Frank Delgado

Frank Delgado is a Cuban singer-songwriter and member of the Nueva Trova movement. On his Facebook page he describes himself as a Modern Minstrel, Traditional Troubadour, and Singer-Songwriter who plays with classical rock & roll flair, all the way to the most pure and danceable Cuban son.

He was born in Minas de Matahambre, Pinar del Río, on October 19, 1960. He studied hydraulic engineering.

During the 1980s he participated in all the fixed and temporary venues of Nueva Trova. Since the 1990s, his work has maintained a constant and ascending trajectory, as evidenced by his performances at the National Theater of Cuba.

More than two hundred cities in countries across Africa, Europe, and Latin America have enjoyed the recitals of this itinerant troubadour. He has also shared stages with Silvio Rodríguez, Luis Eduardo Aute, Daniel Viglietti, Juan Carlos Baglietto, Fito Páez and of course, his Cuban generational colleagues such as Santiago Feliú, Carlos Varela, and Gerardo Alfonso.

His music has traveled throughout Cuba and the world in frequently informal ways.

Although he is followed by many generations and youth in general, he has an audience that holds special loyalty to him, not only for his interpretation considered quintessentially Cuban and pleasing to the ear, but for his intelligent compositions and because, as he calls himself, he is a "committed singer."

Official Albums
Trova - Tur (1995)
La Habana Está de Bala (1997)
El Adivino (1999)
Mi Mapa (2004)
... pero, qué dice el coro? (2006)
Extremistas Nobles (2010) (with Buena Fe)
Ustedes los trovadores no saben na' de la vida (2012)
Más (2016)

Other Compilations
Sonríete Sin Malicia (1993)
En México (1994)
Un Buen Lugar (1996)
Trucho (1999)
Concierto Inmigrante a Media Jornada (1999)
A guitarra limpia (2000)
Otras canciones (2002)
En cuerdas para cuerdos (2004)

His songs, although based on various themes, insist on critiquing the daily problems of Cuba and the common Cuban. His own words are: "I don't know how to make a country but I do know how not to make one."

Among all his work, one of the most famous songs is "La otra orilla," referring to the American shore of Miami.

"They say Trova is dead…" but those who speak this way do not know this gentleman with a contradictory surname; they forget that constancy that has made him indispensable; they do not take into account a trajectory built on clean guitar for more than a quarter century, with that authenticity that can only be achieved by loving the art of troubadour song and committing to it to the marrow.

Throughout this time Frank Delgado has remained faithful to his stance as a modern minstrel, even when the premises that inspired the Nueva Trova Movement, to which he belonged since 1979, have fallen into disuse for most: a sign that labels neither suit him nor concern him…fortunately.

Frank is, first and foremost, a troubadour of essences. A profound connoisseur of diverse areas of Cuban musical creation, he is also not unaware of what happens in the rest of the world. His work is a crucible where chacareras and guajiras combine, some blues, guarachas, guaguancó, reggae, boleros, tangos, pop touches and son, above all that, much son.

As nothing human is foreign to him he employs what interests him from Anglo-Saxon rock and declares himself in debt to Brazilian tropicalism. Such sonic promiscuity serves him to season his songs by defining what early in his avatars as a troubadour was an identifiable style.

He likes to mix his compositions with those of authors such as Silvio Rodríguez, Pedro Guerra, Santiago Feliú, Joaquín Sabina, Alberto Tosca, Charly García, Pepe Ordaz, Chico Buarque, Alfredo Carol, Rubén Blades, Sindo Garay, Jorge Fandermole, Manuel Corona, Joan Manuel Serrat, Virulo, León Gieco, Miguel Matamoros; songs from (almost) all eras and latitudes, from Credence Clearwater Revival's "Cotton Field" to Manuel Luna's "La cleptómana," which he has been performing in the most eclectic of places: in trenches and great theaters, from Cochabamba to Miami, from Galicia to the Flores neighborhood, from Luanda to Guadalajara, from the Casona del Conde Palermo to the homes of Consuelo and Rafael, Gretchen and Jean Marc.

At this point one must think of Frank as one of the Cuban singer-songwriters who has best incorporated into his creative discourse the chronicle, more generational than social, while maintaining an eminently urban character. Using the first person singular he has managed to portray and portray himself (that is: portray us). Common episodes and characters from our daily lives are skillfully captured, worked with decontextualization and fine irony, a certainly corrosive humor and a sharp and caustic verb, like a whip with bells and bongos. In such a way, in the same text political revelry and the epic of the marginal join hands, serious post-modern intellectuality and scatological laughter, amorous intimacy and the dissection of a changing and contradictory social environment: that is, painful.

When he resorts to appropriations he refers to cultural codes parading in a motley collective Konchalovski, the Dandys de Belén, Benedetti, Sodom and Gomorrah, Subcomandante Marcos, Simone de Beauvoir, Brassens, Kundera, Lydia Cabrera, and Bob Dylan.

There is also that erotic component that connects with traditional creole roguishness, as in the series of his invention called "difficult loves" where songs such as "Embajadora del sexo," "Pornorromance," "El mejor palo," "Pupy (mattress name)," "Utopías" and others are inscribed.

A devotee of free love, he uses the most torrid bedroom situations to reflect on social circumstances of lights and shadows, combining both messages.

In open disagreement with the hackneyed phrase that says that in life one is "at 20 years old, incendiary; and at 40, fireman," his songs (today as yesterday) continue to leave no stone unturned. They address fundamental themes, put their finger on the wound, confront us with constant questioning, elude rhetoric and that excessive formalism that weighs down the works of so many singer-songwriters who confuse the stage with a pulpit.

