home country, he left Cuba in 1962. His brother Orestes stayed on the
island. As retribution for leaving, Cachao said, the Cuban government removed his name from all of his
recordings, leaving only Orestes on the label. That, he said, was a ``big tragedy.''
Cachao eventually landed in Las Vegas because, as he admitted, ``I was a compulsive gambler.''
Though cured later in life, he nearly gambled away every penny until his wife whisked him away.
For a while, he had two distinct musical personae. In the New York salsa scene he was revered as a music
god, with homage concerts dedicated to him, and records of his music produced by Cuban-music collector
René López. In Miami, he was an ordinary working musician who would play quinceañeras and
weddings, or back up dance bands in the notorious Latin nightclubs of the Miami Vice era.
It took a celebrity, Miami's own Andy GarcÃa, to integrate his musical personality into one: that of a
legendary master. In the '90s, GarcÃa produced the recordings known as Master Sessions, accompanied
by big concerts honoring his legacy. Cachao's star rose again.
But he remained a working musician, if at a much higher level of appreciation. Cachao continued to perform
and record with all the energy of a much younger artist. Though already frail and distraught at the funeral of
his fellow legend, trombonist Generoso Jiménez, in September 2007, he headlined a rollicking concert in
Miami a week later.
Earlier this month, just days before he was hospitalized, the multiple Grammy winner was in the Dominican
Republic receiving a lifetime achievement award. Cachao was planning an European tour in August with
violinist Federico Britos, with whom he frequently collaborated.
The day before his death, Cachao told his friend Britos, ''When am I supposed to record with you again? I
have to get out of bed.'' And he was in pre-production for a CD of new compositions.
''It was not only a great musician who died,'' said producer Emilio Estefan, who was at his bedside, ``but a
great señor -- a gentleman. Even in his deathbed he would make sure his visitors felt at ease. He
belonged to the people.''
Cachao, whose wife of 58 years, Ester Buenaventura López, died in 2004, is survived by their daughter
MarÃa Elena López, grandson Hector Luis Vega and his nephew Daniel Palacio.
From the archive | The life of the legendary Cachao
April 20, 2006
by Lydia Martin
The legendary Cachao, credited with giving Cuban music its swinging bass line, sits at Versailles sipping a
cortadito made just how he likes it - evaporated milk and Splenda. There isn't a server here who would get it
wrong.
He's trying to tell you about his earliest days at the upright bass, when he was 9 and had to stand on a crate
to reach the thing.
"You know [legendary Cuban pianist and singer] Bola de Nieve? I accompanied him in the silent movies. It
was just the pictures and our music, " he says in his soft rasp.
But he can't finish the story about the beginnings of a career that is now, remarkably, reaching the 80-year
mark. The early lunch crowd raises cafecitos in salute, they wave, they come over to shake his hand. Some
call him Señor Cachao. Most say Maestro.
Israel "Cachao" Lopez, 87, acknowledges the irony with a gentle smile. There have been upswings and
downswings. Friday he performs at the James L. Knight. On June 24, he will be honored at Carnegie Hall.
But it wasn't long ago that he was just another aging exile here at aging exile central. He drank his cortaditos
and kept to himself the fact that he helped create the mambo and later instigated the descarga, or jam
session, the thing that gave Cuban musicians license to burn the house down.
He was a musician's musician whose entire family played and who moved with ease between the Havana
Philharmonic Orchestra and dozens of bands that played the popular sound of the day. He and his brother
Orestes Lopez rushed that sound toward the future in 1937 when they started toying with the starched
danzón - an elegant form of Cuban music that dates to the late 1800s that was composed in three sections;
they sped up and syncopated the third part, but at first, few dancers could follow. "We called that part
mambo. That was la parte sabrosa (the tasty part). My brother and I would say to each other, 'Mambea,
mambea ahÃ, ' which meant to add swing to that part."
A couple of years ago, a journalist traveled to Cuba and brought back the original sheet music of the Lopez
brothers' first mambo. It hangs in Cachao's living room now. The only lyrics, in Cachao's hand: "Mambo,
mambo, mambo, sabroso mambo."
LEAVING CUBA
In 1962, politics made him drag himself to the Havana airport to leave the island for good. He had to lie to
his only daughter about where he was going that afternoon. Maria Elena was only 9. Her mother had left a
couple of years before to lay the groundwork to get her family to New York. Cachao had tried to leave Maria
Elena behind once before, in 1961. But she had cried so hard at the airport, he turned around and ran back
home. Which is why the second time, he left without a word. "Imagine how hard it was, " Cachao says,
staring down at his cortadito. "It was harder for her mother than for me. But I couldn't stay in Cuba. We knew
we had to leave to get her out later. We just didn't know how long it would take."
