Armando Oréfiche

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Oréfiche was born in La Habana and achieved an excellent musical education from the classrooms of that beloved place, known for many years as the Conservatorio Municipal de La Habana and later honored with the name Conservatorio Amadeo Roldán.

Very young, after having perfected his studies with renowned masters, he entered active musical life. A great accompanying pianist, which earned him the preference of Ernesto Lecuona from the concert seasons that the Maestro developed to showcase his music, especially at the Teatro Encanto, in whose excellent orchestra the young Oréfiche assumed responsibility as pianist.

At the beginning of the thirties, Lecuona decides to develop one of these seasons in Spain and guarantee the quality of the accompanying performances by having the orchestra travel from Cuba. After a successful though relatively brief series of performances, health reasons force him to return to Cuba.

Most of the musicians decide to remain in Europe. The young pianist Oréfiche not only takes charge of directing and maintaining the orchestra, organized on the basis of quality, but decides to increase the appeal that Cuban music had demonstrated exerting on the Spanish public, endowing the group, from a visual point of view, with all possible spectacularity. Thus appears the element of costume based on the so-called "rumbero suit," to which he adds lighting and movement details, all of which—supported by excellent quality—resulted in a memorable success for the musicians and increased the dissemination of Cuban music's rhythms and styles in the main squares of Europe.

When world war broke out in 1940, the orchestra returns to Cuba and it is from that date forward that it begins to become popular among Cuban, Latin American, and American audiences.

In the mid-forties, Armando Oréfiche coincides with Ignacio Villa (Bola de Nieve) in Argentina. It is then that he conceives that dramatic-musical scene we know as Messié Julián and it is there where the vision of the creator again emerges, one who had converted the presence of an orchestra into a spectacle without, for that reason, its musical quality suffering or its essences fracturing. It is now when he intuits, in the art of that Bola, the guarantee to leave placed and ready forever, just as he was conceiving it, that unique piece of the Cuban songbook.

"Never in Cuba has Oréfiche been given the recognition he deserves as a director, composer, and disseminator of Cuban music throughout the world. When he was in Cuba, press chronicles got lost in trivialities about whether he should use the name Lecuona or not, or whether his music sounded exotic, etc.

Sergio Vermel, the sagacious artistic director of the Excelsior hotel in Venice, discovers that unusual-sounding group in Logroño and hires them for the exclusive Venetian Lido, intuiting the charm their warm rhythms would exert on European audiences.

On July 3, 1934, they arrive in the romantic city as the Lecuona Cuban Boys, in recognition of who had taken them to Europe and to carry a name more in line with the demands of nightlife of the era. From the Lido they go to Zurich and from there they launch into the great adventure, to Paris, the plaza most desired by all. And the most feared, because everything depended on their good or bad reception.

The City of Light was already delighting itself with Cuban music thanks to the work of figures like Eliseo Grenet, Moisés Simons and their captivating "Mamá Inés" and "El Manisero." The Empire theater, which only received greats like Chevalier, had welcomed without reservation Don Azpiazu's orchestra, which according to Carpentier had arrived to definitively dislodge American music from the Parisian dance halls.

In Paris of that era, nightclubs where music from here was heard proliferated, among them El Palermo and El Barco Ebrio, in the Latin Quarter. The cultural imprint of the Caribbean island was also felt at the Plantation and La Cabaña Cubana, whose Cuban atmosphere delighted a very varied public made up equally of bohemians, art critics, and snobbish aristocrats. Under that climate, on October 5, 1934, the stage of the Parisian ABC served for the debut of the Lecuona Cuban Boys. Success accompanied them immediately thanks to the freshness with which they performed Cuban music just a few years after its "discovery" by Europe.

Winning the favor of European audiences meant not only making good music, but also valuing their appetites and psychology to offer a product that, while understandable, was no less artistic, and without exhaustion following a first moment of dazzlement. To that end they conceived and staged their repertoire in the style of a comprehensive high-quality spectacle, with the character of staging and evocations of Cuban atmosphere. Each one performed a role of broad range that went beyond mere musical interpretation and which constituted, in addition to a surprise, a clear precedent of that participatory musical spectacle today so typical in orchestras of dance music.

Until 1939 the Lecuona Cuban Boys, with Oréfiche at the helm, travel the most luxurious casinos and theaters of pre-war Europe, sharing the stage with figures like Maurice Chevalier, Josephine Baker, and Raquel Meller, and making recordings for the major record companies, radio stations, and the newly born TV.

