The summer tour of Pupy y Los Que Son Son was delayed due to paperwork issues that kept them from receiving their visas in time, but better late than never. They are now in Europe and will perform tonight in Paris at New Morning.

Pupy y los que son son - No te dejé por mala - El Noro on lead vocals

We have published a list of confirmed dates for Manolito y Su Trabuco who will be tourng in August. I am thrilled to see that they will be playing in Sweden and Gothenburg's annual Kulturkalaset in Kungstorget on August 16th. That is where I will be! They have more dates pending confirmation so check their Tours page again at the end of July. Manolito is currently working on the new CD "Sin Freno" but it won't be out in time for the tour.

Lázaro "Mayami" Díaz sings the title track from the coming CD "Sin Freno"
lyrics by Alexander Abreu

This year Kulturkalast is a gold mine for fans of Cuban music. X Alfonso will play there on August 17th. If you are en inveterate Timba Geek and don't know X Alfonso's work, he is known for intelligent, profound lyrics combined with a hiphop/soul/funk music, and his videos are always full of beautiful imagery. I'll just let his music and his moving lyrics speak for themselves. We have posted the confirmed dates for his tour which for now are focused on Northern Europe. But there is also more to come in X tour plans so stay tuned!

X Alfonso "De Corazón"

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(para leer en español oprima aquí)
Story and photos by Bill Tilford, all rights reserved 

“What we have here is a failure to communicate…….”  

As I look at everything that has been happening in the Timba music  concert scene in the United States over the past two years, I am reminded of Aesop’s  fable about the little shepherd boy who cried “wolf”.  For those of you who are not familiar with that story, the short version is that a little shepherd boy falsely warned the villagers about a wolf attack on the sheep in order to bring them running out to the pasture.  After he did this twice, and the villagers came running both times only to learn that there really was no wolf, the villagers vowed to ignore him.  The third time that he cried out, there actually was a wolf, but the villagers ignored him because of the previous false alarms, and the flock of sheep was lost.   In a way, we are faced with a similar problem regarding potential audiences for large Timba concerts in the United States now. There is an atmosphere of understandable skepticism among many of the fans, and those of us who work professionally with the music whether as musicians, agents, promoters, managers, venue owners, writers, media figures etc., will need to put our heads together and try to figure out ways that we might be able to address that skepticism.    This problem was already present before the New York concert, which did at least end with a concert. There was also some collateral damage from this event - a lot of discussion in the industry about possible longer tours by individual bands associated with the concert failed to become actual tours.  

I have seen and heard comments in other places questioning whether some of the bands originally advertised for the May/June 2012 New York concert were ever really signed in the first place.  After examining all of the evidence available to me, it appears that even if all of the original bands had truly been signed and confirmed the number of tickets actually being sold   would still not have been enough to permit a concert of the size originally announced, and it still would probably have been economically necessary for the organizers to “downsize” the concert   ( although I don’t know the actual number of tickets sold, the change from the Armory to the Copacabana would not have been practical if thousands of people had already been buying tickets).   Under these circumstances, it is difficult for me to criticize the fact that a smaller concert was the finished product. However, the handling of the public communications aspects of that process was absolutely horrible.   

Since I am also a brass musician myself, I can tell you that since the same brass section was performing throughout the concert, it was probably a good thing that they didn’t play for six full hours – unless the song list was carefully paced to give them plenty of rest, hour six would not have been pleasant for the musicians or the audience.  But here again, there was a serious communications failure between the organizers and the ticket holders.....click here to continue reading.........  

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Tour season is in full swing in Europe and in some countries they are experiencing summer, while here in Scandinavia only the calender indicates that the summer has arrived. It rarely reaches 70 degrees Fahrenheit and rains almost every day. Fortunately, one constant throughout Europe is the festival season and timba concerts. Each concert has a life of it's own; it is a unique moment in time, and thanks to French DJ extraordinaire Jack El Calvo and Pascualito & FiestaCubana.net, some of the great moments from the current tours by Pupy y Los Que Son Son and Elito Revé y su Charangón are now available at YouTube.

Let's start with Pupy since Los Que Son Son play tomorrow, July 14, at Fiesta in Rome! After getting off to a rough start Pupy is in full swing and rewarding fans for their patience with a new mambo titled Quién me está llamando . I'm not a mambo fan, but somehow Pupy always knows how to please me. Great song! Disfrútenlo!

Pupy y Los Que Son Son estrenando "Quién me está llmando" @ New Morning
video by Pascualito for FiestaCubana.net

And if we are talking about great moments in Timba 2012, check out the video that Jack El Calvo has uploaded: Tirso singing with Orquesta Revé! Need I say more? He has uploaded 3 videos of Revé with Tirso as well as his own video from the Pupy @ New Morning concert, so go to his YouTube channel to watch them all. Here is one example. Candela! Cuida'o que te quema!

Elito Revé y Su Charangon with improvisation by Tirso Duarte & Emilio @ Rignac
video by Jack El Calvo

Elito Revé y su Charangón will be in the Netherlands tomorrow and then heading to Finland for 3 days, 19, 20, 21, at the Pori Jazz Festival before returning to Cuba for a well-earned rest.

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Cuban music in the United States isn't limited to the cities on the coasts; In between a club (Coconut Beach) that has hired Charanga Habanera twice in two years along with actively pursuing other Timba bands and a locally-based band, Grupo Aché, which plays some Songo and TImba (including some Los Van Van covers) as well as the Salsa one might normally expect, Louisville Kentucky is emerging as an important  location for spreading awareness of Timba music in the central United States.   Read more about this and see concert photos of Grupo Aché  here. 

An important African source of Afrocuban music is what is now the country of Benin, and one of Benin's most important bands, Le Tout-Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, is currently on tour in North America.   We recently caught them in concert and asked the band some questions. Read the review and interview and see concert photos of the band here. 

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