Cuban vocalist Omara Portuondo (born 1930), long a well-loved star in her native country, reached an international audience with the release of the "Buena Vista Social Club" album and film of the late 1990s.
The elegant Portuondo, who was nearly 70 at the time, was the only woman among the Buena Vista Social Club artists who reintroduced classic Cuban music to the world. She stood out from that group in another way as well: in contrast to the Afro-Cuban roots music featured in most of the project, Portuondo specialized in a different kind of Cuban song, one with a thoroughly romantic spirit and with strong influences from American jazz and pop as well as other non-Cuban traditions. She was not a forgotten treasure but a modern figure, less well known in the United States than her compatriot Celia Cruz partly because of the political estrangement between the U.S. and Cuba. "In Cuba we have always had the opportunity to get to know many parts of the world, the music of South America, North America, Latin America. I take the best from everywhere," Portuondo told San Diego Union-Tribune writer Andrew Gilbert.
Started Out in Chorus Line
Portuondo was born on October 20, 1930, in the musically fertile Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana, Cuba. Her parents were an unusual couple who raised eyebrows: her mother was an upper-class woman of Spanish descent who was expected to marry a man with the same kind of background but instead chose an Afro-Cuban baseball star, Bartolo Portuondo. For many years they could not walk down the street in public, but the marriage endured. Living on a modest income, the family could not afford a record player, and Portuondo's parents liked to sing romantic duets around the house. Though they were not involved in music themselves they had a circle of musician friends. Portuondo's father had attended school with Cuban song composer Ernesto Grenet.
Portuondo was shy as a child, and at first she left the spotlight to her sister Haydee, a member of the chorus line at Havana's Tropicana Club. When Omara was 15, her mother talked her into a filling in for another dancer who was sick that day. She tried to refuse, saying that she was ashamed to show her legs. "Then my mother said, 'Do it for me. You'll see, one day you'll represent your country all over the world with your art,'" Portuondo recalled to Rob Adams of Scotland's Glasgow Herald. It was not a problem for Portuondo to learn the chorus line's steps, for she had been watching the dancers closely as they rehearsed.
She and Haydee soon joined forces as a harmony duo, performing in nightclubs for audiences that were heavily sprinkled with American tourists. Portuondo won a lead-vocalist slot with a group called Loquibambla Swing, fronted by a blind pianist named Frank Emilio Flynn. The group contained several American musicians, and they created a new style called "fillin" - feeling - that was a stew of pan-American sounds including Brazilian bossa nova music. Heard daily on a Cuban radio show called Mil diez, Portuondo was dubbed "La novia del filín," or the fiancée of feeling.
In 1952, Portuondo formed the group Cuarteto las d'Aida with her sister Haydee, Elena Burke, and Moraima Secada. The group took its name from pianist and director Aida Diestro, and Cuban jazzman Chico O'Farrill composed many of their vocal arrangements. The quartet was a hit from the start, and Portuondo appeared on stage with such 1950s stars as Nat "King" Cole and Sarah Vaughan. Cuarteto las d'Aida toured the U.S. and Europe beginning in 1957, and Portuondo released a solo album, Magía Negra. In 1961, Cuarteto las d'Aida was performing in Miami when Cuban-American relations reached a crisis point: after the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, assisted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war over missiles the U.S.S.R. had installed on the island. Portuondo, who remained a lifelong supporter of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, returned to her homeland. Her sister, along with a host of other Cuban performers, remained in the U.S.
Continued International Touring Despite U.S. Ban
To some degree, Portuondo filled a gap left by the departure of so many other Cuban creative artists, and her career flourished at home, at first with a reformed Cuarteto Las d'Aida and then, from 1967 on, as a soloist. (For a time she sang revolutionary songs and participated in vocal events around the socialist world.) Continuing to entertain in nightclubs, she also appeared in several films and told Adams that she could easily have become an actress instead of a vocalist: "They're similar artforms anyway. In Cuba, I was taught that singers have to be able to get across what we are singing…. Technique and the voice are of the first order, but one must know how to transmit, understand, and explain the music to the audience." Unlike most of the other musicians featured in the Buena Vista Social Club album and film, Portuondo suffered no real hiatus in her career. She worked with some of Cuba's top musicians, including future Gloria Estefan arranger Juanito Marquez. America was off-limits to Portuondo, but she toured both Western and Eastern Europe with the Orquesta Aragón, a legendary Cuban dance band. "Omara is a legend in Cuba, and it's safe to say there's no one of my age who didn't grow up under her influence," 31-year-old Cuban-born ballet dancer Carlos Acosta told Jenny Gilbert of England's London Independent. "When I was a kid I'd see her all the time on television, singing the kinds of songs my parents liked."
