Neither awards nor big concerts can beat the humility of this Panamanian who emigrated to New York to become the voice of salsa. At 74 years old, Rubén Blades talks about his career as if it were not with him, remembering a thousand times the luck he has had in life, the helpless people who were left along the way and the people who have helped him become the king of salsa without giving up conscience, social discourse, among them the Platería orchestra. With one more Grammy in his pocket (and there are 11) the father of Pedro Navajas is preparing to return to the Cruïlla festival in Barcelona and put thousands of people to dance again with the Latin rhythms that have become the soundtrack of several generations.
Repeat at Cruïlla, where last year he played in front of more than 20,000 people
I love Barcelona from the first time we went. It was the place where the lyrics of my songs were first paid attention to. The boys from La Platería did me the great favor of recording Pedro Navaja, and with that they made me known there, because they didn’t know me.
Besides, in cultural terms, the weight of Barcelona, ??of the creators who come from there, have always been at the forefront of the world. Barcelona has always been a place for experimentation, where ideas arise, develop, people are not afraid to try something different, to think. So every time I can go back, I go back, although I’m surprised because you usually don’t come back that fast.
With the success achieved it is normal to return
The band has a good responsibility, and that’s another reason why I’m in it too. I love the contact with the public, I love talking and telling stories, I enjoy the tremendous band that accompanies me, which helps me to succeed. But I’m going to be seventy-five years old and you know, things get more difficult in terms of time.
The band gives him strength to continue
This orchestra is the only one that I know of that has the capacity to interpret songs in different formats. Suddenly we play a sextet, suddenly we go to an ensemble, to an orchestra, to a big band. And they’ll say well, that’s a salsa band, yes it’s a band with an Afro-Cuban sound, but the songs they play, the lyrics, the directions are jazz, pop, salsa, everything.
And they sustain their songs
If we weren’t playing, the audience would lose the possibility of meeting a band that plays songs that aren’t just for dancing. It is very good that we have the opportunity to enjoy and escape, but there are also themes that, for example, tell of the soul of a child, of an adult who remembers what happened to his mother when the father left home, either because died or because you abandoned him. Or a song that talks about domestic violence, at a time when femicides are on the rise. A song like Amor y Control, where you’re talking about the impact that illnesses have on our family, the effect it has, how it marks us.
Socially charged stories
They are songs that seek communication, a solidary connection that is vital in these times and that politics is not sponsoring or helping. Then it corresponds to the music, and if I have someone in an audience who is from the right and suddenly I have another who is from the left, and those two do not speak to each other, they do not have a place. But suddenly in Amor y Control they do find it, then the political aspect goes away and we enter the human aspect and suddenly there is a contact that is vital if we are going to survive as a society. That’s why I thought that as long as I have the voice, I’m going to continue singing.
We are losing suitcases along the way, it is life
It’s like Messi’s Barcelona, ??when Xavi was there that was another team, and that’s a beauty, and we have it in our mind, in our soul, and it’s on video, we can see the incredible quality of that group, they were like telepaths . But the time will come when Messi can’t run, so what is to be done.
The music of the new generations deals with more hedonistic themes, without so much contestation
This is so, and it is partly a consequence of the disillusionment that politics and bad public administration have caused in our society, and especially in our young society. The examples of politicians are horrifying and what they do is encourage escape. What these boys want now is the female, the rigging, but do you know why? They are disenchanted with what surrounds them and what they do is escape through music. I think it’s a process, and I don’t criticize or censor, simply if I don’t like something I don’t listen to it. Each generation is going to create its own answer and we have to be very careful, above all the old ones like me, so that we don’t become the censors now, and say that the only thing that works is what works for us.
He has recently published Paseiros, an album of Brazilian music
I have been very lucky in my life, I have had contact with people who have helped me a lot. I always think of people who are better than me and have never had a chance. How many people out there who write better than me, who sing better than me and have not had the opportunity, or have had it and missed it. That is why the word that should be in our vocabulary the most is the word thank you, you have to give grace and you have to acknowledge things.
What does this have to do with the disc?
In 1966 a friend from my father’s and my mother’s house who was a musician and called Anel Sander, who knew that I like Brazilian music, brought me a cassette of a group called Jongo Trio. And there were two themes, O menino das laranjas, and Terra de ninguém, no man’s land. El menino de las naranjas is a boy who sells oranges to help his mother, while Terra de ninguém is about the landowners. Those two songs had a huge impact on me, it was the first time I had heard jazz like that, so dynamic, sung by drums, bass and piano. Not only that, they were singing in harmony but modern, an extraordinary thing. That shocked me, it opened my ear. In addition, I had not heard lyrics in popular music with a social tone and that was very important to me because I was already marking myself there.
He started young with his committed lyrics
I had written my first serious poem when on January 9, 1964 in Panama we had a revolt against the Americans in the canal zone over the issue of our flag, which they did not want to put next to theirs. A letter that already had to do with a national argument, was not a love letter. It was about my country, about political circumstances, what happened to us, there were 21 deaths, 500 wounded. Later I put music to it because it occurred to me that it would reach more people if I make it musical than if I do it as a poem.
How do you get to Paseiros?
I was left with the desire to make a record with a Brazilian group in harmonies. That was one of my dreams, the other was to have a big band and sing a couple of songs by the standards, by Sinatra and Tony Bennet. I was very disenchanted with the vocal groups I heard, until I heard a group called Boca Livre, it seemed extraordinary to me and then one day I ran into them in New York. They didn’t know me, but I was totally excited, the guys thought I was crazy, but we recorded the album.
