Los Van Van:
Speaking to the Heart of Cuba

by Neil Leonard
www.neilleonard.com

published in Rhythm Music Magazine
Volume 3, Number 2, Feb. 1994

Even in the best of recent years catching a bus or buying a loaf of bread in Cuba meant standing in line for several hours. For a country trapped between a 35-year-old U.S. trade embargo and the inefficiencies of their own system, tasks like finding food have become a full-time occupation. You can come home from an afternoon of shopping to find the neighborhoods power blacked out for several hours, preventing you from cooking what little you have. So when Los Van Van wrote No es Facil (It Aint Easy), singing about buses never arriving, appliances breaking, and other domestic problems, the phrase became one of the most popular sayings on the island, repeated by everyone from bus drivers and bricklayers to Fidel Castro.

Los Van Van have been enlarging the repertoire of popular phrases with each new record. They are the only dance band to produce an unbroken succession of hits spanning the last 25 years. While a Van Van song may not necessarily sound better than hits of competitive bandsRitmo Orientals Azucar (Sugar), N.G. la Bandas Necesito un Amiga (I Need a Friend), Son 14s Bayamo en Coche (Bayamo in Carridge), Irakeres Bacalao con Pan (Codfish With Bread)no other Cuban artists of the eighties described blue-collar Cuban life with more color and detail. Los Van Vans songs were a vivid chronicle of everyday experience, describing everyday encounters with family members, the baker, meat vendor, volunteer construction worker or family doctor. Much like a Public Enemy song or Hank Williams Jambalaya, their lyrics are full of the irony and humor of daily life, with coded cultural references that caused several songs to be banned from airplay.

Los Van Van (The Go Gos) plays a variant of son that they call songo. Son, Cubas primary dance music, emerged in rural communities on the east part of the island and made its way to Havana around 1910. Sons usually begin with a melodic section called the largo that is made up of repeating chorus and verses. The largo is followed by a montuno, in which the singer alternates improvises phrases with a fixed response from the background vocalists.

The closest equivalent to son in the U.S. is salsa, developed in New York as a substitute for son when the U.S.-imposed trade embargo ended direct access to Cuban music. Premier salsa vocalist and composer Ruben Blades, who recorded and occasionally ends his concerts with Los Van Vans hit Muevete, described the first decade of salsa as a repetition of Cuban son of the forties and fifties.

Van Vans modern rendition of son emphasizes electronic instruments and adds heavier accents. The band is to its predecessors what Sly and the Family Stone were to the music of Bobby Blue Bland or early James Brown. While Van Van has alienated a few loyalists of the old guard, the groups innovations have redefined the genre in much the same way as Prez Prados integration of son with the big band sound.

The mastermind behind Los Van Van is Juan Formell, the bands bassist, composer, lyricist, and musical director. Formell was born in the Cayo Hueso section of Havana City in 1942. His father was an arranger, pianist and flautist, but at first he attempted to steer Juan away from the music and refused to pass on his knowledge. The elder Formell had suffered from the institutional racism that, up until the revolution in 1959, segregated dancing clubs and contributed to the tough conditions for mixed or black musicians. Cuba lost a generation of innovatorsPrez Prado, Chano Pozo, Arsenio Rodriguez, Mario Bauza and Miguelito Valdesmen who were among the best soneros to emerge during the forties and fifties, who moved to New York and Mexico to escape the effects of discrimination. Only when Juan was finishing high school did his father begin to give his already musically advanced son music lessons, recognizing that he could not persuade Juan to seek another career.

Formells career began in late 1959 when the newly-established revolutionary government conscripted him to play in the National Police Band. He soon began to play for television, radio, and cabaret orchestras. Working with pianists Gonzalo Rubalcaba Sr. and Peruchin, who were renowned for their eloquent renditions of Cuban classics, Formell refined his playing of sons, danzons, and boleros.

