Omara Portuondo - cantante, entrevista - Tt: Omara Portuondo - TA: singer, interivew - Entrevista

Latin Beat Magazine, Oct, 2000 by Jesse Varela

Omara Portuondo has been called la novia del "filin," a fiancé to lovers of a cabaret music spun out of 1950s Havana nightlife and identified by a Spanglish articulation of "feeling." It's a sound she propagated with a sophisticated Afro-Cuban spin as one of the lead vocalists with the dynamic vocal group Cuarteto D'Aida. With jazzed up bolero love songs, this group swept away Latin America with a pop vocalese that drew from east coast doo-wop harmonies as much as it did from the romanticism that flourished with the genre.

In 1997 she returned to the legendary studios where forty years prior she had recorded with the talented quartet. Now it is the site of the state-run EGREM Studios where she would participate in the historical Buena Vista Social Club sessions with Ry Cooder. Rendering Viente Años, a song she learned from her father as a little girl, for the landmark Grammy-winning album, re-ignited the career of a diva that never sought to be a star but somehow always lived in the limelight.

"I still feel like a child," she said in Spanish last year at the Paramount Theater in Oakland when she was the special guest of Ibrahim Ferrer and his orchestra as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival.

"Things continue to get better and look at me, a special invited guest of the Buena Vista Social Club. How can I stop now? Está buena la cosa hombre. (things are good man)."

Turning 70 years old on October 29, she returns this year to the Paramount as headliner for the 18th Annual SF Jazz Festival with her Buena Vista pal Barbarito Torres as special guest in early October. She will appear on a Thursday night, October 5, at Zellerbach Hall on the U.C. Berkeley campus for Cal Performances. The release of her self-titled Buena Vista...presents album on World Circuit/Nonesuch is the latest (and last) of the featured members of this illustrious cast to record solo efforts and sets a pinnacle for an already amazing career.

The story is that she got into show business by tagging along with her older sister Haydee to the famed Tropicana Nightclub in Havana where she worked as a dancer. As fate would have it, her break came in 1945 when she stepped in at the last minute to fill a spot abruptly vacated on the world acclaimed chorus line. Having memorized the routines watching her sister's rehearsals, she stayed and would later become one of the clubs star attractions.

Born and raised in a neighborhood called Cayo Hueso, she still lives in Havana in a high-rise overlooking the Malecón walkway. Omara was introduced to music by her parents, who taught her the traditional songs they sang around the house like La Bayamesa. Her mother was from a well-to-do Spanish family and her father, a black baseball player with the Cuban national team. At a time when integrated marriages were still frowned upon, "they tried to recreate at home what society denied them."

In the late 1940s, Omara Portuondo won second prize in a talent show on Radio Cadena Habana and began to sing at informal gatherings with friends like composer César Portillo de la Luz (Contigo En La Distancia) and the blind Latin jazz pianist Frank Emilio Flynn. It was Flynn who recruited her for his group Loquibambia Swing that broadcast daily on the radio station Mil Diez. Greatly influenced by George Shearing and Art Tatum, he played Latin music with a jazz inflection and gave Omara an appreciation for genre. She soon learned to glean inspiration from the all-star American and international artists frequenting the island nation.

"Back then, so many people came to Cuba that we either saw or shared a stage with the likes of Edith Piaf, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, and Sarah Vaughn. From Mexico, Pedro Vargas, Fernando Fernández and Toña La Negra were greats who taught us with their performances. I believe everything of quality you experience musically influences you."

Soon she flourished, singing with Los Cuartetos De Facundo Rivero, Orlando De La Rosa and the all-woman Orquesta Anacaona. In 1952, she and her sister became founding members of a female vocal group led musically by pianist Aida Diestro. Known for arranging of religious choral works, Diestro created passionate tapestries with intriguing counterpoints to interpret popular songs of the day. Recruiting Omara and Haydee, she also brought in Moraima Secada (Jon's aunt) and the fabulous Elena Burke to complete the quartet.

They traveled the world and were as popular in France and Spain as they were in New York City. Aida's vocal arrangements were very innovative and fell in line stylistically with the work of the Hi Lo's, The Four Freshmen and the Bay Area's Axidentals. They had Cuban soul in the way New York City doo-wop had gospel roots with a smooth and polished delivery that spoke to their extraordinary musical abilities and sophisticated musical ideas.

Ironically, they only recorded one album in 1957 for RCA Victor, now available on CD under the title of El Original Cuarteto D'Aida (RCA-BMG). With orchestral arrangements by such giants as Chico O'Farrill, it spoke to a vibrant scene reinventing itself from the mambo and chachachá that was taking the music to a jazzier present and made the group a common occurrence on Cuban television.