Compay Segundo

Compay Segundo, the professional name of Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz Telles, ranks among the most enduring figures of Cuban son and trova, a performer whose career bridged the acoustic string traditions of early-twentieth-century Oriente and the worldwide revival of vintage Cuban music at the century's close.^[1] Born in 1907 in the village of Siboney near Santiago de Cuba and dying in Havana in 2003, he embodied a span of nearly a hundred years across which the son travelled from rural courtyards to international concert halls.^[2] The professional name itself encodes his musical role, for "compay" is a colloquial contraction of compadre while "segundo" marks his lifelong preference for carrying the lower second voice in vocal partnerships.^[1]

Like many musicians of the Oriente, Compay Segundo received his earliest training in a municipal band rather than a conservatory, relocating to Santiago de Cuba at the age of nine and taking his first engagement with the city's Municipal Band under the direction of his teacher Enrique Bueno.^[1] In 1934 he moved to Havana, where he played clarinet in a municipal ensemble while mastering the guitar and the tres, the small three-course instrument central to son.^[1] His most distinctive contribution to instrument-making was the armónico, a seven-stringed hybrid he devised to fill the harmonic gap between the Spanish guitar and the tres.^[1]

By the 1950s Compay Segundo had become widely known as the tres player and second voice of Los Compadres, a duo he had formed in 1947 with Lorenzo Hierrezuelo.^[1] The pairing grew into one of the most successful Cuban vocal duos of its era, and standard surveys of the island's music place it within the lineage of son and trova performers that reaches back to ensembles such as the Trío Matamoros and the early septetos.^[3] What distinguished Compay Segundo from many of his trova contemporaries was his devotion to the son rather than the bolero, for compositions such as "Sarandonga" and "Macusa" reveal a songwriter rooted in the dance-driven son corto rather than the sentimental ballad.^[1]

For several decades after the 1959 revolution Compay Segundo remained a respected yet largely domestic figure, better known to specialists than to audiences abroad.^[3] His rediscovery began in Spain during the 1990s with the support of the musician Santiago Auserón, a revival that prepared the ground for the far larger phenomenon to come.^[1]

That phenomenon was the Buena Vista Social Club, an ensemble of veteran Cuban musicians assembled in 1996 under the World Circuit executive Nick Gold, the American guitarist Ry Cooder, and the bandleader Juan de Marcos González.^[4] The group borrowed its name from a members' club in the Buenavista quarter of Havana that had been a favoured music venue in the 1940s, and its repertoire deliberately revived the son, bolero and danzón of that earlier age.^[4] The album was recorded over a few days at Havana's EGREM studios in March 1996 and issued internationally the following year, where it became one of the best-selling Latin records ever made.^[5]

Compay Segundo's signature contribution to the project was "Chan Chan", a four-chord son he had composed in 1984 and first recorded the next year with his own group.^[6] Earlier versions cut with Eliades Ochoa and the Cuarteto Patria went largely unreleased until the second half of the 1990s, so the 1996 session effectively introduced the song to the world as the album's opening track.^[6] Its hypnotic descending bass line became, in practical terms, the musical emblem of the entire revival.^[1]

The recording's success was amplified by the German director Wim Wenders, whose 1999 documentary of the same title followed the musicians in Havana and onstage at New York's Carnegie Hall.^[7] The film and its companion volume framed the performers as artists who had been living in near-obscurity and were now belatedly celebrated, and the Grammy-winning album drew sustained critical attention across Europe and the United States.^[7] The American critic Howard Reich, profiling Compay Segundo for a Chicago readership, presented him as a living link to a more romantic musical era.^[8] Reference works of the period likewise enrolled him among the significant figures of contemporary music.^[9]

In his final years Compay Segundo cultivated a persona of indestructible vitality, attributing his longevity to mutton consommé and a measure of rum, performing before Fidel Castro and singing "Chan Chan" for Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.^[1] He predicted that he would reach the age of 115 but died of kidney failure in Havana in 2003 at ninety-five, the same year as his bandmate the pianist Rubén González.^[4] A Spanish-language biography by Lino Betancourt Molina had already documented his life and discography at the close of the previous decade.^[10] In 2007 the centenary of his birth was marked in Havana by a symphonic concert of his compositions,^[1] and the album that carried his music to the world was later inducted into the United States National Recording Registry, confirming his place in the documented canon of twentieth-century Cuban music.^[5]