The music Portuondo made as a solo artist continued to draw on a diverse set of cultural influences, including American ones. Her shows often included a Spanish translation of George and Ira Gershwin's "The Man I Love." "I admired Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Tommy Dorsey, and Barbra Streisand," Portuondo told John Soeder of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "In my past repertoire, I included many standards, including 'Summertime' and other pieces from Porgy and Bess." Her specialty was the Cuban song genre known as the bolero, a type of romantic ballad emphasizing love, memory, and loneliness. Portuondo could sing the upbeat jazz that became known as salsa, but at heart she was a classic vocal stylist sometimes compared to the melancholy American jazz diva Billie Holiday or the French chanteuse Edith Piaf. Portuondo married and divorced, and her son, Ariel, became her manager.
Omara, a documentary film about her career, won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 1986, and she visited the United States that year for the first time since the revolution. She did not make her solo performing debut in the U.S., however, until a Carnegie Hall concert of 1997. By the early 1990s, just when Portuondo's career might have begun to slow down, the Buena Vista Social Club projects raised her profile around the world. She became involved with the group after its organizer and producer, American slide guitarist and world music enthusiast Ry Cooder, heard her on a visit to Havana in the mid-1990s. As Cooder assembled his group of aging Cuban musicians at the government-owned Egrem studios in 1996, Portuondo was coincidentally recording a new album of her own in the same building. Bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, Portuondo recalled to Adams, "looked in on me and said: 'We need a female voice for a duet with [octogenarian] Compay Segundo, why don't you do it?'" The 66-year-old Portuondo thought, "'What, a love duet with that old guy?' I hadn't seen him for years."
Enjoyed Wide Success with Duets
For her duet with Segundo, Portuondo chose a song called "Veinte Años" (20 Years) that she had recorded many times and had originally learned from her parents years before. She thought that little would come of the session, but the album sold upwards of six million copies around the world, and new touring opportunities began to mushroom. On the soundtrack of the Buena Vista Social Club film (1999), directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, Portuondo was featured in a different duet: in "Silencio," her duet partner Ibrahim Ferrer, a classic vocalist of the 1950s bolero era, was seen using a handkerchief to wipe away a tear from her face. The film's Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature helped make Portuondo better known among U.S. audiences.
The Buena Vista Social Club projects were more than career valedictions; they relaunched Portuondo's career as well as those of many of the other performers involved. Her voice, like that of Ferrer, retained its essential sound, and she still had an unmistakable diva quality in performance. Her Buena Vista Social Club Presents Omara Portuondo album of 2000, with full-scale string arrangements, was one of several successful spin-offs from the original Buena Vista Social Club album, and it brought her a Grammy award nomination for best traditional tropical Latin album. "Making a record like this one had always been a dream of mine," Portuondo told Ernesto Lechner of Interview. "I finally got some good production values and a whole string section to work with." Also in 2000, Portuondo launched her first U.S. tour since the Cuban missile crisis, and she performed frequently in the U.S., Mexico and Europe over the next five years. Though she was thrilled to be playing 20,000-seat venues, she drew a contrast between entertainment in capitalist countries and her life back home. "People are not rich here," she told Joe Muggs of England's Daily Telegraph, "but life is relaxed. When I tour the world, I see your celebrities kept apart from the audience, and I wonder why that is; it seems a little sad." She was backed for the most part not by the Buena Vista Social Club musicians but by a jazz-style big band, and she showed no signs of being ready to retire.
Portuondo saw herself as a musical ambassador, connecting Cuba with the rest of the world. "I've done well in Cuba because I can sing with young pop stars, or with great musical heroes like Ibrahim [Ferrer]; I can be at the front of the stage to sing the big emotional songs, but I can join in with the rhythms of the band, too," she explained to Muggs. "If I can get the world audiences to understand what all these different musical expressions mean to us here, I will be very happy." Creatively restless as she approached her 80th year, Portuondo explored Brazilian sounds on her 2004 album Flor de Amor. The album included an old song called "Tabu" that addressed the theme of interracial love. The year 2005 saw her with a full schedule of appearances, including one at the Latin Passion festival in the Chinese enclave of Hong Kong.
Books
Contemporary Musicians, volume 42, Gale, 2003.
Periodicals
Daily Telegraph, April 29, 2004.
Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), May 1, 2004.
Independent (London, England), April 16, 2004; June 6, 2004.
Interview, September 2000.
New York Times, July 2, 2002.
Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), April 17, 2002.
San Diego Union-Tribune, March 28, 2002; October 30, 2003.
Sunday Times (London, England), May 2, 2004.
