• artist:
  Ska Cubano
• country:
  Cuba
• release year:
  2004
• style(s): Cuban Ska
• formats:
  • CD (Compact Disc)
• record submitted by:
  MFI-Casinosounds
• label:
  casinosounds

Skip into a parallel universe where the hottest musical development is Ska Cubano, the meshing of unstoppable Jamaican rhythms with crazy Cuban brass.

Ska! The compulsively danceable sound that rocked the clubs of Jamaica in the late '50's and early '60's and opened the way for world domination by reggae. (Bob Marley and his Wailers started life as a ka band.)

Cuba! The most musical country on earth, the source of a large part of the great Latin music of the last century and of many of the world's hottest popular musicians.

Put them together and you get an exhilarating fusion: irresistible rhythm plus soaring flights of melodic imagination.

The triumph of the Cuban Revolutio in 1959 sharply reduced Cuban/Jamaican cultural interaction and although earlier Jamaican traditions were preserved in isolated pockets, ska never took root in Cuba in the 1960's

The emergence of Ska Cubano is therefore the creation of alternative cultural history. The mission was led by Peter Scott of casinosounds and Natty Bo of London ska band, "Top Cats", who went to Santiago de Cuba, the Caribbean capital of the east (oriente) of Cuba and the cradle of almost all the best Cuban music, to preach ska.

After several visits, ska culture was established in Santiago, with great new arrangements of Cuban classics and bands performing to a growing following. The cream of the musicians then came together to perform a ska supergroup, Ska Cubano, and to record this copacetic first album.