`If you can't feel this music in your bones then you don't know what music is," said Ibrahim Ferrer, toasting 200,000 adoring fans in Mexico's giant central square last Sunday. "The next millennium belongs to us," added Ruben Gonzalez, rapping in the afternoon sun, hunched low over his piano. Not even the risk of a second earthquake kept Mexico City's music fans from turning up for this extraordinary treat.
The stars of the Buena Vista Social Club hit the stage with all guns blazing, adding a dozen musicians to the line-up, calling themselves the Afro Cuban All Stars and making a historic reunion with Mexico's Sonora Matancera, a sister group who last shared a stage with their Cuban counterparts roughly half a century ago. The city's ancient Aztec temple, with its sacred altars and indecipherable history, was visible from the stage, an appropriate backdrop for this musical journey which spanned five centuries of hybrid tradition.
Gonzalez looked happy, his fingers flying furiously across the first piano he has called his own in a decade, ever since Cuban termites chewed their way through his beloved original. The legendary arthritic pianist complained only of the loss of his walking stick during this tour, which meant he had to be escorted to and from the stage, ruining any chances with the ladies. The handsome great-grandfather needn't have worried, as knots of adoring young women gazed in awe at a man who could have been their father during the second World War, or even at the turn of the century. "Azucar" and "Candela" (Sugar and fire) are the primary ingredients in the son, bolero, and cha-cha-cha, variations of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, where up-tempo romantic ballads meet jazz and salsa rhythms. The band played a warm-up medley, beginning with Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (a tune most of us first came across in the Strictly Ballroom soundtrack) then disappeared into lengthy timbal and bongo solos before coming up for air with a dash of La Cucaracha, Mexico's unofficial national anthem, which ignited the crowd. The contrast with audiences in Europe could not be greater. Anyone who has seen the Wim Wenders documentary (reviewed above) on the making of the Buena Vista record will recall the enthusiastic but polite reception in Germany and the US, concerts which took place in austere, imposing surroundings.
Mexico City's Zocalo, the biggest public square in the world, was transformed into the biggest dancefloor in the world, where enterprising street hawkers flogged a remarkable cardboard periscope, which allowed you to see the stage from half a mile away. In among the crowd there were smiles and kisses, fizzy cola bottles, clouds of marijuana smoke and some hip-grinding manoeuvres that are probably outlawed in southern American states.
Besides, this being Mexico and a free event, there were kids, grandparents, skinheads and street-sweepers - a welcome day out despite predictions of further torrential rainfall which whipped the city over the past three days. "Mexico is a country we carry in our hearts," said Orlando Cachaito Lopez, the man with the huge bass guitar, starting a round of "Viva Mexicos!" and the inevitable response, "Viva Cuuuubbbaaaaa!".
Ibrahim Ferrer, the toothless, mellow vocalist, now a star in his own right, moved the crowd with his passionate duet, Como fue (How it used to be), accompanied by the elegant Omara Portuonda. "If things had turned out the way we wanted them to," she sang, pondering the might-have-beens which infuse the music with an inescapable sense of melancholy. The band retired to the rhythm of Reconciliacion, the only hint of politics in the day. A slight chill cut through the evening air by the end of the concert, as the contented crowd fanned out across the biggest city in the world, carefully holding onto the intimacy of this brief encounter with Cuba, a tiny island with a huge heart.
