Lost and Found

The story about the blind boy born in Cuba was passed down in the Flynn clan like a fading family photograph. Only the barest details about him survived the rifts created by personal tragedies, revolution and an impassable sea.

The boy was named Frank, like his Irish American father who found work and a wife after moving to Cuba at the turn of the last century. The boy’s mother died when he was 4 and his father soon returned to the United States, leaving the child in the care of his Cuban aunt and uncle.

For the Flynns in America, the boy’s biography practically ended there. Later, they learned he had grown up to become an accomplished pianist.

Almost 100 years after the elder Flynn founded the clan’s Cuban branch, one of his U.S. descendants started making trips to Havana, drawn by the almost forgotten family ties. Kathy Flynn, a counselor at Santa Monica College, interviewed a dying aunt in Massachusetts and soon pieced together a skeleton of a sketch of her long-lost relative, the blind boy born to her great-uncle, Francis Joseph Flynn.

When she returned to Havana in 1999 with the information, she discovered there was really no mystery and no missing person.

In Cuba, everybody knows and loves the maestro, Frank Emilio Flynn.

Thanks to Kathy Flynn’s persistence, Los Angeles fans of Afro-Cuban music now have a rare chance to see an artist hailed both for preserving traditional Cuban music and pioneering Cuban jazz. Afro-Cuban connoisseurs have long admired Flynn’s extensive career, which spans seven decades and crosses paths with seminal figures such as pianist Jose Maria Romeu, composer Miguel Matamoros and percussionist Tata Guines, a founding member of Flynn’s respected 1950s quintet, Los Amigos.

“He embodies the history of Cuban music,” said Robert Fernandez, a percussion professor at Cal State L.A. “He was there through all these movements, like the danzon and the descarga. We read about it, but he experienced it.”

In one of his few West Coast performances before returning to Cuba, Flynn is scheduled to perform tonight at La Boca, the restaurant attached to the Conga Room.

Flynn made his U.S. debut in New York as part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center series in 1998, the year before his cousin made contact with him. When he returned to Lincoln Center in January of last year, his performance dovetailed with a reunion of the Flynn family after seven decades of separation.

Fran’ Emilio--as he is affectionately known by friends and fans who drop the hard-sounding “k”--has been in Los Angeles since February as his cousin’s guest. When word got out, ethnomusicologists and enthusiasts rushed to greet this diminutive man with courtly manners.

He’s not widely known to American audiences, but his local disciples include UC Irvine’s Raul Fernandez, a social scientist and Latin jazz expert who taped interviews with Flynn in Cuba for the oral history archives of the Smithsonian Institution. Cal State L.A.’s Paul de Castro, a music professor and avid fan, invited Flynn to be artist in residence during his California stay.

On April 13, the frail pianist celebrated his 80th birthday at a Cuban restaurant on Melrose Avenue. He was surrounded by his newfound relatives and excited fans who had not seen him since leaving Cuba themselves. An emotional Flynn played the piano and cried behind his wraparound dark glasses.

Flynn’s repertoire ranges from Ravel to the rumba, Chopin to cha cha cha. He moves smoothly from the semiclassical songs of Ernesto Lecuona to a swinging descarga, the Cuban-based jam session he helped popularize. And he delights in the the old-fashioned danzon, the elegant ballroom dance that arose from the 18th century French contredanse and which later gave birth to the modern mambo.

But his heart prefers classical, which he considers more demanding. He cherishes the memory of his 1964 concert performance of George Gershwin’s grand Piano Concerto in F, backed by Cuba’s National Symphony Orchestra.

With typical humility, Flynn declines credit as a creator or pioneer.

“At least, if I haven’t contributed anything new, I have given continuity to what others have done,” he said in Spanish during an interview at Kathy Flynn’s comfortable Westside apartment.

The musician’s New York-born cousin rented a small piano for his visit. It must have made him feel at home.

