He’s Found It’s Never Too Late to Grab the Brass Ring

Ibrahim Ferrer is the Cervantes of Cuban music.

Born in 1927 at a social club dance in the small eastern Cuba town of San Luis, the talented singer formed his first band at the age of 13, and spent the next 56 years toiling in relative obscurity.

Then, in 1996 at age 69, Ferrer was snagged by friends from the sidewalk during his daily walk around Havana--where he had moved in 1959--and asked to sing in a session that produced two albums, both nominated for Grammys: “A Todo Cuba le Gusta,” by the Afro-Cuban All Stars, and the “Buena Vista Social Club” album produced by U.S. guitarist-musicologist Ry Cooder.

Both albums, which highlight traditional acoustic Afro-Cuban musical forms, were released on the world music market by Nonesuch Records, to critical acclaim.

Since then, the elderly Ferrer has seen his life change completely, as Cervantes did when he published his first novel, “Don Quixote,” in his eighth decade.

With the incredible success of the million-selling “Buena Vista Social Club” as a springboard, Ferrer has now recorded a debut solo album, due in stores next Tuesday (see accompanying review), and at 72 is fulfilling a lifelong dream to tour the world.

About his good fortune, Ferrer has said, “I pinch myself all the time.”

Given his growing recognition, many outsiders may be surprised that the painfully shy singer was never famous until recently in his homeland, in spite of his beautiful voice and creative interpretations of the traditional Cuban song style known as son. In fact, he has lived in a ramshackle apartment in a working-class part of Havana for decades, supporting himself as a carpenter, painter and dock worker.

Though he enjoyed some success with Afro-Cuban orchestras in the ‘40s and ‘50s, including a stint with the famous Beny More Orchestra, Ferrer was soon cast aside in the mid-’60s as a new generation of Cubans embraced the more Americanized sounds of folk and rock music.

With the intellectual revival in Cuba that came with Castro’s revolution, more emphasis was placed on worker songs by artists such as Silvio Rodriguez, and music coming out of Havana.

It has only been in recent years, with the gradual opening of artistic exchange with the U.S. and the subsequent arrival of outside producers such as Cooder, that mainstream music fans in Cuba and abroad have begun to fully appreciate the work of the older, more traditional groups.

“It is a dream come true,” Ferrer has noted. “When I was younger I thought I was going to travel the world with my music. The only chance I got was when I came to Europe in 1962. Then there was the missile crisis. I played in Paris and Eastern Europe with Pacho Alonso’s orchestra and then I was stuck in Europe. I had to stay until everything settled down again before I could go home. Then nothing happened for 35 years. This has given me the will to live. I’m living the dream of my youth in the body of an old man.”