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Juan-Carlos Formell
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- About Me:
- Expect the unexpected from Cuban music rebel Juan-Carlos Formell, whose visionary songs have been compared to the work of Jobim, Caetano Veloso, Neil Young and Jackson Browne.
Born in Havana in 1964, singer/songwriter/guitarist/bassist Juan-Carlos Formell is a fourth generation musician. But the restrictions of the government-controlled music industry in his homeland made it difficult for him to express his new ideas. "While still in my twenties, at a time when most musicians are full of hope, I was resigned to a future of marginalization," Juan-Carlos recalls. He fled to the United States in 1993, to make his own music, his way: "Music is the combustion created by the impact of a moment on a place. I came to New York as part of an exodus of young Cuban musicians who had no place in their country, because the moment had been cut off. We came looking for legends-- the jazz clubs the jam sessions, the all-night dances -- but we didn't find them. I took my guitar and sang in the subway, looking for the moment."
"Juan-Carlos invented the modern Cuban concept album with his Grammy-nominated 'songs from a little blue house' (1999),' a quasi-autobiographical song cycle evoking his grandmother's memories of childhood in a pre-revolutionary Cuba.
" The follow-up, 'las calles del paraiso,' was more complexly personal, using the cinema as a metaphor to evoke a day and a night in Havana, beginning with with carnival and concluding in reverie. The exile’s reverie, for all of Juan-Carlos’s music reflects the soul-searching of a Cuban artist awaiting the coming of an authentic Cuban revolution, one allowing him, and his generation, to reclaim Cuba as a home of personal and artistic freedom.
" 'Cemeteries & Desire' is the third chapter in a tale of psychological and spiritual transformations novel in the history of Cuban music, recorded in New Orleans, that most Caribbean city of his adopted homeland.
" Like Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who with his magical realist tone-poem, 'A Night in the Tropics' was the first composer to look longingly from New Orleans toward Cuba, Juan-Carlos Formell thrives in the tumultuous force-field existing musically and psychologically between New Orleans and Havana. His bass figure, opening this cycle, transforms into a drum, beating out the alternating currents of a passionate rumba of attraction and repulsion. " -- Norman Weinstein, author, "Nights in Tunisia"
- Website:
- http://www.myspace.com/formell
JOHNNY's DREAM CLUB - the resurrection of Cuban cool
Help fund Juan-Carlos Formell's new album 'Johnny's Dream Club'!!
Contribute $25 and get an advance download copy of the new album. The group needs to raise $5,000 to pay for studio time and other costs in New Orleans. Use their Tune Your World micro-funding widget above to become a sponsor of the album.
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Cuban Cool Goes to New Orleans
'Johnny's Dream Club' will have its world debut April 5th & 6th 2008 at Snug Harbor, the most prestigious jazz club in New Orleans. The band: Juan-Carlos Formell (Cuba)-- acoustic & electric guitars, vocals; Pedro Giraudo (Argentina) -- acoustic bass; Jorge Leyva (Cuba) -- percussion; special guest Lewis Kahn (of Fania All-Star fame) on violin & trombone.
The next day the group will begin to record the new album at Piety Street Recording (where Elvis Costello recorded with Alan Toussaint). They will be joined in the recording by a special guest artist, the celebrated New Orleans jazz clarinetist, Dr. Michael White.
What is Johnny's Dream Club?
The cabaret Johnny's Dream Club was a small masterpiece of modernist architecture at the beach outside Havana where the jazzistas went to play and hang out after their work night was over. What you'd often hear there was el Filin (Cuban for "feeling"), a cool undercurrent in the Havana music scene of the 1950s.
A precursor to and influence upon bossa nova, el Filin's jazz-infused ballads emerged in the late 1940s from the intimate after-hours clubs of Central Havana. Feeling's free-style guitar with progressive harmonies and diminished chords reflected the urbanity and sophistication of bohemian Black musicians: composer/guitarists Jose Antonio Mendez and Portillo de la Luz; pianist Peruchin and Bebo Valdes; singers Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo.
Juan-Carlos Formell's Blog
Cuban Cool heads to New Orleans...
Posted on March 21st, 2008 at 8:00pm —
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