By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Sep 18 2001 (IPS)

Some 20 Ibero-American luminaries of song are accompanying star Cuban troubadour Pablo Milanés in a recording project, the first edition of which is slated for release in Mexico next month.

The album is practically ready and will be launched at a concert that Milanés – one of the founders of New Trova, a Cuban brand of poetic songs or ballads – is to perform in October at the Mexican National Auditorium, with a capacity for 10,000 spectators and considered among the world’s best as far as acoustics.

The songs included on the new disk, titled “Querido Pablo II” (Beloved Pablo II), were all written by this singer-songwriter, except for one performed by Joaquín Sabina, who sings one of his own songs, sources from the PM (Pablo Milanés) Record studio told IPS.

In the recording project, Milanés is accompanied by his Argentine colleague Fito Páez on “Sábado corto” (Brief Saturday), by Brazil’s Gal Costa on “Amame como soy” (Love me as I am), Mexico’s Armando Manzanero on “Para vivir” (To live), and Guatemalan Ricardo Arjona on “La novia que nunca tuve” (The girlfriend I never had).

The composer of the well-known song “Yolanda” also performs “Si ella me faltara alguna vez” (If she were ever to leave me), with Fher Olivera, vocalist for the popular Mexican group Maná, and “La Soledad” (Solitude), with Brazilian standout Milton Nascimento.

The list of musical guests on the album further includes Brazil’s Caetano Veloso, Eugenia León of Mexico, Tania Libertad from Peru, Spanish-Venezuelan Soledad Bravo, Puerto Rico’s Lucecita Benítez and the Argentines Charly García and Alberto Cortés.

Los Van Van, of Cuba, and Pancho Céspedes, a Cuban residing in Mexico, are also among the collaborators on “Querido Pablo II”, which follows a similar project organised in 1984 with the participation of Milanés’ compatriot Silvio Rodríguez and of Catalonian singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, among many others.

The new recording initiative will have an English-speaking touch as well, with US artists Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder, and Britain’s Sting, who will be added to a second edition of the album, slated for release next year, Milanés said during a recent press conference.

Sources close to the ‘trovador’ (poetic singer or troubadour) underscore the great universality of the project, which gathered “so many internationally famous personalities around the works of Pablito,” collected in more than 26 albums.

Milanés, 58, is the author of hundreds of songs that experts categorise among the richest musical treasures of Latin America, where the New Trova movement had great influence beginning in the early 1970s.

“Some of the founders of New Trova, like Silvio Rodríguez, Sara González, Eduardo Ramos and I have become so drastically independent that we may not see each other for months or even years,” acknowledged Milanés during a concert tour of Central America.

His initial artistic development coincided with the dawning of a period of profound socio-economic transformations as a consequence of the 1959 Fidel Castro-led revolution on the Caribbean island.

Milanés was part of the Experimental Sound Group of the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematography, created in 1969, where classical musicians and composers converged with singer- songwriters.

That group is considered the origin of the New Trova, whose star performers – Milanés, Rodríguez and Noel Nicola, among others – were adopted as models by countless singer -songwriters throughout the rest of Latin America.

The founders of the New Cuban Trova declared themselves the continuation of a traditional movement that is rooted in the late 19the century and that period’s legend, Sindo Garay.

Over the last 100 years, ‘trovadores’ have been musicians who compose and perform their own songs, usually accompanied by the economical and easily transported guitar, and perhaps a piano.

But in the past few decades, Trova became identified most as a way of creating a song – where lyrics are all-important and often involve social commentary – and its performers began to be accompanied by more contemporary-sounding bands, with electric instruments combined with the traditional acoustic ones.

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