Running, jumping, climbing trees…

The Last Grandmaster of the Buena Vista Social Club

Everyone treasures their very own special musical moments and I can locate one of mine quite specifically. It was early April of 1998 and the Buena Vista Social Club had just edged their way, in that pre-gig gloom, upon stage at Le Carré in Amsterdam. With the lights slowly fading up Compay Segundo broke softly into the first minor chord of Chan Chan and as Eliades Ochoa joined him in the most famous of all Cuban chord progressions. They shot each other a pair of half-mischievous, half-embarrassed smiles. It was one of those rare, beautiful moments that only music as an art form seems to be able to conjure up.

Perhaps one of the reasons why both the album The Buena Vista Social Club and the subsequent documentary of the same name were so well received is because they took a commercially exhausted generation back to the roots of music. Rubén González was a fantastic pianist; Ibrahim Ferrer an incredible bolero singer and Compay Segundo was perhaps the special talent that not just represented the face of Cuban music, but also its soul. They were different musical heroes. Not wound up with ego, they seemed to have bypassed the self destructive, hedonistic narcissism of modern cool.

Today, sadly, Eliades Ochoa is amongst only a few that remain of the golden age of Cuban music. Both Segundo and González died in 2003 (Segundo falling twenty years short of his stated aim to live until he was 115). Ferrer’s final recording came two years later when he contributed a glimmering version of As Time Goes By to an album called Rhythms del Mundo, a fusion of Western and Cuban music.

Eliades is an immaculately dressed, unassuming character, sitting in a tapas cum jazz bar in one of Madrid’s older barrios. As always he is wearing his trademark broad cowboy hat and he greets me with a friendly smile. “I was born many years ago,” he says dryly, “in a small village in the province of Santiago de Cuba. It is a little bit different to here” he quips as a procession of car horns reverberate from outside.

“It’s a very nice thing how life turns out sometimes,” he muses. Indeed, the path to the glittering lights of concert halls around the world is not one trodden by many Cubans. Winner of one Grammy award, nominated for two more and named Artista Laureado de la República de Cuba in 1990, Ochoa’s career has brought him success and, latterly, fame.

“I feel better here than I do in my own country sometimes,” he tells me. “I like Madrid. I have a home here and I have been coming here a long time, it is my base in Europe. I don’t know why I feel like that, I just do” he shrugs, fingering a packet of cigarettes.

Eliades tells me that he has played the guitar as long as he can remember, often waking with music, always going to sleep with it. His musical education was far from formal. Before he landed his first job with a radio station in Santiago as a professional musician, he used to make money for his family by playing concerts in the working clubs around the red light district of Cuba’s second largest city.

His musical style is thickly rooted in Cuban folk tradition. Mostly he is associated with the “tres”, a smaller guitar of three double strings that has played a key role in the development of Afro-Cuban music. His typical shuffling acoustic sound, punctuated by an energetic beat and a soft bass is known as “son cubano” but Ochoa is just as strongly associated with guarancha, bolero and changüi.

At 61 years old, Eliades was much younger than the other members of the Buena Vista Social Club when they found fame during the 1990s. This first came with the album Buena Vista Social Club produced by Juan de Marcos González and American guitarist Ry Cooder and later the Academy Award nominated documentary of the same name which was made by Wim Wenders.

Ochoa’s moment on the album came with the song El Carretero a traditional guajira lament. The lyrics “A caballo vamo’ pa’l monte” are more than evocative of his younger years, growing up in the hills around Santiago. But it was his involvement with one of Segundo’s final compositions Chan Chan that will etch his name forever into the history of Cuban music.

“You have to feel the music. I feel the music,” says Eliades. Chan Chan, he explains, is just a very good example of people connecting with music. “There is something in the music, in the lyrics…” he trails off.

Just as McCartney claims with Yesterday, Segundo said that Chan Chan came to him fully formed in a dream. It tells the wistful story of ‘Juanica’ and ‘Chan Chan’, with the lyrics remaining simple, earthly and oblique. It is a song which has come to symbolise Cuban music and Eliades can’t hide a hint of pride at its mention.

Cuban musicians age very much like French wines and Eliades is showing no signs of slowing down now in his sixties. “I will be playing in England in a few days time, then Spain and by mid-August I will be going back to Cuba” he says. “I have played all around Europe. It is always different and the people are very interested in the music”.

He suggests it may be time for him to stroll off into Madrid’s muggy afternoon heat. With time for one last word, my mind raced through the hundreds of incisive questions I had ready,

“Do you always wear the hat?” I asked.

“Of course” he smiled.