Americanto's first album
Silvio Rodriguez and Noel Nicola "Cuba Canta"
The first existing recording of Silvio Rodriguez and Noel Nicola together was from a concert during Siete Dias Con el Pueblo/7 Days with the People at “Casa de Teatro” in 1974 in The Dominican Republic.
ET: Bernardo, Can you tell us a little about how you came to make this album?
Bernardo Palombo: Enrequito de Leon and Cholo Brenes gave me a bag full of cassettes and told me, "we need one or two LP's from this." I didn't have any idea how to make an LP and after many failures in two or three recording studios, I was lucky to find Tony Rodriguez, at Opal Studio (54th Street - next to the infamous Studio 54). Tony got interested in the material and the next challenge was to select which part of the concert was going to be used: the old LP's only allowed about twenty-seven minutes per side. The hard part was to extract, not just the music, but to preserve the essence of Silvio's and Noel's communication with the audience.
There is a precious moment when Noel Nicola thanks the audience for the ovations he receives after singing "Maria del Carmen", a song you could consider romantic more than revolutionary. He said "Esto para vean que tambien hacemos canciones de amor...porque todas son canciones de amor."(This is so you can see that we can do love songs too, because they are all love songs) And here, he defines la "Nueva Trova", which was different than the protest songs of Chile, et al. ("...a real revolutionary is guided by feelings of love." Che Guevara). The Nueva Trova expanded the meaning of the protest song and in some way erased the lines between the categories of song all together: romatic, political, intimate, personal.
For me the best work of that album, in addtion to the musicality of the performers, was the way that it was cut. The way we were able to get the feel of what it was like to be there, the way that the performers and audience connected.