Arnaldo Rodriguezdirector of Talismanis celebrating two decades of work in this 2022. It has before it new projects and dreams to materialize with its Musicuba Artistic Representation Agency: one of them is the Havana Mambo Festival. The event, whose fundamental theme is the defense and safeguarding of Cuban popular traditions, will begin on August 9 at the Rosado Benny Moré room in La Tropical and will last until the 14th.
“It has been twenty years of tireless work, but also of joy, of having received love and affection from the public, the encouragement always to move forward, despite the difficulties,” says Arnaldo.
He announced that as part of the festivities he has recorded a new song titled I don’t want to give up that he would like to start distributing soon on radio stations. In addition, he has just physically presented the CD Havana Mambo Orchestra where he makes another type of approach to Cuban music that is far from the fusion by which the national public already knows him.
(Photo: Courtesy of the Egrem)
“The Egrem label decided to support us in this beautiful idea, an album with eight songs that has as guests the Orquesta Aragón, Moisés Valle “Yumurí”, Mayito Rivera, Haila María Mompié, El Noro, Yulaisi Miranda, Iván, “El son of Teresa”, Pedro Barrizonte and Leonard Acosta, as well as instrumentalists from various generations who magnify the proposal of this CD.
“Alexander Abreu recorded the trumpets and that gives the CD a spectacular color. He has always worked with me in the studio. Amaury Pérez, the trombonist of Havana D’Primera, was also present”, commented the director of Talismán.
the waistone of the songs that was already a success at the beginning of Arnaldo’s musical career with the Azúcar Band orchestra has now been taken up again for this album.
“That song came out in the year 2000, in the first record productions that I did and now I take it up again with the current sounds of Cuban music and with this packaging of the mambo in the voice of Haila. So it is one of the works of my authorship for this album where there are classic themes of the genre, co-authored by Dámaso Pérez Prado and Benny Moré, and other unpublished ones by Arnaldo and his Talismán”.
Outstanding in record production is a tribute to Israel López “Cachao” entitled Mambo Cachao. According to Arnaldo, he is “one of the initiating figures of this musical genre. The mambo had a history before Pérez Prado internationalized it, which is his greatest achievement and distinction.”
Arnaldo confessed that he is very happy with the result of the phonogram because it means a new opening in his musical career.
In the opinion of the musicologist of the Egrem, Heydi González, this album contributes to the new generations approaching the mambo.
“I think the intention and objective of the album is very well achieved. You will find sounds very similar to how it was done in the 40s and 50s, when mambomania exploded.
“Arnaldo’s intent and commitment, particularly me, satisfies me a lot, because there are very typical orchestrations of the original mambo and grandiloquence in the brass sections that are so well achieved and harmonized”.
As the director of Talismán warns in the words of the album: “To the rhythm of the congas and bongoes, the saxophones of the Jazz Big Band dance syncopated. Cultures that dialogue and intertwine with each other, deriving essences from a golden age in the music of an Island: Cuba”.