Buena Vista Social Club lift the spirits

When musician Ry Cooder visited Havana in the mid-’90s, he was astonished at the vibrancy of the music scene.

Cut off from Western culture for decades as a result of the communist dictatorship, the city functioned as an artistic time capsule. In tiny cafés and pokey side-walk venues, veteran players were stuck in a glorious retro loop, performing in the same fashion as they had in the ’30s and the golden age of Cuban big band music. Cooder vowed to bring their rich vintage style, called ‘son’ by Cubans, to a wider audience.

Thus was born the phenomenon of the Buena Vista Social Club, a loose affliction of Cuban virtuosos whom Cooder discovered jamming in the Marianao neighbourhood of Havana (an original Buena Vista Social Club at Marianao had thrived through the ’30s and ’40s before closing under communism in the ’60s). The music was the focus of film maker Wim Wender’s 1999 documentary Buena Vista Social Club which chronicled the band members’ return to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York, a city most of them had not visited in 50 years.