Pedro Luis Ferrer: One Hundred Percent Cuban

August 3, 2018

Nephew of educator Raúl Ferrer and one of his most outstanding students, the troubadour has given form to themes that have been treasured as essential by that faithful audience that has followed him for decades at his concerts.

I was a child when I first heard Pedro Luis Ferrer. I think it was in a Radio Taíno spot that had as its background a very brief passage from one of his songs. During the first years of adolescence I suddenly entered the world of rock and roll at the preuniversity "Raúl Cepero Bonilla" and I had no further news by any means of this musician until much later. It was not, fortunately, on another radio spot, but at a concert that I arrived at almost by chance in the late 90s in the Avellaneda room of the National Theater, where I could gauge the magnitude of this Cuban musician, one of the great troubadours that this country has produced in the last forty years.

Pedro Luis Ferrer (Yaguajay, September 17, 1952) has been a composer who has decided to live by his own rules. And on that complex path he has not stopped being that troubadour who with acuity, intelligence, irony and fine Creole humor has embodied in his songs his particular vision of the country he inhabits and of that island that he too has been throughout his long career. Nephew of educator Raúl Ferrer and one of his most outstanding students, the troubadour has given form to themes that have been treasured as essential by that faithful audience that has followed him for decades at his concerts.

The troubadour has been a musician surrounded by legends. His concerts, aside from an excellent encounter with one of the weightiest works of Cuban music, are an authentic class on the tradition and evolution of the island's sound traditions. As he performs his themes, he recounts anecdotes from his travels, from his origins in the Cuban countryside, from his dreams and shipwrecks as if he were a kind of Onelio Jorge Cardoso of the trova, and he speaks about rhythms that sustain the towers of reason of Cuban music. Anyone who has been to his presentation at least once—something that no follower of good music should miss—will have seen him magnificently reviewing the history of changüí, of guaracha and of every musical genre born on this land that he knows like no one else.

The trajectory of this minstrel still needs to be told in full in Cuban music. His lyrics, his music, tell the small and sometimes difficult stories within other stories and reflect the everyday dramas of the common man, that is, of all of us, who have seen how the troubadour portrays us as if we were part of his life. Pedro Luis Ferrer, perhaps many don't know it, gave free rein to his first youthful impulses when in the 70s he joined as vocalist the band Los Dada along with Mike Pourcel, among other musicians, a lineup that set the tone on the Cuban rock scene and did so at a time when this genre was beginning to make waves in its effort to take hold among young people.

Recently I wrote that the musician from Spiritus sometimes sings as if he had to relieve his soul or give sound to solitude. And he does it in that kind of internal struggle that, for the better, inhabits him, although at his concerts he always greets his followers with a broad smile. But in his home studio in La Víbora, where several of his most substantial pieces have been recorded, he finds himself alone with what he has become and knows that, for him, it is a matter of survival to translate all the experiences that wring his heart into songs that should have been promoted in the media without any major headaches.

The troubadour, at 66 years old, is in top form. I verified this recently during a concert he gave at the National Museum of Fine Arts as part of the festival Dance in Urban Landscapes, organized by Isabel Bustos. There, accompanied by his daughter Lena Ferrer, among other musicians, he again spoke jokingly about very serious things that weigh on the nature of Cubans and as always was applauded by an audience that respects him, follows him and thanks him for continuing to sing as always and giving, like a wise teacher, essential lessons on Cuban music, those that, sooner rather than later, would contribute to broadening the perspective of so many young people who go to see him to listen to everything he has to say and demonstrate that in small spaces there are many who still seek music that moves their mind and the compass of sound education in another direction.

There are countless songs that he has placed almost in silence in the history of Cuban musical culture. Artificial Insemination, Fundamento, He Has Delirium of Loving Men, How I Like to Speak Spanish and The Afternoon Has Become Sad, are just some of the themes recorded on the phonograms One Hundred Percent Cuban, Pedro Luis Ferrer, In Foam and Sand, Rustic, Natural, Tangible, and Final, among others, and that have passed from generation to generation as true anthems of a musician who knew how to assert himself and takes advantage of each concert to bear witness that his work is updated with time and that with more than five decades of career the rules under which he decided to live have not changed in the slightest for him. And the audience, down below, thanks him as only the life of a man who has been sincere with them and with his time is thanked. And nothing more.