Cubanismo! for All Time

Jesus Alemany and his band have survived the Cuban revolution--the musical one.

His professional career has spanned the past quarter-century, which saw radical transformations of the island’s popular dance scene. But, while other Cuban musicians devoted their careers to experimenting with progressive percussion, modern harmonics and hip lyrics, this purist trumpet-player stuck faithfully to the roots of the island’s musical past.

Like a careful museum curator, he helped preserve an array of rhythms that seemed headed for extinction in contemporary Cuba--son, mambo, danzon, cha-cha-cha, conga, rumba and even the countrified guajira.

His own press pitch calls his work “an exercise in musical archeology.” Alemany will bring Cubanismo!, the swinging cornucopia of Afro-Cuban traditions he founded in 1996, to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Sunday.

His was not the most popular tack to take. Going retro in this era of Cuban innovation would be like American teenagers starting a Dixieland band during the Beatles revolution.

So imagine Alemany’s joy in the international success of his latest group, the one with rootsy enthusiasm built into its punctuated name: Cubanismo! Even fans in Cuba have embraced a couple of tunes from the band’s third and latest album, dubbed, appropriately, “Reencarnacion.”

“It’s almost magical because it’s not what they’re used to hearing,” said the hoarse-voiced London-based bandleader during a telephone interview this week.

Sunday’s show offers a rare chance for Orange County residents to catch a local performance by some of the most accomplished musicians working in Cuba today.

The lineup includes Carlos del Puerto, the legendary bassist formerly with Irakere, and Pancho Amat, wild-eyed master of the tres, the unique Cuban guitar. Original pianist Alfredo Rodriguez has been replaced on this tour by Nachito Herrera, who was highly praised in the press for his virtuosity during the band’s New York show in October.

Cubanismo! last week launched its latest coast-to-coast tour with a series of California stops, including a weekend swing through San Francisco and Sacramento. The group will be at San Diego’s 4th & B Concerts tonight and at the House of Blues in West Hollywood on Saturday.

‘The . . . Family

Grows More and More’

From the start, the band has been nurturing a diverse audience of Latino and non-Latino fans who have made bestsellers of its polished recordings, all three on Rykodisc’s Hannibal label. But nothing compares to its live performances, charged with jazzy improvisations and fiery drumming freed from the somewhat standard confines of the band’s records.

Cubanismo! made its first U.S. tour in 1997, a watershed year that saw top Cuban bands penetrate political barriers to perform on American soil for the first time since Castro rose to power in Havana.

Alemany is surprised by his band’s wide acceptance with American fans, who are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about Cuban music, he said.

“The Cubanismo! family grows more and more every year,” he said. “People seem hungry for this type of music.”

Alemany was just a 15-year-old conservatory student when he was recruited to join Sierra Maestra, a roots band formed in 1978 by slightly older musicians at the University of Havana. They became the masters of Cuban retro, grounded in the son style of their grandparents’ 1920s generation.

They were so faithful to the past that they fooled even some trained listeners. When the members of Batacumbele, an innovative Puerto Rican group, visited Cuba in the early 1980s to soak up the island’s new sounds, they couldn’t believe Alemany and his colleagues were so young. They had thought Sierra Maestra was a bunch of old-timers.

Alemany was born in 1962 when the revolution was in its infancy. He’s a product of the socialist government’s famed conservatories, trained in music theory from a young age in his hometown of Guanabacoa, a 17th century slave-trade center.

The town outside Havana is now famous as a base for practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, those creative fusions of Catholicism with African pantheism. Modern salsa music and dance is still infused with this ancient religious spirit; salsa songs commonly use rhythms from religious rites and even African lyrics.

“Religion is the most popular thing in Cuba,” Alemany said. “So why not bring it to our popular music since it’s something we live and breathe every day?”

Alemany practices the Regla de Ocha, a Yoruba-based religion commonly referred to as Santeria, a term he calls vulgar. His spiritual mentor was his maternal grandfather, member of a male secret society known as abacua, founded in Havana in the 18th century by Africans from Calabar. The abacua cut on the new album, “Ibiano Utereran,” is dedicated to him.

A Bridge Between

Artistic Past, Present

Religious elements are hard to find in the recordings, produced in Havana by Joe Boyd, Hannibal’s label chief, who worked with Alemany to develop the Cubanismo! concept.

Alemany acknowledges that their formula called for instrumentals at first, to attract fans who don’t understand Spanish; lyrics are limited mostly to catchy choruses.

Alemany’s life and work is a bridge between the artistic past and present in Cuba. He’s sat in with bands on both extremes, from the progressive NG La Banda to the classic Septeto Nacional.

The sound of Alemany’s trumpet--pure and piercing, lusty and melodious--has never lost the flavor of traditional Cuban comparsas, those rhythmic carnival parades of drummers, dancers and horns. As leader of Cubanismo! he has taken his sound across the globe, from Beirut to Barcelona, from Toronto to Taipei.

What’s next?

“There is always a new direction,” he said. “There’s always something different to discover, something fresh to create.”

* Cubanismo! will perform Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. 4 p.m. $24-$28. (949) 854-4646.