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Cuba is the island that taught America how to dance. For much of the 20th century it provided the United States (and, by extension, the Western world) with every key dance craze: the mambo, the rumba, the cha-cha-cha, the charanga, the bugalu. When jazz moved into the concert halls it was the Afro-Cuban influence that kept bebop on the dancefloor. And, throughout the 1940s and â50s Havana was where American hedonists went to party.
But then came Fidel, and Che, and the 1959 revolution, and the Bay Of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that cultural dialogue between Cuba and the US came to a halt. Cuba carried on in isolation, besieged by US sanctions, no longer visited by jazz royalty, no longer the playground of American playboys and gangsters. Its most famous musicians â singer
Various Artists
Stevie Lennox
, December 10th, 2020 09:52
Gareth Goddard follows his crate-diggers classic, Critical Mass, with a more dancefloor-friendly sequel
The idea of crate-digging contains within it a latent cultural hoarding, and perhaps a little pang of personal altruism in resuscitating forgotten songs and victims of circumstance. For the digger, it’s a noble, unending quest for that perfect lost artefact either of its time – or somehow years ahead of it. Take, for example, Soul Jazz Records and its Irish counterpart Allchival, which in recent years have uncovered all manner of uncommercial yet superlative music that didn’t quite make it into the canon.