Cuban vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer (1927 - 2005) was a moderate star for much of his life in his native Cuba, but he skyrocketed to international popularity in his old age after appearing on the album "Buena Vista Social Club", a collection of performances by elderly Cuban musicians. A film that followed the album's release featured a duet between Ferrer and his female contemporary Omara Portuondo, and that duet entranced the musical world, seeming to open a portal into a vanished era of arch-romantic Latin song.
That album led to a chance for Ferrer to fulfill a lifelong ambition. He was a skillful and enthusiastic exponent of the mid-century romantic style of Cuban song known as the bolero, but bandleaders had steered him instead toward more upbeat styles as a younger man. And then, during the era of Fidel Castro's Cuba, the new dance style of salsa grew on the island and was exported around the world; Ferrer's boleros were mostly forgotten, and by the time the Buena Vista Social Club album was recorded he was one of the few remaining vocalists with complete mastery of the style. In the eight years between the release of Buena Vista Social Club and his death in 2005, Ferrer made up for lost time, touring almost nonstop and becoming something of an international phenomenon.
Birth Began During Dance
Ferrer's background was multiracial and included African, French, Spanish, and Chinese strands. His father sang, and his mother was an enthusiastic dancer. It was during a dance on February 20, 1927, in fact, that Ferrer's mother went into labor and he was born in San Luis, Cuba, in Santiago province. Ferrer was fond of saying that he had begun singing and dancing in the womb. His mother gave him the name Ibrahim because she was fascinated with the Arab world, another piece of the Latin cultural mosaic.
Both of Ferrer's parents were dead by the time he was 12, and he made a living for a while by selling fruit on the street, unloading boats at a dock, and doing light carpentry. At the end of one year, when he was in his early teens, a cousin asked him to join a group called Jóvenes del Son - the Young Men of Son, son (pronounced with a long "o") being the African-inspired ancestor that had roots in eastern Cuba and was salsa's direct ancestor. Performing at a New Year's Eve party, they were paid one and a half pesos. It was a modest start, but it led to other appearances in the Santiago area at parties and festivals. Ferrer was drawn to the musical life, and he took odd jobs when he had to so that he could keep performing.
Ferrer's musical education occurred when he began to find jobs with other Santiago groups, each of them emphasizing a slightly different part of Cuba's complex musical culture. The son ensembles were growing into big bands, and Ferrer filled backup singer slots with several of them, sometimes taking lead vocals. Ferrer admired American crooner Nat "King" Cole as well as Cuba's classic bolero singers, but bandleaders pushed him to sing upbeat dance pieces instead. In the band Maravilla de Beltrán he initially sang tango music under bandleader Pancho Alonso. Singing lead vocals with a top Santiago big band, the Orquesta Chepin-Choven, Ferrer had a hit in 1955 with a song called "El platanar de Bartolo," but he was not credited on the record. Despite Cuban society's reputation for being essentially color-blind, Ferrer, as an Afro-Cuban, probably suffered discrimination in his early years.
With his musical prospects on the rise, Ferrer moved to Havana in 1957. he signed on as a backup vocalist with two of the top big bands of the day, the Orquesta Ritmo Oriental and the Banda Gigante, led by singer Beny Moré. The Communist revolution in 1959 put a dent in Cuban musicians' livelihoods, for the number of American tourists crowding Havana clubs was soon greatly reduced. Ferrer refused to join the large group of Cuban musicians who fled to the United States. In later years he was a staunch supporter of the revolution. He rejoined Alonso, whose band had been renamed Los Bocucos. He was still rarely allowed to sing boleros, partly because he was so effective as a jazz-like improviser in dance music. "I was always told that my voice was only suited to dance songs," he was quoted as saying by the Times of London. "That disappointment marked me forever."
Encounter with History
Los Bocucos performed in Paris in 1962 and then went on to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In Red Square in Moscow, for the first time, Ferrer saw snow. He met Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at a reception, knowing nothing of the crisis that had been developing in Cuba while he was on tour. "Imagine you've got a hedgehog in your hand. What do you do?" Khrushchev asked him. Ferrer answered that he would let go of it, and Khrushchev said, "Cuba is just the same. You can't touch it." The group was stranded in the Soviet Union as the U.S. blockaded the island. Finally returning home to Havana, Ferrer started a family with his wife, Caridad. Their large set of children has been variously numbered between six and eleven.
