WOMAD

Pedro Luis Ferrer

From Cuba

Like an aged bottle of top-shelf Havana Club rum, the music of Pedro Luis Ferrer develops more depth and flavour as the years drift by. As the leading purveyor of the 19th-century Cuban style of changui (he calls his less macho updating changuisa), his sprightly trés-led music hits the spot every time, no more than on last year’s immaculate Rustico album. Far from prolific (he’s released three albums in Cuba over the last 35 years), this paucity of output is more down to the treatment he gets from the Cuban authorities than any laziness on his part. The Buena Vista Social Club might have received an official thumbs-up, but in the 1990s Ferrer found his records banned from each branch of the state-run media – therefore all of the island’s media – for his outspoken critiques of Fidel Castro’s continuing regime. Not that the situation finds the 53-year-old troubadour remotely close to raising one of his bushy eyebrows. “I want to be the Cuban that I want to be”, he stubbornly asserts. “I am my own version of what is Cuban. I am even my own version of the Cuban revolution!”In A Few Words… Defiant Cuban troubadour