Buena Vista Social Club’s Success in World Music ‘Real Enough’

The most unexpected breakout group in recent world music history has to be the Buena Vista Social Club. The group’s Ry Cooder-produced album on Nonesuch has now hit the million mark in international sales--an amazing feat, given the fact that the ensemble consists of aging Cuban musicians almost completely unknown to audiences outside the island nation.

Cooder, who has just completed a new album with 71-year-old singer Ibrahim Ferrer, has a history of seeking out and recording talent from strikingly diverse backgrounds (Japan, Hawaii, India and Mexico, to name a few). But he never imagined that his quest to preserve a disappearing generation of Cuban music would have such remarkable success.

“The thing we wanted to do,” he said this week during a break in the final mixing of the Ferrer album, “was to make sure that what we recorded was going to be real enough. Sure, you could find old guys who could sit around and play. But you had to find the artistry, the guys who could render the music at its finest. And that was hard to do in the ‘90s.”

In retrospect, Cooder feels that the Buena Vista success traces to that vital quality of being “real enough,” of capturing the music while it was still preserved in its original form.

“We were lucky to find enough of them so that collectively they could set up this kind of aura,” he explained. “And that’s when the inner voice of the music comes through, and the record begins to have a kind of heart pull to it. In the few concerts that they’ve done, I’ve been fascinated by the looks on the faces of the audiences. At the Carnegie Hall concert for example, there were middle-class American folks just flipping out. Not because it was a bunch of hits or even because it was very much of a show--but because it was from the heart, it was honest, and it was pure emotion.”

The Ferrer recording, tentatively scheduled for release in May, moves into the postwar era of Cuban music. Ferrer’s sweet but smoky tenor cruises easily through songs by Arsenio Rodriguez, Felix Chapotin and Beny More in arrangements that augment the danzon and charanga style with strings and added horns. The result delineates a period with all of the “real enough” qualities of the Buena Vista album--qualities immediately apparent in the atmospheric presence of “Green Eyes,” the one tune instantly familiar to American audiences.

Says Cooder: “We found Ibrahim when we were doing Buena Vista. I was saying that it was great to have this room full of musicians, but that there was a vocal quality, a romantic tenor kind of sound, that was missing. And they told me there was only one guy who could do it, and they’d try to find him.

“So the next day there he was, obviously poor and carrying this little plastic bag with his belongings. But he was incredible looking--really thin and catlike, with this Chinese face. I took one look at him and said, ‘Get this guy to a microphone. He must really be something.’ ”

A new Buena Vista Social Club album, consisting of material from last year’s Carnegie Hall concert and two others in Amsterdam, also will be released later this year. Plans are to coordinate its U.S. release with the availability of a Wim Wenders Buena Vista documentary, scheduled to premiere in Havana in March.

Globe Hopping: Master Nubian oud player Hamza El Din was one of the first world music artists to break into the consciousness of the American audience, initially at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and later via his now-legendary album, “Escalay: The Water Wheel” (Nonesuch). El Din has signed a one-record contract with the Sounds True label, which will release “A Wish,” recorded with an international group of players including cellist Joan Jeanrenoud from the Kronos Quartet, in April. . . .

Shanachie/Yazoo has anticipated this year’s Mardi Gras (which begins Feb. 16) with the release of two CDs chronicling some of the earliest recorded American Cajun music. The first features the early 1920s fiddle work of the legendary Leo Soileau. The second, with performances by guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, fiddler Delma Lachney and accordionist John Bertrand from the same period, reveals the then still-prevalent influence of French ballads on the developing Cajun style.