:|: Conjunto Guantánamo News :|:

Stay tuned right here for news about the ambassadors of Cuban folklore℠, Conjunto Guantánamo. All our news that's fit to print has been archived here since the beginning. Please scroll down to the beginning, read our stories and leave your comments. Do you remember some of these events? Some of these places? Some are no longer around but YOU are! Share your stories in the comments. We love our fans and hope to create more stories with you in the future. 👉 https://linktr.ee/ctoguantanamo

Sunday, November 13, 2011

TAKE PART IN PRODUCING OUR UPCOMING DEBUT ALBUM

This is old news now (originally posted on May 11, 2010) but I'll be updating you here very soon on our debut album project which is turning out spectacularly well. We can't wait to show everyone.

We'll be starting a new KickStarter campaign soon to move production along on the full release. Please pledge whatever amount you can. Receive some great perks (like the band will take YOU out to a great lunch at Superfine or perform at your next party for free!) and help us make this great album project a reality.

Already the first four singles are finished and released on Nganga Records. To hear the first four singles off of the new album -- and download them for free! -- just click here.

Enjoy the new tracks and stay tuned. We have lots more on the way soon!

Ulises, Pepito, Sebastian, Carlos, Mauricio and Oscar

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(Republished from a previous post elsewhere)

Conjunto Guantanamo at Soundworks for Nganga Records

We've finally begun production and sat in the studio last month to begin recording our new debut album. Pepito, Pedro, Sebastian, Mauricio, Oscar and myself laid down the basic tracks to a few new songs that will be going into our new album which we want to have ready by the Fall. We're recording it at Soundworks Recording Studio in Queens with my favorite engineer, Kamilo Kract. I'm so happy to also have my friend the tres player Pablo Moya on as our producer. He did such a great job on our first session the other night. What an ear! Pablo and I are on the same page with our goals for this project so I really expect it to be a great finished product. Look out for our CD release party this fall.

Recently I heard about the Web sight called KickStarter that provides a good way for a band to raise funds for a recording project by having them offer incentives to their fans for pledging donations to the project and making them directly involved in the the final product. To see our project page, please follow this link and take a look - Please click this link to see our project's page on KickStarter. Please pledge as soon as you can because the official deadline to reach our pledge goal is June 15 at 10:00pm EDT. DON'T FORGET, KickStarter has an all or nothing policy which means every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands. Our project will only be funded if we meet our pledge goal by the deadline. KickStarter uses the Amazon Payments system which means if we fail to meet our funding goal in time, our backers pay nothing at all, all pledges are cancelled and that's that.

There are a variety of different pledge levels starting from just $5 so there's probably a level you might want to participate at. Come have fun and be a part of our production team to make this album a reality.

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Saturday, November 21, 2009

AMAZING EXPERIENCE - Week of November 15th to the 21st, 2009

By ULISES BEATO

Last week I went to Cuba on Monday night and had such a great time I went back on Thursday night again. How's that you say? Well, maybe I should be a little more specific. Read on.

Actually, Cuba came to me—Septeto Nacional Ignacio Piñeiro was here all week and I had the extreme pleasure of not only watching them play but I also got to spend time with them, some old mutual friends and some new ones backstage on both nights that I saw them—thanks and a shout-out to "mi consorte", Gabe Romero, who piloted my flight down... stairs that is! It was an experience I will never forget.

Many of my contemporary Latin music colleagues were in attendance as well as a few Latin music stars and celebs including Johnny Pacheco, Ismael Miranda and even that Cuban music fan and record collector, actor Matt Dillon. Hanging out one-on-one with your heroes is always an enlightening experience. This was by no means an exception to the rule.

Later, as I recalled the experience I thought to myself "...wait, here is the band that not only first coined the word ‘Salsa’ in relation to the music, brought us the quintessential tune “Echale Salsita” and also spearheaded many other milestones in traditional Cuban Son.” They are also one of the three or four main bands that re-invented the genre from the ground up. Since Cuban music in turn influenced everything in popular music from North American Jazz to Rock to Reggae and on and on, one can surmise that this original handful of Cuban pioneers influenced virtually all the popular music we hear today in a very profound and long-lasting way.

Septeto Nacional was founded by Ignacio Piñeiro in 1927 on the heels of Septeto Habanero who made the very first recordings of Son in October of the previous year for Victor Records. At this point in time, the early Son ensembles relied merely on the bongo as the main percussion instrument, the claves, güiro, and maracas where also in the mix, but merely as minor percussive accompaniment. The bongosero alone really drove the music with the familiar yet erratic thrust of a powerful locomotive, since at the time, bongo players in Son ensembles had no fixed rhythmic pattern to follow; rather, they would riff independently throughout the entire song.

