Tribute to the Cuarteto Patria

Unlike most of the other stars of Buena Vista Social Club, Eliades Ochoa wasn't whiling away his time in retirement when Ry Cooder sought him out. Throughout the 1990s, Ochoa was busy releasing albums of campesino music, the rural cowboy style of eastern Cuba whose potency owes little to the current nostalgic revival. The campesino son never really went out of date, though it's been eclipsed the past half-century by urban big band genres. Ochoa's combination of an incredibly affable voice and stinging tres solos makes for the most exciting guitar ensemble sound around, and the variety and bright arrangements of Tribute to the Cuarteto Patria leave his first post-Social Club release, Sublime Ilusion, in the dust. Highlights include "No Quiero Celos," which develops into a descarga jam session that fades out in the midst of wonderful trumpet work. "Yiri Yiri Bon" marries a memorable short chorus to a slow buildup of intensity in the manner of the Social Club's "El Cuatro de Tula," a song first heard on Ochoa's 1993 CD with Cuarteto Patria, A una Coqueta. "Casa de la Trova," a tribute to a legendary music club in Santiago de Cuba, begins on a pastoral note until Ochoa's fiery solos and an ecstatic chorus blow the lid right off the cloud cover. Take that, city dwellers! --Bob Tarte