By the mid-sixties rock was stealing the spotlight from Cuban music. The evolution of Cuban dance music had slowed down over the past ten years, but rock was reaching its peak. The most popular group became the Beatles, whose masterful songwriting, cutting guitars and occasional screaming vocals filled young Cubans yearning for a music that was both lyrical and filled with wild abandon. Their influence was so pervasive that Formell and his contemporaries were dubbed the generation of the Beatles. The excitement only increased when Cuban radio banned them, along with many other rock bands, at a time when rock was actually gaining acceptance in the rest of North America.

Formell had already embraced the music of Elvis Presley and the Beatles when he began working with vocalist Elena Burke in 1965. He had recently taken up writing and arranging, seeking to integrate rocks electronic and rhythmic innovations with son. Burke recognized the young talent and recorded several of his pieces accompanied by La Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna (the forerunner of Irakere). The records succeeded in reviving Burkes career and boosted Formells status among his peers.

Cubans are obsessive about naming their rhythms. While the public and record industry in the United States goes no further than grouping bands into generic styles such as rock, rhythm and blues, or country, Cuban bands can have a different style listed for every song on a given record. The major styles include son, songo, cha-cha-cha, bolero and changui. Composers who create new spins on existing styles give them names like cha-cha-cha-shake, guajira-son, cata songo, bomba son, changui 68, or bata rock. Every Cuban songwriters dream is to achieve immortality by creating a new dance or style that will become a focal point for a generation. Formell was wasting no time in searching for new variations from his experiments with Burke, which he labeled shake or afro-shake.

In 1967, Formell was invited to join percussionist Elio Reves Orquesta Reve, a relatively unknown cojunto tipica. The group used the charanga instrumentation of piano, flute, bass, percussion and violins. The charanga orchestra had evolved over the past 75 years, reaching its peak in the forties and fifties with Orquesta Aragon and Enrique Jorrin, creator of the cha-cha-cha.

Formell was reluctant at first to accept the offer. Charanga seemed like it was quickly going out of style. But it soon became clear that the experience was to change his life. Put in charge of directing and writing the arrangements Formell quickly started changing the sound of the group. By the time he left two years later, he had added electric guitar, substituted electric bass and amplified the violins and cello with pick-ups. Violins and flute maintained the flavor of charanga, while the vocals, drums, electric guitar and bass became the heart of the groups sound. In less than one year Orchestra Reve had a style all its own and was filling dance halls across the island.

In 1969 Formell left the group to form Los Van Van, taking a number of Reves musicians with him. This allowed him to continue to develop his new sound without interruption. By the late seventies he had added three trombones, a drum set, and later synthesizers and effects processors.

With Los Van Van Formell refined his sound and called it songo. Working closely with percussion virtuoso Jose Luis Quintana (Changuito), he modified son by reinforcing the bass and percussion accents, bringing them almost up to the level of the voice. Changuito expanded the role of the timbale player to include cymbals, bass drum, tom toms and percussion synthesizers as well. Songo also incorporated more Afro-Cuban polyrhythms then its predecessor.

By the 80s songo had become Cubas most popular dance style of the last thirty years. Foreign musicians such as Batacumbele (Puerto Rico), Bobby Sanabria (New York) and Ruben Blades (Panama-New York) began to adopt songo. The form became one of the hippest Latin styles outside of Cuba and contributed greatly to restoring Cubas reputation as a center of cutting-edge Latin dance music.

Van Vans longevity have allowed them to continuously refine their technique over the years, to the point where their ensemble work is unsurpassed. Juan Formell and Changuito in the rhythm section often seem fused into a single musician. Pedro Clavo (Pedrito), their charismatic singer, has also been with the band for over fifteen years, brilliantly evoking in song and speech the rhythms and language of life in Cuba. The eighties was an exceptionally strong period for the group, as documented in their retrospective album Cronicas. Released in honor of their twenty-fifth anniversary, the album showcases Van Vans genius at chronicling the pleasures and difficulties of day-to-day existence.

