Ángel Quintero

Cuban guitarist and composer. He arrived at Cuban song blessed by the renewing winds of the Nueva Trova. A prolific author, his compositions "Tumbao", "Corazón, corazón" and "Donde crezca el amor" are well known, but without doubt "Solamente una ventana" is the creation that awakened the admiration of his generation and that of all those who recognize it as one of the excellent works of Cuban music.

He studied guitar at the Ignacio Cervantes School of Professional Development. He joined the Nueva Trova Movement in 1974, and, like Alejandro García (Virulo), broke the schema that existed of the troubadour.

Venturing into opera-trova, with his work Donde crezca el amor. About this piece the composer expressed:
«...I knew that the world of theater is very complex and that it is full of necessary conventions, however, our songs (I refer to those of the Nueva Trova Movement) have a very important characteristic: melody cannot be an end in itself, nor the text a mere pretext for music, but rather both—text and music—seek a harmonic totality that is enriched from the literary and musical point of view.

This was the main reason that led me to think about the classic format of opera, that is, a piece where everything would be said through song, as an experiment that would tell me whether today's youth can endure a work where everything is said through singing and whether this could still be a means of communication between them and me».

This search also had in teatrova, from Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, an interest on the part of the public in the novelty of the treatment given to troubadour song within theater. Quintero's music has also been used by the National Ballet of Cuba.

International Tours
Guatemala
El Salvador
Honduras
Panama
Nicaragua
Bolivia
Ecuador
Argentina
Mexico
United States
Spain
France
Belgium
England
Germany
Russia
Turkey
Greece
Iran
Egypt
Russia
United Arab Emirates

Works
Donde crezca el amor
Anécdotas y aventuras de don Juan Tenorio
Bolero y nostalgia
Despacio se han besado los amantes
El sí y el no
Este oficio mío
Francisco emigrante
Identidad
La Catedral
La Giraldilla
Los deditos
Paloma de hierro
Que evoque alegre todas sus noches
Vamos cantores libres

Discography
"Alma y Voluntad" (EGREM 1986)
"Yo sacaré lo que en el pecho tengo" (Bonafina-Records, Guatemala 1993)
"Soy un Paisano" (Sello-EGREM 2000)
"Mirando tu foto" (EGREM 2001)
"Soy un Paisano" (En Vivo-Centro Pablo de La Torriente Brau 2002)
"El Paisano. Colección (EGREM 2002)
A guitarra limpia, published by Centro Pablo de la Torriente, 2002) which includes the musicalization of some texts by Cuban National Hero, José Martí, and EGREM is working on the re-release of two new CDs.

Criticism
Words written by journalist and critic Pedro de la Hoz in the Bulletin of Centro Pablo de la Torriente:

When Ángel Quintero began to distribute and share songs among his friends and anyone who wanted to hear him back in the early 70s, there was no doubt: we knew, we and he, that a troubadour had been born.

Among these urban music styles also counted boleros and sones, rumbas and guarachas, which in the case of Angelito—as in the case of his colleagues Virulo and Carol—prevented him from yielding, both to the option of hobnobbing with the opportunistic "tojosismo" that some cultivated, and to that of wearing a poncho and simulating an superficial belonging to Andean culture.

Moreover, the troubadour was assisted by a family ethic: in Angelito's house there was no place for banalities or sequins.

We shouldn't pay too much attention to anniversaries. That 35 years of artistic life and 25 years of professional career of Ángel Quintero are now being celebrated are nothing more than pretexts to revisit a work praiseworthy for its scope and character.

The best proof of this is found in the relevance of themes that have withstood the passage of time. It is not only that "Solamente una ventana", "Tumbao" or "Corazón, corazón"—or those that took on life in the never-forgotten opera-trova "Donde crezca el amor"—are inescapable references in the soundtrack of Cubans from the 80s, but that when they are heard by successive generations, the warmth of the reception demonstrates the permanent vitality of those songs.

Another particularly intense area of Ángel's work is situated in the experience that gave rise to "Paisano". I don't believe there is another artistic musical testimony as penetrating and lucid about the diaspora as that collection that the troubadour wove together amid personal and collective tribulations. Nor is there a song as sharp as "Identidad" in which the paradoxes and clashes that the so-called global village brings us are addressed.

Several of these anthological themes nourish the repertoire that will be heard at this concert, at the side of Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, the home par excellence of Cuban troubadours of our time.

But also the continuity and consequence of Angelito's work in recent times can be heard. Nothing human is foreign to a singer who, while not considering himself a chronicler per se, tackles with full commitment the conflicts and feelings of the common man in this land.

All of this seasoned sometimes by well-founded lyricism, and other times by doses of wit, not lacking the ingredient of intelligent and fruitful vernacular humor.

Ángel Quintero has not stopped growing as a troubadour. He has achieved that rare virtue of resembling himself as much as his era, without betraying one or the other. And that is quite a lot.