2024-05-07 21:09:26
Photos: Jorge Luis Borges
Text: Editorial Cuba Noticias 360
In 2017 Cimafunk released his first album Terapia in which he distributed intensity and originality in equal parts. It was a melting pot of Cuban music, with influences of funk and jazz, which had a recognizable impact on the present of local music. His intentions were clear: to recapture the strength and richness of sound deep in the country’s cultural history and return it to the present with universalist airs.
Terapia is an album that suddenly placed him among young Cuban musicians with a very interesting proposal due to its evident rhythmic dialogues with stylistic closeness to the most traditional American music. Topics such as Me voy, Paciente, Parar el tiempo or Ponte pa’ lo tú, delivered the generous letters of introduction of this artist who revitalized, adapted to his creative desires and stimulated the freedom of the mixture of Cuban music and new forms of develop it that has characterized the recent generations of instrumentalists and composers of the archipelago.
For more than three years he was presenting the songs from the album on Cuban and international stages. In the United States she gained a not inconsiderable number of followers for her work and her followers served to articulate the Cuban community around the most recent proposals of music cooked on the island. In her rise to the peaks of popularity, she also won the affections of transcendent figures such as the Spanish Alejandro Sanz and the Argentine Fito Páez. With Sanz she shared two concerts that she offered in the cities of New York and Miami as part of her new tour of the United States. And with Fito she took the stage on one of the most memorable nights of the Gibara Poor Film Festival.
His power of expression has been one of his greatest trump cards, something that is also evident in the new production he has just released to break three years of recording silence. This is the Cun Cun Prá EP, a material with which he continues to show his eagerness to experiment with different rhythmic proposals that have as a common trait his interest in creating lines of connection between the culture of the island and its vast layer of international influences.
On the EP there are 5 songs that are based on pop, jazz, funk, and Cuban popular music. Highlights include cuts from the “La Papa” category, performed alongside Diana Fuentes; The Potage; a version of Parar el tiempo, and Caliente, a song that he premiered with a concert at the Salón Rosado de la Tropical during the last International Jazz Festival in Havana.
The recording of Caliente with the musicians of the band from the American city of New Orleans and the singer Tarriona Bell, leader of the group Tank and the Bangas, is another of the obvious successes of this album.
In the course of the song, Cimafunk hones his effervescent and sharp sound language with a well-woven delivery that joins that waste of intensity and energy of the Americans. Finally, one listens to the song and perceives without difficulty how everyone adapts to a sound discourse in such a way that they seem to be children of the same cultural identity.
Cun Cun Prá and Potaje are other songs that ask for a track so that the public can fully enjoy this glamorous party that worships the most pulsating fusion concepts and the historical journey of Cuban music.
Stopping time is a theme that does not demand greater demands from him or from Diana Fuentes, who also shares with Cimafunk the capacity for seduction that he achieves with the public through his staging.
The Cuban musician, born in the province of Pinar del Río, in western Cuba, has not hidden his expectations with this EP that serves as a preamble to the album he will publish in the middle of next year.
“It is a material with rhythms close to the Caribbean and 80s disco music. It comes with different sounds and other textures. I am very satisfied with the result of this material. I hope everyone likes it like I do. I am full of desire to return to the stage and show all my music and new songs. I hope it will be very soon,” Cimafunk said exclusively to Cuba News 360.
There is no exact date for a Cimafunk concert in Cuba after the impasse in shows and other cultural proposals due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, the audience is already waiting to discover everything new it has to offer to feel live those vibrations that it launches from the stage and move even the most imperturbable of mortals. Meanwhile, the #cuncunprachachallenge initiated by Cuban actress Camila Arteche is being positioned on the networks.