It was not until after percussionist Agustin Gutierrez, a bricklayer in his day job who in 1929 joined Piñeiro's septet, devised the "martillo" pattern (pronounced mar-tee’-yoh and meaning "hammer") that the bongo had a fixed supporting rhythmic pattern assigned to it. The martillo pattern consists of a steady driving beat or ostinato of eight notes tightly woven around the clave beat with some sporadic riffing here and there as an adornment to the pattern itself. It is at this very point that Son acquires a percussive characteristic different from that of Changüí where the bongo does not adhere to a rigid standardized pattern.

Gutierrez conceived the pattern as a result of the Cuban audiences’ insatiable demand for the new musical genre in the days when their American counterparts indulged in Fox Trot and Ragtime and almost two decades before the addition of the tumbadora (conga drum) to the Son ensemble. The fledgling Son bands of the day still had a small repertoire and started to include Bolero's in their inventory to satisfy the public's unquenchable desire for anything they had to offer. Yet a steady rhythmic pattern on the bongo appeared more appropriate for the slow and sultry Bolero than for the more piquant Son. However, in time, the martillo pattern became permanently associated with Bolero as it eventually did with Son. Today, many years later, the martillo is considered the most fundamental pattern in bongo playing and the basic scheme from which a bongosero's intricate rhythmic vocabulary stems.

Ignacio Piñeiro also composed numerous tunes that are not only considered the most symbolic of the Son genre but familiar to any Cuban or Latin American music fan young and old alike. Besides Echale Salsita Mayeya No Juegues Con Los Santos, El Guanajo Relleno, Suavecito, Esas No Son Cubanas and many in a long list of his compositions have since then become standards of the genre. It is said he wrote over 600 songs in all.

Today, more than 84 years after its inception, the band is in its fourth generation and sounds like it stepped out of a time machine with Eugenio Rodriguez "El Raspa" as the lead singer. Previously, the main singer was none other than Carlos Embale who was, as Juan de Marcos of Afro Cuban All Stars fame once said, “one of the very finest voices to come out of Cuba in the Twentieth Century” and one of my all-time favorite vocalists.

One of the reasons I enjoyed this experience so much was because when you rub elbows with cats like those you receive, as they say in the martial arts world, "secret teachings" that you can't get from a book, record or even a music school for the teachings can only be gained when these cats decide to take you under their wing and share what they know so well. Among so many other things, they told me to keep listening to the old bands and do as they did while just giving it my own flavor when I'm the one playing. "That's how you make this music," they all agreed.

Frank Oropesa "el Matador" who is a friend of my good friend Roman Diaz was especially warm and had much advice to offer me in my musical endeavors. Please check out the blog at a later date for more, as Frank was kind enough to offer me his contact information in Havana and asked me to stay in touch.

See this link for more on this legendary band or look them up on YouTube here.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

CG on FOX's Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay this Fall...

So we were just called up by the production company for Fox TV's Kitchen Nightmares show with Chef Gordon Ramsey. It's a fun reality show where Chef Gordon Ramsay goes in and does a makeover of a different restaurant each episode putting the restaurant crew through the wringer to make each restaurant more successful than before. The show was filming their next season's premiere episode right here in Brooklyn at Mojito Cuban Cuisine.

Conjunto Guantanamo was chosen from the handful of bands that play at Mojito for the filming of the episode's finale. For the end of the episode, they threw a surprise Good Luck party for the restaurant's crew at The Brooklyn Flea Market here in DUMBO last Sunday, May 3rd.

We had fun meeting Chef Ramsey and being filmed for the show. We brought along Afro-Cuban folkloric dancer Rita Macia to show off some moves with our own Pedro Domech. Chef Ramsey told me he loved the band and he really seemed to enjoy our sound. Check out the nice shot above of us (courtesy of photographer David Lukens) with Chef Ramsey and the crew at Mojito.

So look out for the season premiere of Kitchen Nightmares on Fox coming this Fall. Stay tuned for more info here soon.

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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Rockin the House at Gonzales y Gonzales

Conjunto Guantanamo performed at Gonzales and Gonzales again last week and, I must say, the house got thoroughly rocked by us that night, to say the least. We added that young up and comer Papote Jimenez on backup vocals and Segundo Gonzales on minor percussion to complete our sound (as an octet) and it proved to be a great combination. Papote and Pedro Domech complemented each other beautifully on the vocals and Ariacne Trujillo and yours truly joined them on the backup vocals which rounded off so beautifully. The rest of the band played with so much swing and verve we had that packed house shaking their asses non-stop all night. It was so packed it was hard to get to the front door from where the stage is. The G & G crowd really responded to our jam which we recorded and will be posting here in the next few days for you to check out.

STAY TUNED FOR THE LIVE RECORDING OF OUR PERFORMANCE AT G & G here on MySpace.