As a boy, Francisco Emilio Flynn Rodriguez plucked out his first notes on a piano that belonged to his mother, Digna Maria, who had been married 17 years before giving birth to her only child in 1921. She was not a musician, but a festive hostess who kept the home alive with music. She’d often invite musicians to come over after they played background music at silent movie theaters.

“For me, those were marvelous encounters,” recalled Flynn, whose sight was damaged at birth from a doctor’s misuse of forceps and gradually deteriorated.

Music also filled the air the day his mother died, in February of 1926. She took her son to hear a municipal band play at a nearby plaza, and succumbed to heart failure later that night. She was 47.

Flynn’s father left eight months later, writing and sending books in Braille from the States. When the letters stopped in the early 1930s, Flynn assumed his father was dead too. (Kathy Flynn said she has been unable to locate the elder Flynn’s death records.)

Flynn remembers getting lots of love from his aunt Elvira and uncle Emilio, who also bequeathed him his middle name. But he was barely in his 20s when tuberculosis claimed the lives of both his surrogate parents, two years apart.

By then, Flynn’s world had gone completely dark. He could no longer discern the colors and light he had been able to see as a boy.

Flynn continued his education at a school operated by the Cuban Assn. for the Blind, where he also taught. Years later, he would develop a technique for teaching the blind to write music, countering their natural tendency to learn by ear, as he had done by listening to Romeu, the danzon master, on Cuban radio.

“If they want to be musicians,” he said of blind students using his method, “they have to be the real thing.”

On a recent drizzly Friday afternoon, a small group of students and instructors attended one of Flynn’s master classes at Cal State L.A. They crowded into a messy practice room with a reverence reserved for church. Their unpretentious guru squeezed into his chair at the piano, his back against a bookcase.

Flynn’s posture is bent and stiff, as if a brace was keeping his head and shoulders rigid. But his wrinkled hands danced nimbly across the keyboard.

With a musical memory like a jukebox, Flynn flowed through songs evoking his heyday in Havana of the ‘40s and ‘50s. The pianist was at the forefront of a movement called filin (for “feeling”), which fused the traditional Cuban bolero with jazz sensibilities. He worked with its prime exponents, including composer Jose Antonio Mendez and singer Omara Portuondo, the latter of Buena Vista Social Club fame.

“Now, I’d like you to help me with a mambo,” Flynn gently urged his students, who obediently picked up their percussion instruments.

The novices got shaky and lost their timing behind a man who has recently recorded with Cuba’s most dynamic new talents. Flynn kept pumping his feet like pistons to keep rhythm on standards such as “Bilongo” and his ever-popular, polyrhythmic composition “Gandinga, Mondongo y Sandunga.”

For a moment, a listener could imagine the magic of Flynn’s Cuba in an era of never-ending descargas, starting in ritzy cabarets and extending until dawn in small cafes on the wharf in Old Havana.

Flynn and other musicians would gather for Sunday jam sessions in the basement of 1900 Habana Street, headquarters of the Club Cubano de Jazz. He was a charter member of this enthusiastic group of aficionados who would play at no charge. The cover was 1 peso at the door, plus drinks, which helped pay to bring jazz musicians from the United States to sit in.

Flynn still expresses enthusiasm for a period of thrilling spontaneity and pure love of music.

“The commercial spirit was totally absent from us,” said Flynn, dismayed by the lack of scruples he’s encountered in the record business. “We wanted to play what we felt.”

After class, Flynn bundled up before venturing into an exceptionally chilly spring day in L.A. Martha, his wife of almost half a century, helped him slip on a black cap with long goofy flaps over his ears.

It’s just too cold in California, they say. And they miss their native country where, despite economic hardships, Flynn enjoys official support and ample professional opportunities.

“When we come here to play,” he tells the students, “we can forget about Cuba for a while.”

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* Frank Emilio Flynn, tonight at La Boca at the Conga Room, 5364 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 8 and 9:15 p.m. Free. (323) 938-1696.