"CARIBE" - Ana Carla Maza (Cuba/Spain)

• artist:Ana Carla Maza (Cuba/Spain)
• region:Barcelona
• release year:2024
• style(s):Latin
• country:Cuba
• formats:Audio File / Digital
• record posted by:ACM Global Music Publishing
• label:ACM Global Music Publishing
• publisher:ACM Global Music Publishing
•   buy this record

Links

• SPOTIFY

Cuban composer, cellist and singer, Ana Carla Maza makes a freedom-fulfilling musical reconnection to her Havana upbringing and Latin American roots with the release of Caribe. Self-produced and featuring a brass heavy sextet, it’s a throwback to the Afro-Cuban descarga jams of the 1950s with plentiful and joyful paths to the rumbas of the Caribbean, the tangos of Argentina and flirts with Brazilian bossa-jazz and samba.
​
With over 150 concerts performed in 2022, following her second album Bahia, Ana Carla’s immersion in her music is, and has always been, absolute (and starting from a very young age). In Caribe, she has thrown caution to the wind, and unlike her previous solo work has solar-powered her songbook, and brought together a Latin jazz band, allowing her to re-colour and patch together her joyful memories of growing up, during the late 1990s, in the wildly exuberant city of Havana. It was a seismic time for the city that had a profound affect on Ana Carla, as a worldwide craze for boleros and cha cha cha had taken hold, following the momentous popularity of the Buena Vista Social Club music and film.
Caribe is a record that was conceived, written and recorded ‘on the road’, on a plane trip to Mexico, by the shores of Lake Annecy, from a castle in Portugal - a predictable and perfect creative method to match Ana Carla’s lightning energy and restless philosophy to life and music. She has grouped a tremendous set of musicians to reflect this fresh, Latin chapter; A Guadeloupean drummer Arnauld Dolmen, two Cubans, percussionist Luis Guerra and saxophonist/flautist Irving Acao, Norman Peplow, a German who loves Honduras on piano, a Frenchman from the south called Fidel Fourneyron on trombone, and Noé Clerc on accordion. And of course, Ana Carla on cello and the lead voice of this special love-letter.
​
Classically trained, Ana Carla took her first musical steps growing up in the ever-reverberating ‘rumbero’ district of Guanabacaoa, Havana. She vividly remembers looking out of her much-loved Grandmother’s lounge window and listening to and observing Afro-Cuban ceremonial music and ritual (Santería), which took place in the opposite building. At 5 years old , her mother (Mirza Sierra, director of a children’s choir) and father (Carlos Maza, jazz composer and instrumentalist) introduced her to the piano with the help of Miriam Valdés, sister of the living legend Chucho Valdés. She plucked her first cello string at 8 years old when the cello outsized her, and it would become the instrument that she would call her own.
​