Wisconsin Union's World Music Festival presents Roberto Rodriguez
A wandering musical soul
By Jonathan Gramling
But then the revolution swept the island nation in 1959 and Rodriguez fled with his family to Miami. But there was a part of Rodriguez that never left Cuba, his sense of being rooted in one place. Outside of his family, the thing that connected Rodriguez to Cuba was the music. And he has developed that sense of restlessness -- rootlessness -- into a pioneering career on the world music scene.
Rodriguez has performed with many heavyweights in the music industry including the Miami Sound Machine, Julio Iglesias, Phoebe Snow and Paul Simon, to name a few. At first, Rodriguez wanted to be commercially successful and become a millionaire like any other aspiring commercial musician.
But as Rodriguez neared midlife, other musical considerations began to take hold. He wandered musically, in part because he was bored, because of the longing that he has had for a place since he was uprooted from Cuba as a child. He has wandered from project to project.
One of his first projects was heavily influenced by his remembrances of the Jewish community that had lived in pre-Castro Cuba, a people whose history, on some levels, resembled his own. "There were about 12,000 Jewish families in Cuba at one point," Rodriguez recalled during a telephone interview with The Capital City Hues. "It was ironic that it was their second Diaspora after coming from Europe and having to leave. They came as Jews, but then they left as Cubans. That's a very traumatic, historical double-whammy. Now there are about 500 families remaining. It was like the paradise that they first had to get used to, but eventually it was very hard for them to leave again. They came before World War II. A lot of Polish Jews were there. It was a community that my father was very close to."
Rodriguez's memories and interest in Cuba's Jewish community compelled him to write and record the album "El Danzon de Moises" on the Jewish record label Tzadik. "The record is a tribute to the Cubans who happened to be Jewish," Rodriguez said. "Part of it is an imaginary music that could have been made in the 1930s and 1940s in Cuba. You have the clarinet and the klezmer and you make a band of this mutation of different cultures. There were a lot of Chinese Cubans. Everyone assimilated to the culture."
Rodriguez's musical wandering led him to Algeria and Maurice El Medioni, a 79 - year old Jewish Algerian musician. Together, they recorded "Descarga Oriental," which was awarded the BBC Radio 3 Best CD of the Year for the Cultural Crossing category. "We disseminate this world music that crosses borders and is able to touch people all over the world," Rodriguez emphasized.
"Maurice is this jewel, a national treasure of Algeria," Rodriguez continued. "At different times of our lives, we've had parallels of revolutions and leaving the country and Diaspora and learning new languages. This little guy has this sound of mutation from Algerian, Syrian, Lebanese, Moroccan and Spanish influences. He loves Cuban music. He's learned it from the Puerto Rican soldiers when they were in Algeria. He learned salsa and the sensibility and flavor. He learned the jitterbug from the American soldiers. He's a very colorful guy and has had a great career. He's 79 years old and still going. I'm very fortunate to work with him."
`What enraptures Rodroguez when listening to Medioni's music are the melodies. "You have to meet a guy like Medioni and he will play two notes and you go 'Oh my. This is unbelievable,'" Rodriguez emphasized. "We were from two different generations. We were from different cultures. And when we were in the studio, he would say 'You are my eyes Roberto.' I would reply 'No, I am your Sherpa.' He would sit there and listen to a track and all of a sudden, he would smile. A radiating smile would come out of this guy. I would say to myself that he is happy and that is good."
While many musicians have an ego the size of their talent, Rodriguez is a down-to-earth person who readily checks his ego by the door when it comes to music. When Medioni and he play at the Wisconsin Union Theater, it will be about Medioni and the music -- and not about Rodriguez. "We will play his compositions," Rodriguez said. "Basically, it will be his melodies that you will hear. They are beautiful melodies that brought me to do the project because I identified with them. There are many famous Cuban songs where you write the melody and then put the words to it, like Lennon /McCartney and anyone else. I felt that connection with his melodies. It goes back to the old Spanish melodies. So it's a combination of Cuban music with an Oriental -- meaning Middle Eastern -- flavor. It will knock your socks off. It has rhythm. It has melody. It puts two cultures together. It's quite a unique sound."
It is probably this sense of searching for a home and his understanding of the connectedness between musical styles that has led Rodriguez to almost literally wander the globe in search of new musical styles.
And while many people pick up a musical style by listening to a record, cultural immersion is important to Rodriguez as he explores a new musical style. "I'm always an advocate who says 'If you want to learn global music, go there,'" Rodriguez said. "'Go to the place, hang out and bring it back. Don't do it just from here. Don't just listen to the television or the radio or a CD. Go there. Walk across the border. Keep going and find the place and sit there until you can feel how these people breathe, how they talk and the space between them. You have to go to the well. That's it. It's not about going to become the next Ravi Shankar. No, it's go, learn and embrace it and bring it back.' A lot of them do bring it back and a lot of them don't. I listen to everything, bluegrass, you name it. There are things that I love and there are things I don't care much about but I investigate it and try it. I embrace the music and try to make the world a smaller place."
Even though Rodriguez has achieved some success and notoriety as a musician -- he won an American Music Award and was nominated for a Grammy -- and has written a musical score for a film, the music world is still a rough place to be for a person who is pursuing forms of music that aren't necessarily commercially viable. "We get flooded with the tribulations of surviving and making a living and trying to get our next gig," Rodriguez said. "They say ';If you want to get a musician to complain, get him a gig.' It's true. It's true. Why not complain when you get the gig because it doesn't come around very often? You're always floating. You land and then you float again. I definitely wouldn't have it any other way. I've met some wonderful people. I've played for wonderful audiences. I just played in Holland at the Concertgebouw. It's a beautiful hall in Amsterdam. It's like Carnegie Hall here that sits 2,500 people. I've played in facilities' from the smallest clubs in Germany where they go crazy to big venues that sit 7,000 people. I want to look back and say 'Wow, that was a lot of fun.'"
Rodriguez will never have to look back with regret for through his musical restlessness, he has brought joy into the hearts of world music aficionados.
September 5, 2007 Archives