Laurin Talese and the theater of living histories

The gilded moldings of the Teatro Marti in Old Havana can be contagious mirages. The neoclassical theater has something, a spirit, that takes you back to another era. If Billie Holiday, the lady of jazz, had he not died 65 years ago in New York, would he have come to sing here?

There are at least 200 people in the room, divided between the lower level seats and the balconies. On stage is vocalist Laurin Talese. Thank you very much, she says in Spanish. Then she launches into a flurry of stories in English that a girl translates for us: "I wrote this song about love, there are so many kinds of love: love for your cat, love for your siblings...". Talese is a jazzman, born in Ohio, fell in love with Philadelphia, sang many other genres before discovering the cadence of jazz and this April he came to Cuba. "...love for your other half —continues—, and the love you feel for your parents and also the love for your best friend, who sometimes we choose as our family, and in fact this is what this song says: This Love.

Photos: Courtesy of the U.S. Embassy

"In Cuba we have a challenge, we want to show vulnerable populations, the Afro community, women. Laurin Talese is special because she has a very important story. She is a woman who is in jazz, a genre traditionally for men," explains Xavier Billingsley, cultural attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. 

There are women who are in industries that have high numbers of men but are working hard to represent gender issues. Women with the capacity to undertake their own business, their own art and who write their own music, Billingsley explains why Talese is celebrating Women's History Month in Havana. In addition to an agenda of talks with young Cuban women entrepreneurs, the jazz musician has planned two concerts on the island.

Although Laurin is in the Caribbean, he continues to inhabit other spaces. He stirs the chords of Night Song, by another jazz great: Sarah Vaughan, and he says that he sang it some time ago in Colombia. Then he jumps to the Portuguese language with Djavan. Sing Fleur de lis without twisting a single tone or bossa nova twist. His voice cuts like razor blades on the wrists. 

"I want to make another song for you. I wrote it with one of my friends. We were young when we wrote this song together; we were each going through a breakup, and believe it or not, we were the women who were wrong; we were wrong; we were immature and unreasonable. We wrote this when we realized we were foolish." When the audience listens Forgive and forget doesn't know it, but he is hostage to a journey. Talese has plunged them all at once inside their past. And of his pain.

Laurin Talese at the Teatro Martí. Photos: Courtesy of the U.S. Embassy

"Don't go away from me." It seems to be the inevitable path. Reconstructing a lost love with the notes of jazz. "Don't go away from me". And the voice comes out fresh, as if just soaked in the waves and laid out to dry carefully on the sand.

"When I was young everything was easier to categorize, good or bad, but as we get older we get wiser. There's a lot of stuff in between," Talese explains about the musical pieces on his most recent album Museum of living stories.

He also talks about his observational experience creating this album and even about other nuances that he doesn't say but are there, such as youth, Afro-Americanism, the endless roots of family trees. "Some stories I heard from friends, some I lived, and some were secrets and I will never confess what they are really about," he notes.

Anything, Rain Song, Quiet, Centerpiece. Songs and shattered fragments of life and Laurin Talese and behind, the screen with old photos, in sepia, merging into a grid of the ocean. Photos that seem random, of a woman with huge glasses, another holding a cigar. The close up a smile with very white teeth, six men lined up, wearing hats and starched shirts, Laurin very young at the piano. The sea moves as if threatening to overflow into the room.

The jazz musician tells the audience about the smell of the rain, about sleepless nights with her throat pierced by injustice, by rage; she intones many complaints about death. She talks about when she saw on the news how a man's life was taken from him in the street: "And they filmed it on TV, how can the life of a human being be so small [to] be taken away like that? We carry on like normalhe sings. It is a single verse and contains that cursed polysemy of musicians, who say in five words: I saw a man die and the world went on as if nothing had happened.

Laurin Talese at the Teatro Martí. Photos: Courtesy of the U.S. Embassy

"We have one last song," he introduces, heI wrote it for my aunts. They are aunts who dream and call you on the phone, and say, 'I had a dream about a fish, is there anything you want to tell me?' That's why I write to fortune tellers: Soothsayers" 

The concert ends, everyone applauds. The theater empties, the silence begins to smear the walls, the columns. 

It is 2024 and Billie Holiday is not in the Caribbean. Decades have passed since the night some nuns locked her in a room with the body of a dead girl, to punish her. Decades since she begged for a job at Pod's and Jerry's and was unable to mark three dance steps and said those words "Sure I can sing But what good is that of it?". Enough time has passed to scrutinize her story and bring it into focus in dozens of different lights and relive it on a Philadelphia stage, with the play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill and the voice of Laurin Talese. In this new century, Talese and Holliday can plunge together into "bar purgatory" and merge their sorrows into the unique sound of jazz.

It is April and Laurin Talese sings. The Martí Theater breathes amidst the rubble of the Saratoga Hotel, and Havana is almost as deserted as a room without a show. Billie Holiday is not dead.