Ferrer continued to perform with Los Bocucos, eventually making some recordings for the state-owned Cuban record label Egrem and drawing a small but steady salary as a government-approved musician. He felt that the elimination of the wealthy American component of the group's audiences had actually had positive results. "The music got better after the revolution because we weren't playing for tourists so much," he was quoted as saying by Spencer Leigh of the Independent. "There was a greater identification between the musicians and the audience, which was Cuban." Still, Ferrer had to do construction work to make ends meet in the family's small apartment, which contained an old American refrigerator and some icons relating to the Afro-Cuban santería religion (a fusion of Catholicism and West African beliefs), of which Ferrer was an adherent.
Ferrer officially retired in 1991, having the bad luck to do so just as the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union led to the withdrawal of its support for Cuban economy. He was forced to work shining shoes on the streets of his Havana neighborhood, and it was in that situation that he was approached one day in 1996 by Juan de Marcos González, a Cuban musician and producer who had hatched the idea of the Buena Vista Social Club sessions together with American rock guitarist and world music enthusiast Ry Cooder.
Cooder had suggested the idea of a romantic song on the album to balance the African sounds of the other musicians, and Marcos González said that there was only one musician who could fill the bill. At first reluctant to become involved, Ferrer came to the studio and agreed to perform after experiencing an impromptu reunion with the other musicians, who were of his generation or even older - pianist Rubén González was 77, and guitarist Compay Segundo was 89. When Ferrer and González performed a classic bolero called "Dos Gardenias (para ti)" (Two Gardenias for You), the room was entranced and the album was another step closer to becoming a huge success.
Made Solo Debut
Even Cooder could not predict just how successful the album would become at the time. "I thought, 'Ten old guys playing Cuban music. Who's going to listen to it?'" he told Leila Cobo of Billboard. But the Buena Vista Social Club album sold more than six million copies around the world and spawned a variety of spin-offs, one of which was the 72-year-old Ferrer's debut solo album, The Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer, released in 1999. The album, said England's Daily Telegraph, "showcased Ferrer's gift for balladry, heavy with nostalgia and sentiment, redolent of cigar smoke, sawdust, and jacaranda." It revived songs from the classic era of the bolero, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. The album sold more than one and a half million copies on its own, reaching the number two position on Billboard magazine's world music and Latin music charts. A duet between Ferrer and female vocalist Omara Portuondo, "Silencio," was featured in a Buena Vista Social Club film directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders.
Ferrer now found a large international demand from music lovers who wanted to experience his music in live performance. "The next time I saw Ibrahim Ferrer" after recording his solo album, Cooder told Cobo, "he's walking on stage at Carnegie Hall. The reaction to the human onstage - and this is a direct line from the audience, this poor anorexic audience starved for humanity - they go crazy. It's a wonderful case of what real beauty can do to the world." Ferrer toured nearly nonstop during the last several years of his life, winning the Best New Artist honor at the Latin Grammy awards at age 73 in the year 2000. He became a widely recognizable figure thanks to a signature golf cap he always wore. A series of concerts he performed in Japan that year with Rubén González and Omara Portuondo resulted in sold-out 10,000-seat halls for ten nights in a row.
A second Cooder-produced Ferrer album, Buenos Hermanos, won a Grammy award (for best traditional tropical album) in 2003, but U.S. relations with Cuba had worsened under the administration of President George W. Bush, and Ferrer was denied a visa to attend the ceremony. Cooder's trip to Cuba to produce the album itself had been made possible only by a directive signed by outgoing president Bill Clinton shortly before leaving office. Buenos Hermanos joined Ferrer's talents with those of other Buena Vista Social Club musicians as well as those of non-Cuban performers such as Mexican-American accordionist Flaco Jimenez and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, an African-American gospel ensemble. Ferrer also recorded a duet with English alternative rock star Damon Albarn.
Ferrer undertook a new European tour in 2005, but the ravages of emphysema - he was a lifelong smoker - had begun to catch up with him. He often expressed the idea that since he had gotten the chance to live the musical life of his dreams in his 70s, he was going to make the most of it while he could. Asked by Garth Cartwright of the Guardian why he kept touring, he answered, "I love to sing, to make music. Making music is the greatest joy." Ferrer died in Havana on August 6, 2005, but his legacy was due for expansion by a wealth of material that lay unreleased at his death.
Books
Contemporary Musicians, volume 44, Gale, 2004.
Periodicals
Billboard, June 26, 1999; August 27, 2005.
Daily Telegraph (London, England), August 9, 2005.
Economist (US), August 20, 2005.
Guardian (London, England), August 9, 2005.
Independent (London, England), August 8, 2005.
New York Times, August 8, 2005.
Times (London, England), August 9, 2005.
