Havana, March 2 (RHC)-- Cuban tres guitar player Pancho Amat prepares the release of a new musical production to mark 50 years of artistic life.
Entitled ‘Memorias’ (Memoirs), the new album will include 10 tunes, half of them instrumentals, with Amat himself playing the tres guitar, charango, cuatro, bandola and cavaquinho.
Memorias proposes a journey around all the sonorities, genres and styles performed by Pancho Amat since his beginnings in the early 1970s when he was a member of the Cuban iconic group Manguaré. Also included are genres typical of Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, as well as changüí, nengon –a regional genre from Guantánamo province, which gave birth to Cuban son and Cuban contradanza --known outside Cuba as the habanera.
Five of the songs included in the new album speak about Latin American reality, among them one dedicated to Puerto Rico entitled ‘Que canten los que comieron.’
Another track entitled ‘La Fiesta de San Benito-A bailar nengón’, mixes traditional Cuban son with Bolivian rythms.
Also included in the new album is the track ‘Te esperaré’ (I’ll wait for you), released on social media some months ago. Co-authored by Amat and poet Héctor Gutiérrez and featuring singer María Victoria Rodríguez, it is a tribute to Cuban health professionals, particularly the members of Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade, who are on the front lines fighting the Covid-19 pandemic in countries all over the world.
Also included in the new musical production is the track ‘Un son para mi Habana’, released in November 2019 on the 500th anniversary of the Cuban capital.
Pancho Amat and his group Cabildo del Son have joined the campaign of concerts online launched jointly by the Cuban Music Institute, the Ministry of Culture and the Radio and Television Institute in times of Covid-19.
Pancho Amat has also used the time of necessary isolation imposed by the current pandemic to offer tres guitar lessons online to students from around the world.
Regarding this new musical production, Pancho Amat thanked a group of other renowned musicians for their collaboration, among them bassist Gastón Joya, flutist Orlando Valle “Maraca”, pianist Emilio Morales, clarinet player Javier Salva and violinist Irving Frontela.
