Omara Portuondo at the Polish Theatre: the voice of Buena Vista Social Club and Cuba’s musical world

Omara Portuondo, the voice of Buena Vista Social Club, will sing in Wrocław! One of the greatest singers of our time, known to audiences worldwide through the legendary Cuban group Buena Vista Social Club, will give her only Polish concert on 30 May at Teatr Polski in Wrocław. The last remaining figure from the world of old Cuba's great artists comes to Poland at the invitation of Ethno Jazz Festival.

Omara Portuondo is turning eighty-eight. She has spent more than seventy of those years on stages worldwide, an unrivalled interpreter of Cuban bolero. She began alongside her sister in a girl group that accompanied figures such as Edith Piaf and Nat King Cole at Havana’s famous Tropicana club. Her first album, “Black Magic”, was recorded before the revolution and featured Spanish-language performances of dazzling arrangements of American standards, including the title track “Old Black Magic”. News of the 1959 revolution reached Omara while she was performing in the USA. Although many of her musicians, including her sister, chose to remain in America, Omara returned to Cuba. Her voice would accompany an entire generation growing up in the difficult, closed world of Castro and Guevara.

Unlike the now-famous artists whom Wim Wenders and Ry Cooder brought out of obscurity and oblivion in the late nineties with the film “Buena Vista Social Club”, Omara never stopped performing, not even for a single season. For her, therefore, it was not a return to music, as it was for Ruben Gonzales, Ibrahim Ferrer or Compay Segundo, but rather her long-awaited introduction to the whole world, which until then had rarely remembered the dazzling beauty of Cuban music.

Both Wenders's documentary and the film about Omara herself won awards at festivals around the globe. The “Buena Vista…” album and the subsequent recording of the Carnegie Hall concert, but especially Omara's solo albums “Omara Portuondo”, “Flor de Amor” and “Gracias”, marking her 60-year career, made the Cuban artist a legend often compared with Billie Holiday or Piaf.

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