| | |  Entertainment | November 2009 
A Salsa Star Is Reborn After a Break for Politics
 Larry Rohter - New York Times
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November 28, 2009
| | Rubén Blades, Panama's former tourism minister, at an Upper West Side restaurant this week. (Damon Winter/The New York Times) | |
Rubén Blades has a very specific reason for calling his current tour “Todos Vuelven,” or “Everybody Returns.” After suspending his music and film career for five years to serve as a cabinet minister in Panama, his homeland, Mr. Blades is back, on the road and with a new album, testing the waters and trying to figure out whether the entertainment business still has a place for him.
“Yes, I’m back in it, but with discrimination and focus,” Mr. Blades said this week over lunch at a Cuban-Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side that he has frequented since the mid-1970s, when he experienced his first success as a salsa star with “Pablo Pueblo,” “Pedro Navaja” and other socially conscious songs. “The world changed while I was away, and the idea now is to see how to fit in.”
Mr. Blades, 61, and Seis del Solar, the band that has recorded with him since the 1980s, will be playing Saturday night at the United Palace ballroom in Washington Heights. But his formal reintroduction to American audiences occurred this month at the Latin Grammy Awards ceremony in Las Vegas, where he sang with Calle 13, the Puerto Rican reggaetón and hip-hop duo that won five awards that night and may be the hottest act in Latin music right now.
“Rubén is one of the few artists who can disappear and come back with the hope of attracting a young audience, and that’s because of the quality of his songs,” said René Pérez, 21, the lead singer of Calle 13. “I wasn’t really following his political life, but in musical terms, it’s like he’s the teacher and we are his students. I’ve listened to his music since I was little and have learned from him not just how to write but also political awareness. We believe in his message.”
From 2004 until this summer, Mr. Blades, who is also a lawyer with degrees from the University of Panama and Harvard, was Panama’s minister of tourism. According to government statistics, tourism generates more income for the country than does the Panama Canal, so that portfolio is an important one, and after years of criticizing those in power, Mr. Blades was eager to put his principles to the test.
“It’s not that easy to explain why I like doing so many things that seem disconnected,” he said. “But when I started writing about social issues in music and started having success with that, I felt that there was a contradiction arising from making a living out of writing about social injustice. In my mind, the only way to end that contradiction was through politics. It’s really about changing the conditions I am denouncing in my songs, and that can only be done through political work.”
That kind of willingness to veer off in unexpected directions has long been a hallmark of Mr. Blades, who manages his own career. David Maldonado, a salsa tour promoter and manager who has done business with Mr. Blades on and off for more than 25 years, said Mr. Blades was warned that he would damage his budding career when he chose in the early 1970s to go “out of sight, out of mind” and enroll at Harvard.
“Rubén, he’s an enigma, definitely not your average artist,” said Mr. Maldonado, who was a producer of the film “El Cantante” with Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez. “He can’t be managed by normal entertainment industry standards, because a lot of the things he does just don’t go along with the program. He’s indifferent to the standards of the business, and that can frustrate people, including me sometimes.”
When he started off, Mr. Blades seemed to be a salsa singer in the classic mold, heavily influenced by Cheo Feliciano, and a songwriter valued for his ability to wed socially conscious lyrics to danceable rhythms. “When you talk about Rubén, you’re talking about an extremely exciting performer who also knows how to awaken brain cells with his heavy, incredibly creative lyrics,” said the salsa pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, a friend of Mr. Blades since their days at Fania Records in the 1970s.
But over the years, Mr. Blades strayed further and further from that formula. He performed in Paul Simon’s failed Broadway musical “Capeman” in 1998 and early this decade recorded a pair of albums, “Tiempos” and “Mundo,” which incorporated jazz and folk elements and even, in one memorable instance, bagpipes.
“The problem with being a writer in salsa is that the genre is pretty much defined by the appeal of the music to the feet,” Mr. Blades explained. “And that’s fine. I will never put that down. That’s the way it is. But those limits, those structures, were something I was trying to break away from.”
Mr. Blades’s new CD, “Cantares del Subdesarrollo” (“Songs of Underdevelopment”) deepens that process. Many of the songs, like “Las Calles” (“The Streets”) and “Himno de los Olvidados” (“Hymn of the Forgotten”), have the politically charged lyrics for which he is famous. But the sound is stripped down and acoustic, harking back to the era before Afro-Caribbean ensembles acquired big horn sections. Mr. Blades takes a large musical role, playing guitar, tres and percussion in addition to singing.
One song attracting a lot of attention in Latin America is “País Portátil” (“Portable Country”), whose title comes from the novel of the same name by Adriano González León. The song speaks of “a place without memory/where nothing is surprising anymore/not a crime pardoned/or a charlatan as president” and laments the ascendance of “falsified heroes and mortgaged ideals.”
Because Mr. González León was a Venezuelan, there have been suggestions that Mr. Blades is writing about Hugo Chávez, the populist president of Venezuela. Mr. Blades said that, as in many of his other songs, he was describing a phenomenon common all over Latin America. But, no longer bound by the restrictions of government office, he also criticized Mr. Chávez for “insisting on adopting a system that has been demonstrably proven not to function.”
About his acting career, Mr. Blades seems less certain. Over the years, he has appeared in films with an explicit political or social message like “The Milagro Beanfield War” and “Cradle Will Rock” as well as more mainstream fare including “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “All the Pretty Horses.”
Mr. Blades said that he had begun a move from Los Angeles to New York with his wife, Luba Mason, a jazz singer originally from here. He added that he’d be interested in working in a television series under the right circumstances. But he also said he had just had “an interesting conversation with my agent, who like anyone else who works with me, has been bewildered by the things I do and my motives” and was complaining, “We don’t even know where you are,” and asking: “What are you going to do? Do you want to work?”
Though many of the songs on Mr. Blades’s new CD are pessimistic in tone, with their focus on the twin vices of corruption and violence, he said that he came out of government service feeling hopeful about prospects for change. At a meeting of Western Hemisphere leaders in April that he attended as part of Panama’s delegation, he saw El Salvador represented by incoming and outgoing presidents whose parties were engaged in a murderous civil war two decades ago. That may have been even more heartening, he said, than the presence of President Obama.
“Look how things have changed,” he said enthusiastically. “So yes, I’m very optimistic. Usually when you work in government, the stories you hear are of disillusionment. But as a matter of fact, I came out of government not just thinking it can work but knowing that it can. It may sound pompous, arrogant even, but it’s nice to be able to do something for reasons other than your own personal gratification.” |
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