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Thursday, April 23, 2009

CG at F.I.T.'s Salsa Club

Thanks to Christina Tavarez, and company, of FIT's (Fashion Institute of Technology) Salsa Club for having us for the LASO Salsa Dance event. We enjoyed playing for the students on the school's outdoor terrace and they seemed to really dig the band. Now Conjunto Guantanamo is their official FIT SALSA Club band and we love that!

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Monday, April 13, 2009

WFMU Radio Appearance

😃😃😃😃😃

POSTSCRIPT: Here's the show in its entirety! — Hear the show on WFMU's archives HERE!

😏😏😏😏😏😏

Our appearance on WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise last Saturday was a total blast. The band and the live audience at Barbes had a great time and there was lots of fun had by all.

WFMU (FM 91.1out of West Orange, NJ) has been my favorite radio station ever since I was introduced to it well over a decade ago by some co-workers in Manhattan. WFMU bills itself as a "free form" radio station that's privately owned (one of the few stations to have that (lack of) format. That means they have a tremendously eclectic blend of different formats among the programs they offer. They'll play some weird Garageband track from some polka band from New Jersey one minute and then you'll come back a few minutes later and they'll have some crazy Indian tabla/harmonium ensemble doing their thing next. I've even been introduced to some great Cuban stuff on that station (I heard Los Zafiros on WFMU for the first time years ago and they are still one of my favorite Cuban bands ever!).

So Needless to say, I've wanted for Conjunto Guantanamo to appear on WFMU's airwaves for many years now and it finally happened last Saturday night. It just so happens that Barbes, that extraordinary music venue that also has a super eclectic blend of acts playing every day of the month (and Olivier Conan the owner), has a long-standing relationship with some of the crew at WFMU. Together they've been doing live remote broadcasts right out of Barbes on the Transpacific Sound Paradise program with Rob Weisberg several times a year and Conjunto Guantanamo were invited to appear on this latest episode of the program. We played a whole set live on the air and many of our friends showed up at Barbes for the live taping and many more have told us they tuned in on their radios and PCs. We were able to show off some of our latest numbers including La Rosa Oriental and Coballende to name just a couple.

I will post a link to the episode here as soon as Rob and his peeps put it up for grabs on WFMU's website where it will be available until the end of time (at least that's what they told me).

Stay tuned...

POSTSCRIPT:

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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

What can I say About Barbes?

Ah, Barbès...

What can I say about Barbes? Actually, where do I start explaining what Barbes is about? It's actually the last place you would think, in such a short time since it opened its doors, would become such an important venue for performers in the city. With its tiny size and lack of accommodations, it has a built-in handicap that you'd think would keep it from establishing itself as a place for musicians [to brag about playing at]

But, with nightly performances by so many fine acts from far and wide representing (and quite well I might add) every musical genre under the sun, and with their occasional live radio broadcast on WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise show with, Rob Weisberg, Barbes has firmly established itself on the city's live music circuit as a must-do venue for its area musicians and for the ones passing through, on the level of a Joe's Pub, Zebulon or Nu Blu.

In actuality, I suspect a great deal of Barbes' success is thanks to its illustrious proprietor, Olivier Conan. French by default and a Brooklynite by choice, Olivier has become Brooklyn's musical curator par excellence. Himself the director of the celebrated Chicha Libre and a founding member of Las Rubias Del Norte, he puts together a monthly schedule of a slew of performances by different acts both local and otherwise that is enviable by even some of the most played Manhatten Clubs.

As far as Conjunto Guantanamo playing there, I must say that the audience that Barbes attracts is wholeheartedly enamored with music and appreciate every morsel you layout for them. Some dance and some watch but regardless, we get a good crowd there that makes us feel like we're the last Coca-Cola in the desert.

We look forward to many more gigs there in the near future. Stay tuned.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Making New Friends at Socialista (and feeling star-struck)...

Ulises with Mickey Rourke (Mickey! Gimmie my hat back!)

With Matt Dillon – Matt collects Cuban Music...

...with Sting and Trudie...

Ulises with Sting at Socialista

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Monday, September 8, 2008

An Interview of Mickey Rourke filmed at Socialista

(Written in 2022)

Here's an interesting interview of the actor Mickey Rourke filmed at Socialista during the time that CG was the Tuesday-night house band there. The club had a short lifespan but the memories of the goings-on there are now legendary. Mickey went right on to do The Wrestler around this time when he would go to Socialista to hang out and relax. Originally released Sept 8, 2008.

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Monday, September 1, 2008

Upcoming Radio Opportunities...

