José Luis Cortés, Trailblazing Cuban Bandleader, Dies at 70 – Repeating Islands


He was skilled within the classics and jazz, however he helped popularize a brand new, danceable style referred to as timba.

An obituary by Neil Genzlinger for The New York Occasions.

Revealed April 28, 2022Updated April 29, 2022

José Luis Cortés, a Cuban musician who together with his well-liked band, NG La Banda, helped set up the energetic style of music referred to as timba and unfold the sound with well-regarded albums and rollicking exhibits that had concertgoers dancing within the arenas and afterward within the streets, died on April 18 in Havana. He was 70.

The Instituto Cubano de la Música posted information of his dying on its Fb web page and stated the trigger was “a hemorrhagic encephalic accident.” The publish referred to as him “probably the most necessary figures in up to date Cuban music.”

Mr. Cortés, a flutist who graduated from the Nationwide Faculty of Artwork, was an admired determine in Cuban music for many years, though he had not too long ago been the topic of abuse allegations by a former vocalist together with his band. He introduced a mix of significant musicianship and showmanship to the road music of Cuba when he based NG La Banda in 1988. He had earlier performed in Los Van Van, the famed dance band of Juan Formell, and Irakere, the pianist Chucho Valdés’s genre-straddling group of virtuoso gamers.

He drew on these influences because the chief of NG La Banda, a big ensemble a fan of danceable songs.

“One of the best ways to grasp his fashion is that he introduced to bounce music the complexity of big-band jazz,” Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor of Chicano and Latin research on the College of California, Irvine, and writer of books together with “From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz” (2006), stated by e-mail.

The “NG” stood for Nueva Generación, and the band aimed for a younger viewers, with driving percussion, streetwise lyrics and a brass part referred to as “los metales del terror.”

“There’s uncooked energy in these terrifying horns, and within the forceful, nasal singing, however sophistication within the preparations and rhythmic adventurousness,” The Miami Herald wrote in 1992, assessing “En La Calle” (“On the Avenue”), an album that solidified the group’s popularity. “Dense, driving, dance celebration music.”

NG La Banda’s 1992 album “En La Calle” (“On the Street”) solidified the group’s reputation.

That album included “La Expresiva,” a music that, as Professor Fernandez put it, “paid homage to the barrios of Havana,” which is the place the band’s music notably resonated. That sound was first referred to as salsa cubana however quickly had its personal title, timba. Professor Fernandez and Anita Casavantes Bradford described the music in an instructional paper, “Cuba’s Second Golden Age of In style Music, 1989-2005.”

“Quick, loud, and characterised by its a number of overlapping rhythms and deep booming bass strains,” they wrote, “timba was additionally recognizable for its insistent percussion and dense, rushing-note horn patterns.”

It’s, they added, “a extremely technical fashion of music, and holding one’s personal in a timba orquesta, particularly within the horns, or ‘metales,’ part, stays an accomplishment boasted by solely essentially the most rigorously skilled and disciplined musicians.”

The sound that Mr. Cortés and his gamers perfected, the Spanish-language Florida newspaper El Nuevo Herald wrote in 1994, “has breathed new life into dance music, stimulating the listener’s senses whereas difficult those that enterprise onto the dance ground.”

José Luis Cortés was born on Oct. 5, 1951, in Villa Clara, Cuba. His musical training, he stated, emphasised classical and jazz.

“You couldn’t play well-liked Cuban music at school,” he stated in a 1998 interview with The Miami Herald.

He spent the Seventies in Los Van Van, which was breaking new floor by incorporating parts of funk and rock into mainstream Cuban dance music. For a lot of the Eighties he was in Irakere, an influential group whose goal was, as Mr. Valdés as soon as put it, “bringing collectively jazz and the ancestral varieties.”

Mr. Cortés’s nickname was El Tosco, “the Tough One.” Definitely the lyrics in NG La Banda’s songs may very well be tough, with vulgarity and what some listeners construed as misogyny. He defended these selections.

“In style music comes from the individuals,” he informed The Observer of Britain in 1993. “I check my songs within the streets; in the event that they prefer it, it’s a success.”

He additionally defended timba as a style.

“The intellectuals say that timba is crap,” he informed The Miami Herald in 1998. “However it is a racist idea. Cuban well-liked music has all the time been the music of the individuals, of the poor barrios, the place there are only a few whites.”

Some students linked the emergence of timba to the troublesome financial instances Cuba skilled after the autumn of the Soviet Union, a time also known as the “particular interval.” The style’s vitality and blunt lyrics, they instructed, spoke to a technology that got here of age through the hardships of the Nineties.

The group was well-liked sufficient that when it made its New York debut, in 1997, it performed Avery Fisher Corridor at Lincoln Heart.

“When the band did what it does finest,” Peter Watrous wrote in a evaluation in The New York Occasions, “taking part in lengthy, structurally difficult tunes that blended funk, stop-time components, drum sections and Afro-Cuban dance music, all with wild choreography, the viewers was up on its toes and screaming.”

Mr. Cortés’s profession, although, ended beneath a cloud. In 2019 Dianelys Alfonso, who had been a singer within the band and had had a romantic relationship with him for a time, stated he had repeatedly assaulted her. That 12 months The Related Press reported that Mr. Cortés had not responded to the accusations, however that Ms. Alfonso had obtained each widespread help for coming ahead and abusive messages from Mr. Cortés’s admirers.

Info on Mr. Cortés’s survivors was not instantly obtainable.



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