The Faults of Frank Delgado

August 4, 2019

Nostalgia, melancholy, and at times, sublimity. Authentic, optimistic and grateful for the life he lived because he chose it and because it makes him happy, Frank strolls across the stage, from one side to the other, not knowing for certain what to do with his bare hands, without his guitar and without having his ideas in a predetermined order. He yearns, hums, laughs, observes, inquires… and enjoys those three hours as if they were the last ones he would have in this world and as if those sitting there, in front of him, had no other option but to listen to him.

They can all leave, those born in the 60s and those born three decades later. No one forces them to stay in front of him, dressed in black, wearing a hat and sharing that provocative dialogue from a distance. However, no one leaves because the former want to remember and the latter want to know what Cuba was like that they never knew and how his life has been and what happened in Angola and why it took so long for him to record his first album…and to sing, yes, also to sing.

I didn't know that I could have known him as Chico Gil, or as Frank D'Max, or with any other stage name that was proposed to him years ago, when he was carving out his own space as a troubadour. I also didn't know that he missed the pickled vegetables of the Havana carnivals so much and that his muse, the first one, is named Isabel. But it doesn't matter if one knows much or little, or if one day, all at once, he wants to tell us everything. What matters is that the soul and the body and the memory vibrate when they tell us something, and if there is music, what matters is that upon hearing it, we feel that despite everything, we will reach somewhere.

Frank Delgado's turn comes, then, to bear the guilt. Yes, because it was he who came up with the idea of returning to Teatro El Sótano to celebrate 40 years of his artistic life every Wednesday of this summer and to present himself "As himself" in a show that combines his charisma with the basic scenic codes of every artist who respects himself. For having that idea, once a week is not enough (and he must have already noticed) for everyone who wants to get in to be able to. Thanks to him, many traveled through time and discovered that they shared his experiences and felt sadness because they are no longer the same. Because of him, others like me grow sad not having known what no longer exists, and it troubles us not to have the solution at hand to bring it back….

He is guilty of having wanted to play "in this kind of minstrel therapy," that we were left wanting to know what happened after 1995, when his first album, Trovatur, came to light. I blame him for having been so sincere and for finding out things that, perhaps because of distant references, didn't seem believable to us. And of course, the greatest of all his faults is making me believe, without telling me, that one day I could invite him to sit on my wide porch (without announcing to him that he won't resist coming back) to tell me everything else, just like that, as he himself is, without tricks or affectations. I like knowing him guilty because I know that he assumes those faults gladly.