The record opens with No Soy De La Gran Escena (I Am Not From the Grand Stage), named after a television show featuring performances of classical music, La Gran Escena. Ruefully mourning the fact that he cannot be on the show, the singer speaks of his admiration for classical music, political song derived from tradition of Spanish troubadours, even foreign artists. The middle of the song features a brief excerpt from a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, complete with sentimental violins, which attempts in vain to overshadow the songo beat. The song climaxes with a full ensemble montuno, in which Van Vans singers declare all Cubans to be rumberos. Whatever our pretensions to the contrary, the song implies, our real music is the music of the street, our link to our Afro-Cuban heritage indissoluble.

In Se Cambia El Turno (The Shift Changes) Van Vans singer invites the listener to walk with me and youll see as he takes you on a tour of Havana. He points out hotels, gas stations, pharmacies, pizza shops, all of them brought to a standstill at the end of the afternoon shift. As often happens in a Van Van song, an extra-musical voice enters to help Pedrito fill out the scene. In this case the woman wont sell him a bottle of rum for his daughters birthday, because she does not feel like working during the shift change.

Cuatro Anos de Ausencica (Four Years of Absence) is about a doctor who returns from a four-year tour of duty in Angola, West Africa, filled with the pride of international success, only to find that he cant obtain beer to toast his success with his neighbors. The song speaks to the difficulty the Cuban army faced in adjusting to the hardships and widespread shortages at home after returning from serving their country overseas. It plays on the tension between national pride and impatience with the prevailing situation; these are resolved in the end with the doctors declaration to return to service if called.

El Negro No Tiene Na (The Black Guy Doesnt Have Anything), from an LP of the same name tells what Pedrito claims is a true story of neighbors believing gossip that was he killed in a fire. When he goes to a neighbors house to confront her, she screams out Youre a ghost! When I was in Havana the word on the street was that Pedrito used the song to dispel a rumor that he had AIDS. When I ran into Pedrito in a parking lot he had the song title, El Negro No Tiene Na, carefully painted above the running board of his car.

After these provocative LPs, El Negro No Tiene Na and Cronicas, Van Van have toned down the lyrics to avoid controversy during the islands current economic crisis, a period in which day-to-day existence has reached a level of difficulty far more severe than that described in No Es Facil or Se Cambia el Turno. Aqui El Que Baila Gana (Here He Who Dances Wins), the double LP that followed Cronicas, is full of dance songs with simple lyrics. But while Formell is simplifying the lyrics, he is making up for the loss with new rhythmic experiments.

Deja La Boberia, one of the albums highlights, combines songo and rap, a reaction to the lambada and salsa erotica that saturated Cuban radio in the late eighties. Van Van challenges the public to check out their new dance, which is introduced by all the lead and background vocalists rapping in unison. Though void of story, the songs innovative funky rhythm has captivated fans. The comical popular phrase Deja La Boberia, loosely translating to cut the clowning, is surely intended be Formells next addition to household phrases.

Despite the recent uneveness of the groups lyrics they seem capable of an unforseen number of productive years ahead. Occasionally a rival band threatens to share their spotlight, but none of their toughest competitors have survived the complexities of keeping a dance band at the top for more than a decade. As one enthusiast explained on our way to Salon Rosada, Cubas toughest and most competitive night club, with Van Van one knows what to expect: They have demonstrated twenty years of quality. With the other groups no one knows what will happen after their next hit. The back wasll of Salon Rosadas stage was covered with posters and record covers left by performers. But it was crowned with Van Vans name in neon standing alone at the top.

Neil Leonard is a composer/saxophonist whose recent solo concerts were featured at the Audio Art Festival, Poland and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, New York. He can be heard on the latest CDs of Ibrahima Camara and the Alloy Orchestra. He is currently teaching in the Music Synthesis Department at Berklee College of Music.

BOX: Several Van Van recordings have been reissued by the Island, Messidor, and World Pacific labels. A number of the late 1980s masterpieces including El Negro No Tiene Na and Deja La Boberia are re-issued on Bailando Mojao (World Pacific), an anthology of works from 1984 to 1990. The disk comes with a booklet of translations. While the lyrical rhythm and coded cultural references are lost, the translations give more detail of everyday life in Cuba, making this CD a first choice for English-only listeners.