Manuel Galbán

Manuel Galbán Manuel Galbán was born in 1931 in Gibara, Holguín Province (Cuba), into a very musical family. Two of his siblings played the guitar, his father played the tres and his mother sang. He was essentially a self-taught musician who began playing at a very early age “my feet didn’t even touch the ground when I sat on a stool”, as he explained. He played the guitar and the tres in several local groups and made his professional debut in 1944 with the Villa Blanca Orchestra. In 1956 Galbán moved to Havana where for seven years he performed in bars and clubs, as well as making several radio appearances and featuring on a number of albums. This was a key stage in Galbán’s career as he began to make a name for himself on the Cuban music scene. He also developed the sound that he would become renowned for. Galbán became one of the first guitarists to use his right hand to mute the sound of the strings and whilst creating dry tones, drawing the guitar’s sound closer to that of a percussion instrument. Likewise, his interest in the music being produced in the USA led him to explore sounds that would later become popular in the realms of surf music, sounds he would come to incorporate within his style. Seven years after moving to Havana, in 1963, Galbán joined Los Zafiros, a vocal group formed the previous year, that combined the Cuban music style filín with other musical styles such as bolero, doo-wop, calypso music, bossa nova and rock. This fusion transformed Los Zafiros into one of the most popular Cuban groups of the time. They even achieved international fame and performed at several venues in Europe including the Paris Olympia. Although Galbán wasn’t the first guitarist to perform for Los Zafiros, he did remain with the group for a long time, becoming one of their key members. He was so important to the group’s success that the prominent pianist Peruchin once said of him: “You’d need two guitarists to replace Galbán”. Galbán left Los Zafiros in 1972 due to problems within the group. For the following years he formed the group Batey where he remained for 23 years as a guitarist, pianist and musical director, territory with which he had already become familiar in Los Zafiros. With Batey, Galbán toured the world and became one of the key ambassadors of Cuban music, and he recorded number of albums documenting popular Cuban music with the prestigious Cuban record label Egrem and worked with the Bulgarian label Balkanton. After his spell with the group Batey, Galbán joined the group Vieja Trova Santiaguera for two years before answering Ry Cooder’s call for him to take part in an Ibrahim Ferrer recording and subsequently join Buena Vista Social Club where as with the other musicians, Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, Compay Segundo, Omara Portuondo and Cachaito Lopez, Galbán’s career witnessed a renaissance. www.montuno.com Touring internationally, they manage to reach foreign audiences that had barely heard of this generation of Cuban musicians who had helped to forge the country’s popular music scene. Manuel Galbán, along with the others, had returned to the place where their careers had begun. In the case of Galbán, he began touring again, just like the years with Los Zafiros and the group Batey, with whom he came to visit in excess of 60 countries. Along with colleagues, these older musicians performed in emblematic venues such as the Sydney Opera House or London’s Albert Hall to Europe’s top festivals, and Galbán once again felt he was what he’d always wanted to be: a musician through and through. The success of the Buena Vista Social Club series of albums and Wim Wenders’ film allowed an entire generation of Cuban musicians to experience a second youth and it also revived Galbán’s recording career, not only by working on recordings by other members of the Buena Vista Social Club such as Ibrahim Ferrer, “Cachaíto” López or Omara Portuondo, but also because of the album he recorded alongside Ry Cooder in Havana, Mambo Sinuendo (Nonesuch, 2003). This record received much acclaim from audiences and critics alike. The album, virtually conceived as a one-on-one production by two of the biggest maestros of the guitar on the American continent, fully exploits the fruits of the musical wealth that has become a familiar trait in Galbán’s career. “Galbán and myself felt that there existed a sound that had yet to be explored, there was scope for a Cuban band with an electric guitar to once again convey that fifties atmosphere in a smooth, simple yet lush manner. Our group has two electric guitarists, two drummers, a conga player and a bassist: a sextet with the potential to sound like a big band and unveil the mysteries of classical melodies. The result is powerful, lyrical and entertaining music”, Cooder explains referring to the sessions when the album was concocted. In 2003 Mambo Sinuendo was nominated for the Latin Grammy Awards, it triumphed with the prize for the best jazz performance from the magazine Downbeat and in 2004 it received the Grammy Award for the Best Pop Instrumental Album. Manuel Galbán continued to tour the world performing with the Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club and recorded his last album Bluechacha, which he had been working on for more than three years. On this album, that can be played almost as a tribute to the career of a musician that many have compared to the US guitarist Duane Eddy, Galbán reworked some of the tracks that he himself has stated formed part of his musical training from the outset. “At first, we had a list of more than one thousand tunes”, he reveals when discussing the album’s initial plans. On the record, he surrounded himself with some of his long-time colleagues including Omara Portuondo, as well as other musicians such Rosa Passos, performing classic Cuban traditional music and also some fresh, previously unheard compositions. The list of guests featured on the album is indeed impressive, Trío Esperança, Eric Bibb, Marcelo Mercadante and Sissoko Ballaké. There are one-on-one arrangements, with the aim of triumphing together rather than vying for the limelight, and they show how the metallic sounds of Galbán’s guitar preserve sensitivity and relevance. www.montuno.com As impressive is the underlying concept behind the album: the quest to forge a work that revives one of the foremost components in the history of recorded music; the arrangements. To do so he called on his daughter Magda Rosa Galbán and Juan Antonio Leyva to contribute. On the album, Galbán returned once again bestow us those sounds that fuse guitar and percussion. The result is a recording with an almost orchestral feel, bursting with the energy that only he could glean from the guitar, with that uniquely personal stylistic elegance with which over the years he would transform into tiny gems any tune that he picked up, adapting it into a language ahead of its time. A language he created, where the sounds of the instrument bore as much significance as the discourse of the guitar. Galbán was a cornerstone of the six-string instrument. He achieved something that very few are able to: a couple of bars were suffice in order to recognise that unmistakable style. Manuel Galbán Gibara, Holguin 1931 – Havana 2011. www.montuno.com .

Load more