By then Oréfiche is not only a prominent orchestra and stage director, but also a prolific composer and arranger. In the first of these roles he demonstrated his singular musical talent; in the second, his veneration toward some of the most distinguished Cuban composers.

Oréfiche himself recounts in an old interview that... Among the first is the one titled "El primer beso," of which troubadour Guyún made a creation and which I later published in Paris. To that period also belongs "Te he arrancado de mí." (...) In Spain he wrote "La Filipina," which Raquel Meller premiered in Barcelona.

Later he devoted himself for some time to making arrangements of numbers by the main Cuban authors (...), adapting them to the orchestra's needs. Among them are: "María la O," "Canto indio," "Siboney" and "La Rumba musulmana," by Lecuona; "Folie Negre" and "Cubanacán," by Moisés Simons; "Hindú," by Armando Valdespí; "Tabú," by Margarita Lecuona, and others.

At times Oréfiche has been criticized for that unique way of his of adapting Cuban rhythms and turns to European perception. If truly the ends justify the means, in his favor it could be argued that perhaps no one in any era has disseminated Cuban music better and more widely throughout the world. He noted with regret that, despite his efforts, Cuban music did not "enter" as it should with those audiences. Then, to make them understand it, he dedicated himself to making arrangements of pieces known to them, adapting them to the rhythm and manner of Cuban music itself. (...) Thus emerged "Rumba azul," "Rumba Internacional," and "Antillana."

The imminence of war precipitates Oréfiche to return to Cuba on November 4, 1939. In just six months the Lecuona Cuban Boys present themselves in the principal theaters and clubs of La Habana and the interior of the country, until in 1940 they begin an extensive six-year tour of Hispanic America, where a new spectrum of possibilities opens to them.

Apparently, contact with the warm Latin universe favors in Oréfiche the creation of boleros and songs, like the well-known "¿Corazón para qué?," composed in Buenos Aires in 1941 with lyrics by Rodolfo M. Taboada. In that same year, in Montevideo, he composes "La Conga del Carnaval de Uruguay," which provokes a true dancing frenzy, and "Quién," which he dedicates to Elvira Ríos.

In 1942 he creates "Misterioso Nilo Azul," later renamed "Bolero árabe," with lyrics by César Lenzi. And in 1943, "Escúchame," with lyrics by Fernando Torres, and "Mi sueño y tú," incorporated into Rita Montaner's repertoire. In 1944 he launches "Me estoy enamorando de ti," and the following year, in La Habana, "¿Cuándo me vas a querer?" and "Mi noche sin luna." Countries like Perú and Chile were privileged with the boleros "Perú" and "Linda chilena," also composed in 1944.

Another of his very well-known pieces was "Cariñosamente," which was a great success in 1950s La Habana in the voice of Tina de Mola.

After returning to Cuba, on February 2, 1945, they debut at the Tropicana cabaret. Before the year's end they depart for the United States under the name Havana Cuban Boys, following the split suffered by the orchestra.

After a brief stay in that country, the orchestra travels in 1947 to Europe and the Near East. In December 1950 they return to La Habana to perform with Josephine Baker and Roland Gerbeau at the Teatro América, and to inaugurate TV in Cuba.

In 1951 they travel through South America and in 1952 they return to their homeland, where they do seasons in theaters and cabarets and on alternating tours between South America and Europe they leave performances as memorable as those of 1953-54 at the inauguration of the Tamanaco hotel in Caracas and at the X Conference of Foreign Ministers, held in the Venezuelan capital itself. There they coincide with orchestras like that of Machito and his Afrocubans, that of Xavier Cugat, and the Cuban ones Anacaona and Casino de la Playa. "Festival" on TV.

In 1959 the orchestra was in Europe. In 1961 Oréfiche visits Cuba and later settles as a pianist in Spain. According to a critic who sees him perform at the Madrid discotheque Long Play, "...it seems to one to be in front of a twenty-year-old virtuoso pianist who delights and intoxicates with his art and his songs"

In 1994 Oréfiche is invited to participate in the U.S. in a show of Cuban street vendors called "Si te quieres por el pico divertir." There, encouraged by an audience that applauds him standing, he pays tribute to Lecuona interpreting "El cisne," "Juventud," "Para Vigo me voy," and "Panamá," in addition to the street vendor cries "El frutero," "El dulcero," and "El pulpero."

The ashes of the famous Cuban pianist and composer Armando Oréfiche were scattered in the sea in front of the avenue that he used to travel in the last years of his life.

Oréfiche, a prominent figure in Cuban popular music of the twentieth century, died in Las Palmas on November 24, 2000, victim of aggressive anemia that kept him hospitalized for several weeks.