Law student, radio host and music fan, Dan Zacks has figured out a brilliant strategy for mixing business and pleasure: make sure your business involves great music and a warm tropical location.

Zacks, whose show Waxing Deep has broadcast for the past six years, considers it a personal mission to share music that might otherwise not be widely available.

His latest project, Sí, Para Usted: The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba, is a 17-song compilation of vintage Cuban tracks, which until now have never been available for distribution outside the island.

Although his show’s particular emphasis is Canadian jazz, in the last few years, Waxing Deep has shifted to include a global jazz/funk spectrum, mostly selected from the rare LPs the producers find through tireless record shop excavation.

In fact, what sparked the idea for the project was the unprecedented amount of listener response to the Cuban selections featured on the show. Fans would call in to request names and ask where they might purchase the music.

Recalls the host, “Sadly, Cuban music other than The Buena Vista Social Club and its ilk has for too long remained scandalously unavailable outside of Cuba. To our enquiring listeners we could only half-heartedly suggest an eBay search and a call to their local record dealer.”

Realizing that there was a potential market for this sound, Zacks began to put together a business plan. His desire to release a sixteen-volume box set of Maritime fiddle music would have to wait.

Detailed negotiations with the Cuban government followed. Due to the amount of bureaucratic red tape gumming up distribution rights, no one had ever bothered to undertake such a task. Or in other words, there was no money in it.

But Zacks wasn’t motivated by profit (although he admits that he has no problem if profit is motivated by him). So, in the summer of 2006, he and his personal translator/sister Cara flew down to the island’s capital.

He says of the experience, “[it] was much too short but it gave me the opportunity to do some first-hand research into the music and particularly the artists that are compiled on the CD. Also it made me realize how foolish I was not to learn Spanish.”

Inside a “dusty Havana warehouse,” the siblings discovered a treasure trove of vintage recordings from the 70s and 80s. Despite Cuba’s repressive socialist regime this was, ironically, an era of enormous musical experimentation.

Zacks explains some of the underlying reasons for this paradox. Because of state-subsidized schooling, “music schools were made more accessible and they swelled with students who, because of racism or poverty, had been unable to attend in the past.”

Cuba’s music industry was also taken over by the government, which put an end to the romantic starving artist paradigm: musicians who passed state-ordained exams were allotted a fixed salary, and the nationalization of the industry reduced the cutthroat free market competition, which often results in music produced to pander to popular tastes rather than innovation.

Free from commercial demands, Cuban musicians were able to use the following period as a sort of musical playground. The result was an explosion of original output, ranging from rock to jazz. For his compilation, Zacks chose to highlight the era’s range of funk, beat, jazz and modern variations on classic Cuban forms, such as son.

Sifting through hundreds of recordings (and Q-tips), he painstakingly re-mastered dozens of songs from the original tapes. And the end result is a virtual landscape of the decade. Cuban superstars such as Chucho Valdés (Irakere) and Los Van Van are featured alongside fringe bands such as Grupo Los Yoyi, to create an eclectic panorama of sounds.

While historical circumstance invites a definite political subtext, the album is, at heart, a celebration of Cuba’s revolutionary beats. Or as Zacks lovingly dubs it: Communist funk.

Sí, Para Usted is the first of its kind. Chances are you will discover something you’ve never experienced before.

For more information, or to order a copy of Sí, Para Usted: The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba, contact Dan Zacks at info@waxingdeep.org.

- Jordana Feldman
jordana@sugarcainent.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.