Frank is among those who believe that human improvement begins (re)knowing what is messed up in the world…and the world begins in our own home.

While the debate continues about whether or not the universality of artistic work, the globalizing conditions that mark today's art, and the search for a national stamp, Frank Delgado writes songs that know how to reach another listener. For some, he sins of localism by reflecting very particular realities and experiences of the Cuba that we have had to live ("Coppelia," "Río Quibú," "Cadena paladar," "Gallego," "Viaje a Varadero"), but immediacy and direct connection to a historical context are more than necessary options in fulfilling an important social function.

In this regard, I consider that some of his lyrics are, simply, fundamental, regardless of whether they illustrate his personal vision of phenomena such as the Angola war ("Veterano"), the figure of Ché ("Con la adarga al brazo," "Si el Ché viviera"), and successive waves of emigration ("La otra orilla," "El Adivino," "La Farándula Habanera"), all treated with that tone of anguish that touches sensibilities and provokes shared resonance, putting neurons and the heart to work.

Indifferent to market forces and even to the collusion of some institution or more or less powerful patron, the troubadour has carved out a place for himself through determination, respecting the bohemian and free connotation of music. His themes are not usually blessed by broadcast (despite having appeared in the repertoires of Mezcla, Xiomara Laugart, Mayohuacán or Issac Delgado) and circulate among a brotherhood of unconditional followers, while producing dandruff attacks in censors, frightened by that song become a piercing-sharp instrument against negligence, bureaucratism, double morality, manichaeism, and taboos. Those are the same suspicious ones, incapable of understanding that behind (and in front of) each critical phrase directed at what the singer understands should be pointed out, there is a vote of unavoidable permanence ("I decided at my own risk and expense to stay here on this shore"). Nevertheless, his performances convene thousands of people who disregard this absurd censorship and identify with the troubadour, overflowing venues and singing those same songs that don't play on the radio.

His discographic recordings compile songs from diverse periods, grouped by the common denominator of his author's circumstantial expressive need, rather than based on labored dramaturgy or marketing maneuvers. As a general rule they are taken from concerts and recitals, which guarantees a high level of spontaneity, where interaction with the public plays an important role.

In 1996 the Mutis label (Argentina) puts "Trovatur" into circulation, inaugurating an official discography that until that moment had been nourished only by scattered recordings without a specific conceptual thread, and inclusions in compilations with other artists. It was followed by "La Habana está de bala" (1998, Nuestra América, Argentina) and "El adivino" (2001, Picap, Spain, Music Hause, USA) up to "Mi mapa" (2004).

However, one would have to add music composed for theater ("Falsa alarma," by Virgilio Piñera) and film ("Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas," "Monte Rouge," "High Tech"), so that we are in the presence of an accidental discography, difficult to recover, scattered across half the world, just as Frank Delgado's own songs are spread by word of mouth.

Vocally he has a certain nasal accent typical of son singers, perceptible especially when he dedicates himself to improvising in the montunos, but also when he does an excellent second voice.

His way of guitar playing, avoiding excessively trite harmonies but without pretending a display of virtuosity, manages to instill an organic accompaniment. While it is becoming clear that he prefers to perform alone with his instrument, he has also worked with musicians such as Julián Fernández, Yoriel Carmona, Elmer Ferrer and his band, Dayron Ortega, Adrián Berazaín, or the fruitful experience with the Duo Síncopa, in addition to sharing vocals with Gunila, Erick Sánchez, or the legendary Carlos Embale. He even ended up joining that science fiction adventure of maintaining his own group (Cuerpo de Guardia) in the early 90s.

He does not hesitate across generations and can be seen alternating equally with recognized figures and newcomers to trova. However, in this facet there must be a separate point with the legendary quartet that united him, for life, to Santiago Feliú, Gerardo Alfonso, and Carlos Varela in the mid-1980s. This association remained in the affective memory of a generation that heard the irreverence musicalized by these four musketeers of Cuban trova. Their recitals, a true revelation for the time, were gusts of committed poetry and street guitars, a transfer of human energies with something also of that naivety that led us to believe the world was edible and blue. The dream was shared in all its intensity, and when the inevitable (friendly) rupture came and each one clung to his life raft, Frank did too, but continued singing the songs of others. He still does.

That same vocation for promoting the work of others led him to design one of the radio projects that made history in the diffusion of trova: El Salón de los Juglares, broadcast on Radio Ciudad de La Habana in the early years of the last decade. All those who made this type of song passed through that program, from the consecrated and historic ones to those just beginning; from Pablo Milanés to Raúl Ciro, from Athanai to Eusebio Delfín. Demo tapes and discs, homemade and professional recordings, were part of the concept proposed with each broadcast, along with clarifying comments always conceived from knowledge and identification. It had what mattered: it communicated. But just as it happens with things that come from the soul, it disappeared one bad day to deprive us of that facet of his.

Frank Delgado assumes traditions to subvert them. More than schematic reverence and idolatry by decree, he is interested in confrontation: an indispensable nutrient for any work of art that respects itself. He is a sybarite dedicated to living by and from song, a troubadour in search of some singular map, a hydraulic engineer who decided to break dikes instead of building them, using only his guitar and voice as detonators.

Since then he became one of those indispensable ones that Brecht mentioned. These first 25 years of artistic trajectory attest to that.