TEXAS
COWBOY RIDES THE LATIN MUSIC CHARTS
Rafael
Mieses
Bronx Journal Staff Reporter
It
was a hot Saturday night two summers ago in Santo Domingo, the capital
of the Dominican Republic, and singer and Texas country boy Ned Sublette
was trying to find his feet in unfamiliar territory. Sublette was
standing in line to get into “El Monumento del Son”, an
indoor-outdoor dance club on the outskirts of the city. He wanted to
have a glimpse of the dancers and to get out on the dance floor.
One
problem, though. Sublette couldn’t get in. The Texan had on sneakers,
strictly in violation of the club’s dress code. He pleaded and pleaded
until the very same bouncer who blocked his way finally came up with a
pair of black lace-ups, about five sizes too large. Sublette didn’t
care; he flopped out among the crowd and scuffed and scraped from one
end of the floor to the other until the wee hours.
Sublette
is just that crazy for Latin music. All of 47 years old with a
weather-worn, Texas demeanor you’d expect to see in a band backing
Garth Brooks, Sublette in fact took the stage at the recent Fordham Road
Renaissance Festival, on August 28, in the Bronx, to perform. He led off
with a country music classic, “Ghost Riders In The Sky,” of all
things - this time recast over a frenetic merengue beat. Not only that,
but he was playing before an estimated audience of 40,000 Latin music
fans, a crowd almost a fifth of the population of his hometown Lubbock,
Texas, and sharing the bill with other Latin music heavies such as José
Alberto, Miles Peña, George Lamond, and Yomo Toro.
Indeed,
Ned Sublette’s life is an amalgam of different musics, influences and
culture. For much of the 90s, Sublette, a musician by training, has been
a major proponent of Cuban music stateside. In 1990, he traveled to Cuba
for the first time and was inspired to co-found Qbadisc, the first
American record label dedicated to marketing contemporary Cuban music in
the U.S. He was soon recognized as a major U.S. promoter for Cuban
music, introducing American audiences to Cuban artists as diverse as Los
Muñequitos De Matanzas and NG La Banda as well as Celina González,
Issac Delgado, Carlos Varela and Emiliano Salvador. Sublette says his
small label Qbadisc has more than survived; it is alive and kicking.
“There are no weak tracks in any of our 27 albumsin the catalogue.
That is the beauty of what we do,” he says.
Sublette
says going to Cuba was actually the turning point of his life. “I went
to Cuba out of curiosity as a musician,” he recalls. “It was like
walking into a virgin forest.
Sublette
was born and raised in Lubbock, a sleepy town that he describes as a
treeless place where official authorities did not permit the sale of
alcohol. The town was so desolate, that Sublette says, “You could see
the sky under the belly of a buffalo at a hundred yards.” Ned’s
father was a college biology teacher. Sublette says he never took to
plants and animals but seized upon music, especially the work of another
Lubbock native, rock ’n roll legend Buddy Holly. Holly, it turns out,
provided much inspiration for Sublette’s current album. As a tribute,
Sublette honors his hero with a version of “Not Fade Away,” a Holly
tune recorded with the backing of Los Muñequitos de Matanza, a famous
Cuban rumba group. “Buddy was the metaphor for this record,”
Sublette says. “He is the one giving me permission
to do this.”
Sublette
left Lubbock to study Spanish classical guitar at the University of New
Mexico and later in Spain. He received his Master’s Degree in
Composition and Performance at the University of California in San
Diego. In 1976, he moved to New York and got a working band, the Ned
Sublette Band up and running by 1982. At the time, Sublette, the
guitarist, played a sort of dissonant and loud country rock style. The
group even worked at Manhattan’s CBGB’s.
By the
mid-80’s, though, Sublette moved toward new insiprations. He dove into
the city’s salsa scene, and his influences grew increasingly Latin.
“It was the best music in town,” he says point-blank. Sublette’s
country group broke up in 1993, and afterward, he went on to work with
artists ranging from John Cage to La Monte Young.
His new
album, Cowboy Rumba, features eight originals written by Sublette and
two covers: the merengue version of “Ghost Riders in The Sky,” and
the hardcore rumba version of Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” The
album’s pantheon of heavy-duty guests includes Cuba’s NG La Banda,
Puerto Rico’s Yomo Toro, and Texas’s favorite son Lloyd Maines on
pedal steel and Dobro guitar. The supporting players are a host of
first-call New York musicians, most of whom have worked with Ned for
years.
Country
music fans might recognize “Ghost Riders In The Sky.” The song was
written by Stan Jones in the 20’s and later became a big hit by Vaughn
Monroe during the 40s. It has been recorded by almost everyone in the
country genre. Sublette has an interesting story behind his version.
Once, during a practice session, Sublette says a drummer of his started
playing the song in a pambiche
style (a two-bar syncopated merengue with a slow tempo ). “I told him
to stop fooling around and to play it the proper way. Then, I realized .
. . hum, that sounds nice, let me hear that again,” Sublette
remembers. The merengue Ghost Riders was born.
Sublette’s
take on the country staple, is nonetheless sung in English, which has
made it hard for some radio programmers to play it and for record store
owners to place it in a labeled bin. “People know the song but they
don’t know me. They don’t know the record. How do we get to radio?
Where do we place it in the store?” he chuckles.
The
song’s success hasn’t diminished Sublette’s devotion to Cuban
music, a love that often puts him in a controversial light. For one, the
current commercial appeal of Cuban music butts heads with the Cuban
exile community’s intolerance for anything originating on the island.
Sublette thinks objections to Cuban musicians coming stateside
exaggerate what ties, if any, the artists have with the Cuban
government. The fact is, Sublette argues, that since the Cuban
government owns all the media outlets, live music has become more
spontaneous, and perhaps one of the few channels for people’s
expression, that can readily escape any kind of censorship.
That
doesn’t mean Sublette doesn’t have
critical remarks for the recent Cuban music boom. For one, he
complains, there seem to be just too many Cuban albums coming out right
now, and as a result, lower quality material might drive out the good
stuff. “Getting any visibility for a good Cuban record is very hard.
There are thousands of compilations. At least, it is nice to see the
people from Buena Vista Social Club like Eliades Ochoa, Abrahim Ferrer
and others getting the recognition they deserve but there are many bad
records.” Sublette isn’t pointing a finger, adding that the
producers and artists, in many cases, “are good friends of mine.”
Mr.
Sublette has heard and witnessed so many stories in Havana that he is
actually writing a work of fiction about the island. Moreover, by
year’s end he will be publishing a book about Cuban music under the
Chicago Press sponsorship.
“The
album ‘Cowboy Rumba’ is a portrait of myself, the places I have come
from. It is more a point of correspondence,” says Sublette, who
insists that the clave - the syncopated rhythmic pattern that defines
Afro-Cuban music - is ubiquitous.
Little wonder, then, that “Not Fade Away” molds so well to
the rumba beat. “Cuban music is the secret influence on all of us,”
Sublete allows. “You hear it in my work; you hear it in Buddy
Holly’s. It’s everywhere”.
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