This month sees the release of Chanchullo, the second solo album from the octogenarian Cuban pianist Ruben Gonzalez. Born in Santa Clara in 1911, Gonzalez played with all the great Havana orchestras including that of Arsenio Rodriguez - the most influential musician playing in 1940s and 1950s Cuba. His was a music which employed all those tight horn arrangements of the US swing bands, and it proved popular not only in Cuba itself but also in New York - in many ways the early messenger of the 1970s salsa craze. At the core of it, however, was that impossibly seductive African percussion feel with its roots deep in rumba and other pure Cuban forms. And it's still working its magic - the enormous success of The Buena Vista Social Club and its various offshoots is stunning proof of that.
It should come as no real surprise that there has been something of a Cuban revival. It's a music which always been hugely important internationally - particularly from the 1930s on as it adopted a global language with rumba, mambo, chacha-cha, Afro-Latin jazz and salsa. Record-breaking sales should be no real surprise either, given that it's also a music which regularly made its way into the mainstream - even today's barren pop charts are swelling with Latin sounds from Ricky Martin, Carlos Santana and, of course, Lou Bega with his Mambo No. 5.
The story of The Buena Vista Club has by now been well documented - not least by the Wim Wenders film - a touching tale of how en Gonzalez and his fellow old-timers, mostly living in some obscurity, were "rediscovered" by Ry Cooder. For music lovers, it was both a delight and a poke in the eye for the record industry which, as usual, never saw it coming. For the record, most of them had already been coaxed back into the limelight by Juan de Marcos for an earlier Afro-Cuban All-Stars project - but nobody, least of all the musicians, would begrudge Cooder his special achievement. He has re-presented this music to the world with a success that surely exceeded all expectations.
A delight too, that Dublin was in at the start of it. Juan de Marcos had long been a visitor with the All-Stars and Sierra Maestra, but when en Gonzalez showed up in Whelan's back in 1997, we suddenly had a fair contingent of The Buena Vista Social Club assembled on that small stage. About a month later, the same people were only to be seen in places such as Carnegie Hall, and it made that extraordinary evening in Wexford Street seem rather like a very good dream - Ibrahim Ferrer standing behind a speaker and emerging every so often to break your heart with a song, en Gonzalez literally refusing to stop playing and everybody dancing and enjoying an experience that thousands would wish for just a few weeks later. Some dispute it ever happened at all, but it did.
The development of the music within Cuba is a whole book in itself but, with the Buena Vista success, it's worth looking at the impact Cuban music has always had outside the country. Now, in the middle of a Cuban boom, I find three new albums on my desk - Ruben Gonzalez, Cubanismo's Mardi Gras Mambo and, most telling of all, The Best Cuban Album in The World Ever - a two CD release from Virgin Records. The latter is part of an ongoing series of "Best in The World Ever Albums" and indicates a huge corporate acknowledgment that Cuban music is a marketable force. The impact it might now have on other marketable forces (most of them unlistenable) remains to be seen, but certainly the charts need something. Another punk explosion seems unlikely, so maybe Cuba might do it - an altogether unintended revolution to rescue us from what passes these days for pop.
It's not that I'm necessarily hoping for a mad rush of mock-Latin pop. It has happened before and most of it only survives these days as kitsch. There was that alarming period when, on the back of the 1950s mambo craze, just about everybody made their mambo record - Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como and even the rock 'n' rollers came up with some inexplicably strange records, with The Honeydreamers' Irish Mambo being awarded the big cigar.
I never thought I would see the day When the fish would mambo in Galway Bay. Even the little leprechauns shout Ole!Doing the Irish mambo.
Outside the mainstream and the novelty, however, Cuban music has been an element of jazz right from its beginnings. Even in the formative New Orleans days, there were borrowings from Latin rhythms - just another ingredient in the early stew. By the 1930s, musicians such as Duke Ellington were hugely fascinated by what was called rumba - not actual Cuban rumba, which was a percussion and vocal form - but a version of Cuban song which introduced the rhythms of the Caribbean into the ballrooms of North America. Caribbean and Latin-American musicians settling in the US, were to bring further boosts of musical energy, the most spectacular being when the beboppers at Birdland first clashed with mambo kings at The Palladium.
And while band leaders such as Perez Pado, Mario Bauza and Machito popularised the music for dancers everywhere, it was the odd individual such as Chano Pozo who really changed the shape of things. Born in Havana in 1915, Pozo became a member of Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band in the mid-1940s, and his was probably the most effective Cuban input of all. He had a huge influence on Gillespie, whose Latin-tinged music in turn influenced everybody else - from the serious "high" jazzers of bop to the Latin groovers such as Mongo Santamaria and Candido - "The Thousand Finger Man".
Those connections were to continue into the 1960s along with what was known as the boogaloo (or bugalu) craze - a jazz, mambo, funky fusion which was to reemerge decades later under the name Acid-Jazz. Basically, it was another mambo revival, but one which took the music of Tito Puente and others and souped it up with a rather more soulful and black feel - hence strange hybrid sounds such as those of Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers. And the music is still very much in evidence today outside the mainstream among the hipper, jazz-based rap and dance acts - and with plenty more to come. Even Basement Jaxx have been listening.
That Cuban music also had a bearing on rock 'n' roll is maybe less obvious. Marc Ribot, with his band Los Cubanos Postizos, is a musician currently exploring that borderland between Latin and rock 'n' roll. He would argue that Chuck Berry had more than his share of Cuban touches in his music and that they extended well beyond those obvious moments such as Havana Moon. It was something, Ribot would contend, that lay deep within his R 'n' B style - a style usually credited as more country-tinged than anything else. And to back up Ribot's notions, it is perhaps worth remembering that rock 'n' roll's finest moment - Richard Berry's Louie Louie - was a cha-chacha, and therefore as Cuban as it gets.
We don't yet know what impact the current interest in Cuban music will have on contemporary pop - mainstream or otherwise - but history tells us that it will certainly have an effect. Cuban music has been pushing popular music for years and now, at a time when pop really needs something to come along, it's doing it again. But while Ruben Gonzalez, Ibrahim Ferrer and the rest are making extraordinary music, the real hit will come when the young Cuban musicians are let loose. That might well be the salvation of us all.
Cuban Music and Dance events in the ESB World Music Summer School include a performance today in Temple Bar Square and tomorrow in Smithfield Square (46 p.m.), as part of Ireland's first multicultural Mardi Gras. Information 01-478 1884. Arminta Wallace reports on the Cuban music events in Tuesday's arts page.