World Premiere of Unreleased Buena Vista Social Club Song Performed by Eliades Ochoa and Compay Segundo

June 10, 2021

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Buena Vista Social Club, the World Circuit record label announced the details of the special editions that will be available starting September 17th and released the unreleased "Vicenta" on digital platforms, with its respective video available on YouTube, extracted from the original 1996 session tapes.

The special edition, which includes the original album remastered by Grammy-winning engineer Bernie Grundman, will also include songs that were recorded in those sessions but had never been released, some conceived as repertoire suggestions, others spontaneous improvisations in the studio, in addition to other gems that promise to live up to the original album recorded in just seven days in Havana.

It will also bring notes, photographs, unreleased lyrics, a biography and other texts about the scope of Buena Vista Social Club's work, as well as a special one dedicated to the legendary Havana Club. As a preview, the record company released "Vicenta" on all digital platforms, a vocal duet between Buena Vista featuring Eliades Ochoa and Compay Segundo.

The song—composed by Compay Segundo—tells the story of a well-known fire that on April 1, 1909 destroyed almost the entire town of La Maya, near Santiago de Cuba, where the Cuban singer and guitarist was born and lived as a child among banana, coffee and cocoa plantations, according to an announcement.

The official history tells that on March 26, 1996, the trio formed by Cuban orchestra director Juan de Marcos González, American producer and guitarist Ry Cooder and producer and owner of the British record label Nick Gold brought together an improvised group of Cuban musicians in the historic Egrem / Areito studios from the 1950s in Centro Havana.

Most of those gathered were celebrated veterans from the golden age of the Cuban musical scene of the forties and fifties and none of them had any idea that the recordings they were about to produce would change the lives of many people, including themselves, and would forever transform the position of Cuban music in the world. "The Buena Vista boys fly high and never lose a feather. If you miss the boat this time, you'll have the blues forever," said Cooder, 25 years after those sessions.

In that sense, Juan de Marcos González assured that "it probably was the most important album of Cuban music in the late twentieth century, and definitely the one that reopened the doors to international recognition of 'Son Cubano'": "Twenty-five years later I can still feel the positive vibrations from the studio and, of course, the pleasure of having contributed in some measure to the album that rescued my country's music and many of its great performers from the shadows," he added. Gold, for his part, said about those sessions that they were something "unique in the life of Cuban music at its best transcendental moment" and that "the magic created in that studio sounds as vital and beautiful today as it did 25 years ago".

Finally, Eliades Ochoa noted that Buena Vista Social Club brought "traditional Cuban music to the rest of the world" and that it allowed him to become known internationally for the "sones, guarachas and boleros that I was doing when I was young". "It also allowed me to reconnect with musicians whom I admired. Buena Vista united us through music and we were a well-directed family.

On this 25th anniversary, we will remember with well-deserved pride those great legends who will always be present among us. We will celebrate with joy the legacy of Buena Vista Social Club and traditional Cuban music," he concluded.