BuzzFlash Reviews

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This is the classic DVD that features aging singers of the classic Cuban period, performing incredibly under the direction of Wim Wenders. Ry Cooder initiated the project and contacts in the late '90s that led to this extraordinary musical documentary.

At one time, all the Cuban performers in this DVD played music or sang at a now defunct Havana night club, the Buena Vista Social Club. After it closed, many of them faded into obscurity, until Ry Cooder tracked them down.

If you haven't seen and listened to "Buena Vista Social Club," it's an absolute delight.

As the New Yorker noted when the film came out:

"In 1996, the blues guitarist Ry Cooder gathered together some wonderful Cuban musicians in their seventies and eighties for a successful recording project. Two years later, Cooder went back to Cuba, this time accompanied by cameras and the German director Wim Wenders, seeking out the men and women of Cuban music on the streets and in the old dance halls of Havana. In this beautiful city that got left behind by the global economy, the bedraggled stone buildings and pre-revolutionary Chevys and Dodges have aged into pure soulfulness. So have the musicians, who still look great, play beautifully, and exude a stirring seriousness and dignity. The movie comes closer to pure happiness than anything else in the theatres at the moment."

A DVD that you can watch again and again just for the soulful, Cuban music.

An online reviewer praises the film:

I could have stayed to watch Buena Vista Social Club all day and all night. The film traces master guitarist Ry Cooder's seemingly endless search for more musical legends to play with, as he takes us to Cuba to meet the masters of "Son" music. The result is a warm, beautiful and touching portrait of the aging "Son" masters emerging from a long hiatus to show us they haven't lost their touch.
Cooder has long sought out masters of "roots" music to learn from and play with. This time he found his way into a diamond mine, and the resulting three albums, "Buena Vista Social Club", "Afro-Cuban All-Stars" and "Introducing Ruben Gonzales" could all have won the 1998 Grammy award, as the former actually did.

The film follows the aging Son musicians around their native Cuba as they prepare for overseas concerts in both Holland and New York City. The city of Havana shows the effects of aging itself, run down and seedy, but, as with the musicians themselves, there is a spirit of unity and inner strength that overrides the worn down facade. That spirit emerges quickly as you see how deeply the Cubans feel their music. You also see a country that preserves the old and makes it work personified in the "antique" automobiles the Cubans use to get around.

BuzzFlash note: "The Buena Vista Social Club" introduces us to a lost part of Havana's musical culture, and also reminds us of what we are missing by being prohibited from engaging in open cultural exchange with the people of that island.

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