Buena Vista Social Club
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Buena Vista Social Club is the name shared by a ensemble of elderly Cuban musicians recruited by Ry Cooder in 1996 to play traditional (read "Pre-Revolution") Cuban music, their eponymous first album, released in 1997, and the 1999 documentary on the group by German director Wim Wenders. The band was named after the social club most of the musicians played between 1940 and 1960.
The story on how the band went to be goes thus: Ry Cooder had been invited to Havana, Cuba, by British world music producer Nick Gold of World Circuit Records to record a session in which African musicians from Mali were to collaborate with Cuban musicians, but while waiting in Mexico for the flight they were informed that the Mali musicians couldn't make it due to visa reasons, so to not waste the travel they decide to record an album of traditional son cubano instead. Once in Havana, they quickly assembled a group of what turned out to be legendary son, danzón, mambo and bolero musicians from The Thirties to The Fifties, many of them having been forgotten even in Cuba after the social changes brought by the Cuban Revolution closed their usual music stages and made their musical styles passé. Once in the studios, they got into such a level of synergy that they completed their intended album in six days, with still enough material for an album dedicated to the pianist Rubén González and numerous tracks that didn't make the cut. The album went in a surprise success, selling a million units on its year of release and earning the Grammy for Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album in 1998.
Wenders made the documentary as a way to make Cooder concentrate into the soundtrack on the film they were working at the time, The End of Violence, piqued by his friend interest by the musicians' recordings and the surprise success of the album. The film showed the reunion of the group, the recording of an album by the group members, two abroad concerts with the full lineup of the album (including their legendary one in Carnegie Hall in 1998), and the reactions of the elderly musicians to all of the above.
The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2020
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- Culture Shock: Many of the elderly musicians have never been out of Cuba, and none of them have been ever in the United States, so they were understandably awed on the travvel portions of the film
- Rockumentary
- Title Track: "Buena Vista Social Club".