And he won the Grammy
When I make the records I make them and I no longer want to know. I have a long-suffering friend named Daniel Eisenberg, you are condemned to have friends, and there are friends who are condemned to have you as a friend. He helps me with many things, but I don’t know, I make the record, put it on and that’s it. So I don’t know what really happened, I don’t know if it was sold or not, it seems to me that it’s a good record. I was surprised how you have no idea he won the Grammy. I thought Cristina Aguilera was going to win it, and I felt bad because she had sung Camaleón for me at the Person of the Year gala [in 2021], and it was the first time I think she was singing in Spanish. And she suddenly makes an album in Spanish and then someone else wins it. But hey, I was happy for Boca Livre too, because the group is superb.
Will any song from this album be played at Cruïlla?
No, but I’m organizing it to see if next year we’ll do a tour with them and Editus.
What is your secret to staying in shape, so that cats remain brown and do not have white hair?
It’s the stories, the stories don’t change. There are several things that I consider to be wrong valuations, for example, that the artist owes himself to his public. No, the artist owes it to himself. If he were for the public, Picasso would never have done what he did, Dalí or Miró would never have done what they did. Artists are going to follow their direction, their inner meaning. I wasn’t worried by those who told me “you’re never going to be successful because these songs are too long” or “you’re playing songs that people don’t care about”. It’s your opinion but it’s not my opinion.
An opinion appreciated by many people
We, Latin America, and Spain and Catalonia, are story societies, we are storytellers, we are storytellers, all the time is a story, it is the story, it is the meeting, the coffee, hey, did you see what happened to So-and-so, that is It is the story, the story. Music can perfectly reflect that, those realities that are repeated generationally, and that is what has made the unusual happen. I just came from Chile and Argentina, the two shows were full and they were young, because they can understand what Love and Control is, suddenly they know what El cantante, Siembra, what a Plastic, Father Antonio is. They have all these creations that they tell from the soul, they understand and make the issues their own because they are talking about things that they know and that have affected them. And that’s why the songs continue to be relevant, even though they are not songs that are on the radio, people know them, no matter what. That is why it is very difficult to understand how it is possible that suddenly a guy like me, at my age, can still get into the crowd of people who come to a show, with many of them being young, when in reality we know that one’s audience ages. with one.
A music that creates new, younger audiences
It’s not common, I think it has to do with the care and attention I put into the lyrics. Because if she had written one thing to get out of trouble, I don’t think she would have held up. Once I was in Barcelona walking through Pueblo Espanyol with my wife, Luba, and a gentleman, a thirty-something-year-old boy, stopped me and we began to talk. And I asked him a question, because he was not born when I was writing all these songs, I asked him how he found out about the songs, what happened if he is not on the radio if he is not in the videos. He told me “what happens is that the audiences reached you”, and now Pedro Navajas is in the Flash series.
“Life gives you surprises” is something that people say without knowing where it comes from
Thanks to the guys from Platería, as I told you.
He has also had contact with Stay Homas
I was checking something and suddenly I saw them, or someone said to me “hey you haven’t seen these guys”, and I saw it and I thought they were great. I tried to contact them without knowing how to reach them, so I put an ad on my website and someone, a girl who is a friend of theirs who doesn’t know who I am, read it and told them. So they called me and that’s where we started, in the middle of the pandemic. I saw them there when I was there last year and I sang with them, they seem like a great group, they play everything, they are very good musicians.
What does a New Yorker think of what is done with immigrants in the US?
It is one of the greatest shames in our society, that we have not solved things that we can solve if we put the will to it. Even if you don’t have compassion, at least as an act of self-defense, because any of us can end up on the street. A disease is enough in this country, if you do not have insurance you can leave a perfect person who paid his rent, who had his job, on the street. Not everyone on the street is a drug addict or crazy or whatever. It is a situation that I believe can be resolved but the correct attention is not paid to it.
What I am proposing is that we could be sponsors, sponsor families, people who do not have a job, but also have people who do have a job who have been productive and suddenly something happened to them and they ended up on the street. Now, I deduct that money from taxes instead of giving it to this idiot politician to buy a plane and a bomb. That allows me not only to help the person, it also creates solidarity, because I think it desensitizes us. If you see people on the street taking food out of a garbage can, you take that pod home with you. That has to desensitize you, something has to kill you and that thing is affecting your relationship with your wife, with your children, with your friends, with your relatives, with your neighbors. That pod kills you something.
It is what is also done with those who want to cross their border
I just wrote a song that’s going on the next new album, it’s called Immigrants. Here in the United States for many years it has been believed that all of us in Latin America want to come here and that is not true, most of us who are here do so because we had to come here. I came because of the dictatorship, I did not come here because I am going to be a musician and I am going to be a lawyer. My dad had to go with my mom because Noriega was going to kill him and the others. I graduated as a lawyer and I left because I was not going to be a lawyer in a dictatorship and with my family abroad. I ended up here because the CIA was supporting Noriega, that’s why when a gringo tells me that if I criticize, of course I have the right to criticize, because it’s your fault that I’m here. And on top of that I can’t say anything because I must be super grateful. Well no, I am paying for my stay here, they are not giving me a damn here so please, no one leaves their homeland because they want to.