Recently, Conjunto Guantanamo have had requests for recorded material by several radio stations both locally and even as far away as Radio Antena Uno in Italy. The requests came in just in time as we are headed into the recording studio even as I write this to lay down some tracks for our new demo disc. That said, everyone please stay tuned for these singles which will be available right here on our MySpace page and on iTunes, and also will hopefully enjoy some airtime on the following radio shows...
Transpacific Sound Paradise with Rob W on WFMU day/time (89.9 FM in NYC)
Jeffry Cobb, also on WFMU (89.9 FM in NYC)

WDNA

Tony V

Radio Antena Uno

A big thanks to these radio show hosts for their interest in our music. Stay tuned. Same Bat-time. Same Bat-channel!

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Monday, June 23, 2008

CG at IKEA's Grand Opening in Red Hook, Brooklyn

One of our Summer highlights was our participation in IKEA Brooklyn's grand opening in Red Hook, Brooklyn. We had a great time all three days that we played and enjoyed all the people from the area that came around to say hi and dance up a storm every single day we played. I have to admit, when they asked us to be ready to start playing by 6am on the first day they opened (Wednesday, June 18), I thought it was kind of strange - that was definitely a first for all of us in the band. But then the day came and there we were at the crack of dawn shaking the roosters out of bed along with about 700 people who had begun camping out two days beforehand hoping to be the first to see the first IKEA in Brooklyn and possibly win themselves a couch or new chair. There were people from everywhere attending the event from Sweden to Puerto Rico and everything in between.

There were several news crews there including FOX and NY1 and a few of our friends called later to say they had seen us on TV. There were also other performers there ready for the week of performance including Jonathan Colton who had actually written a song about IKEA. The organizers had a nice stage set up for us complete with a giant Plasmatron screen where we could see the band playing live. Despite the early call time, over 700 customers and over 600 employees and dignitaries attended.

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Enjoying the SUMMER...

At the risk of doing a little too much name-dropping, we have to tell you who came out to Socialista last Friday night. One of Hollywood's hottest couples by far, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore were in the house enjoying the Cuban vibes. The icing on the cake... Cuba Gooding Jr. was there as well. We will be playing in the restaurant at Socialista tonight which is an easier place for us mere mortals to get into so if you want to come check it out...

Wednesday nights at Little Branch are not half bad either. The cocktails are some of the best in the city, made with super fresh ingredients (and they pack a punch as well), and are cheaper than the refreshments at Socialista at a mere $12.00 a pop. This is a great spot to bring a date and share some intimate moments in one of the little booths. And the fast-acting mixed drinks will help you to muster up the courage to show off your fancy dance moves. See you there...

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Thursday, July 26, 2007

Conjunto Guantanamo is Socialista's House-Band

Thanks so much to everybody who has been coming out and showing support. We have been gigging almost every night of the week to awesome crowds. We are now the house band at Socialista. This new, beautiful West Village hot spot has a real Cuban flavor, with pale green walls, ceiling fans, and high, arched windows. With big-name partners like Sting and Trudie Styler, Ben Silverman, and Harvey Weinstein, they've created a haven for VIPs on the West Side Highway. Sting and Trudie have come out quite a few times to see us and special ordered us over for a few private parties there as well. On two recent occasions, the entire Police were there, and as Stewart Copeland tapped along on his beer bottle, Sting and Trudie danced and checked out Chino's moves.

Mickey Rourke, a Miami Beach native, and a regular at Socialista, likes to practice his Cuban-style Spanish with the band between sets. Actress Leelee Sobieski was dancing quite seductively at a recent gig. Helena Christiensen and Eva Mendez (otra Cubanita) have both enjoyed the music of Conjunto Guantanamo as well.

Two weeks ago, Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio stopped by Socialista. Cameron being of third-generation Cuban descent, was a graceful and delightful dance partner for Chino, who is known for grabbing the most beautiful lady from the crowd, never missing a beat between singing and dancing.

Just this past Monday, Matt Dillon came to hang out and showed off his moves on the dance floor. He told us he loves Cuban music and he asked if we have a CD. We gave him our demo. And for the record, we are working on our debut CD and it should be ready soon. Stay tuned…

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Saturday, October 21, 2006

Performance at the 10th Annual DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival: Death of Dumbo

The Death of Dumbo performance at the 10th annual DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival was a lovely evening of sets by some of the best bands in DUMBO (there are many good ones) including nervous cabaret, Freeloader, and Vial. Conjunto Gantanamo’s set started at 8 PM and we played for 45 minutes. Thanks to everyone who came and danced for us on this balmy night. Many folks told me our sound could be clearly heard all around the neighborhood last night. Please see the photos of us playing under the bridges at the Brooklyn Bridge Park by the East River. What a beautiful backdrop downtown Manhattan made that night. Thanks to Steve for taking those lovely images of us so unexpectedly. Thanks also to THE MAN! Iggy Videgain and Daniel Starling of Vial for putting this event together for all of us to enjoy.

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