Ruben Gonzalez, 84; Pianist With Buena Vista Social Club

Ruben Gonzalez, the elegant Cuban pianist who charmed the world with his gentle manner and dazzling style during a remarkable late-career comeback with the Buena Vista Social Club, died Monday in Havana, the Cuban Music Institute confirmed. He was 84.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but the diminutive musician had been in failing health in recent years, wracked by arthritis and suffering memory loss. American guitarist Ry Cooder, who produced the 1997 Buena Vista album, said he last saw Gonzalez two years ago, but the enfeebled pianist didn’t recognize him.

Gonzalez, however, never forgot how to play.

“He was rusty but great,” Cooder recalled Monday of his first meeting with Gonzalez in 1996. “He was this little old guy, but you could see he could still play. He was a very kinetic player, very high energy, and had that very animated quality that Cuban musicians have....

“That is very hard to get on tape -- microphones don’t see that kind of energy.... Some people can play fast, some people can play loud, some people can play sad, some people can play scary, but this dancing quality, for me, has something to do with your character. He was a happy man, Ruben. Cheerful, happy, laughing.”

Gonzalez was born in 1919 in Santa Clara, in central Cuba. A cobbler’s son, he studied medicine and classical piano, hoping to work as a doctor by day and musician by night until, he told the San Francisco Examiner in 1998, “I found out that doctors had to be on call all the time.”

He started working as a full-time musician in 1941, the dawn of a golden era in Cuban music. His career would span six decades, marked by bright accomplishments and long periods of disillusionment.

Gonzalez played with some of the greats in the history of Cuban music, including Arsenio Rodriguez, the legendary blind bandleader who popularized and updated the traditional son style in the 1940s, and Enrique Jorrin, who created the cha-cha-cha in the 1950s.

The work was not all glamorous. Gonzalez once recalled he played nightclubs in the old days from 9 p.m. until 4 a.m., performing 25 or 30 numbers a night, often in response to shouted requests from the audience. The regimen kept his mind and fingers nimble.

In 1979, Gonzalez was featured on a series of recording sessions by Las Estrellas de Areito, an all-star Cuban lineup of the day. Prized by connoisseurs, the albums were recently reissued by World Circuit, the label behind the Buena Vista craze.

After Jorrin’s death in 1987, Gonzalez tried unsuccessfully to lead the band. He soon retired on a pension and stopped playing. His piano crumbled after 60 years of faithful use, victim to rain, rot and termites. Gonzalez did not come out of retirement for the Buena Vista sessions. He was recruited earlier that same year by Juan de Marcos Gonzalez for another project by the Afro-Cuban All Stars, “A Toda Cuba le Gusta” (All of Cuba Likes It).

On that album, recorded just days before Buena Vista, Ruben Gonzalez gave a sterling preview of the classic technique that would win him a new generation of international admirers. On an instrumental cut named for him, “Clasiqueando con Ruben” (Going Classical With Ruben), he shines with his graceful technique -- a delicate touch combined with an impeccable sense of rhythm.

At the same time, after Buena Vista was finished, Gonzalez got the chance to make the first album of his career as bandleader, “Introducing ... Ruben Gonzalez.” It was recorded live with no overdubs in only two days in April 1996, the month he turned 77.

Buena Vista’s eventual success turned Gonzalez into an unlikely celebrity, cheered as he shuffled, shoulders hunched, onto the world’s most prestigious stages. But despite the fame and frenzy of success, he maintained a dignified composure and a quiet devotion to his art, clearly demonstrated in film director Wim Wenders’ documentary “Buena Vista Social Club.”

“I think people had forgotten about me in Cuba, even my friends,” Gonzalez told the Times of London in 1998. “Then suddenly, they find that I am more successful than at any time in my life. They are a little surprised. So am I.”

Gonzalez embraced his belated success, which boosted his spirits and improved his arthritis from the renewed use of his fingers. In 1999, during a tour of Scotland, the buoyant octogenarian told a local reporter that the grueling tour schedule didn’t tire him.

“I love this traveling,” he said. “I never want to stay still again.”

*

Times staff writer Randy Lewis contributed to this report.