Buenaventura, Cachao's wife of 58 years (everybody called her Estelle for reasons Cachao himself can't
explain), died last year. She was only 15 or 16 when she swooned for one of Cachao's danzones at a party.
But when she asked to meet the composer, she wasn't impressed. "She thought I was too fat. She didn't like
me. But we became friends and a couple of years later I asked for her hand, " Cachao says with a chuckle.
After Buenaventura's death, daughter Maria Elena, now a grandmother herself, moved from the Bronx to live
with her dad. They share an unassuming two-bedroom apartment in a new building off Calle Ocho in Coral
Gables. Cachao's five Grammys sit on the entertainment center above the TV. But mostly they serve to prop
up snapshots of Cachao's two grandsons. Says Maria Elena, who finally got out of Cuba in 1967: "As many
times as I have seen him play, every time he is on stage, I cry. To see a musician so surrendered to his art
is incredible. Whether it was a baby shower or Carnegie Hall, he played with the same emotion."
What's strangely missing from Cachao's place is his instrument. "I don't need a bass at home. I rent them, "
he says. "It's hard to drag it around the airports at my age. The one I bought in 1930 for $30, I recently sold to
a collector for $25,000. It was easier not to have it. Insuring it cost $2,000 a year. And I really don't need to
practice any more."
Cachao delivered his delicious thump, thump, thump to New York's Latin jazz scene in 1964, after two years
in Spain. Later he played endless Las Vegas orchestra pits. But by 1978, Buenaventura had put her foot
down, demanding they move to Miami to get Cachao away from the gaming tables. He was hooked on
blackjack and roulette, burning through thousands of dollars while scratching his head about fellow
entertainers' casino habits.
"Frank Sinatra would arrive with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis and a mob of bodyguards. He would sit and
listen to different bands I happened to be in, because he loved Cuban music. You had to play Siboney for
him. Once he heard it, he got up and went to the tables. Liberace would play only the penny machine. And he
would get really angry when he was losing. People around him would say, 'Take it easy, take it easy.' But he
had just lost a whole dollar and he didn't care that he was a millionaire, it was a whole dollar."
ANONYMOUS BANDS
Miami is where the baby showers came in. It may have been the closest thing to Havana, but it wasn't a city
with much of a live music culture. Besides, times had changed. The mambo, even the descarga, had
become part of the sepia-toned past.
But Cachao never complained. He put everything into being the anonymous sideman in a string of
anonymous banquet hall bands.
"At least I never had to become a barber. I was still living from my music. And I never gambled again. The big
lie about gambling is that you can win. Maybe for a little while, but in the end you always lose, " says Cachao,
who admits he still buys the occasional lottery ticket. "I never spend more than $1."
What happened next everybody at Versailles knows. In the early 1990s, a Hollywood actor named Andy
Garcia, a youngster who pined for an era he was too young to have lived through himself, yanked Cachao,
one of his childhood idols, from obscurity with the help of another youngster named Emilio Estefan. In 1994,
they released Israel "Cachao" Lopez Master Sessions, Volume I, on Estefan's Crescent Moon label. It
helped spark new interest in the retro Cuban sound not just locally, but across the globe. "Those two, and
Glorita, too, are like my children, " Cachao says.
Even before Master Sessions, Garcia was obsessed with the idea of making a movie based on Guillermo
Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres. Even then, he knew Cachao's music would play a big part the The
Lost City, which opens April 28, and the soundtrack, which features several of his songs.
"I always saw the music as a protagonist, " Garcia said. "For the physical protagonist in the movie, the music
is the one thing he finds solace in in exile. It is the one thing that never betrays him. It's true for me, too.
When I close my eyes and I hear a piece of music from the past, I go back and live an era I didn't even know.
I never saw Beny Moré live. But in my imagination I have." Friday at the Knight Center, Garcia will play not
just with Cachao but with Moré's famed trombonist, Generoso Jiménez, who left Cuba in 2003. "I'll be like
a kid in candy store, " Garcia said. Generoso and Cachao go way back. In 2005, they performed at the
Grammys alongside Bebo Valdés, Arturo Sandoval and Johnny Pacheco in what the Recording Academy
billed as a "once-in-a-lifetime performance."
"It was delicious, " says Generoso. "To be with Bebo and Cachao on stage again. At our age. Imagine that. I
remember Cachao from when we were kids. I recorded a descarga album with him before he left Cuba.
Now, here we are working again together in Miami. I find myself enchanted with life as I'm about to turn 89."
Cachao, who turns 88 in September, seconds that emotion.
"To be remembered after all these years. It's beautiful."
Copyright © Miami Hearld & AMBIENTE MAGAZINE. Do not reproduce without citing these sources.
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