Carlo Fidel: "I like to respect the mystery of the song"

Surely it was on one of those usual Sundays destined to visit my grandmother, when I saw that guitar. He always greeted his neighbors Mercedes and Fidel, and on some occasion my gaze escaped towards the instrument that rested on the sofa in the cozy apartment. Its owner was the grandson, whom he would see play it for the first time years later at the Abraham Lincoln Community Center. Carlo Fidel Taboada Petersson was the discordant note of the contest for amateur singers of Matanzas La Nueva Voz, where with backgrounds Selena and José José were sung through a broken audio system. I remember that on that occasion, and suddenly, the sound frame changed when Carlo and Ania Delia played an acoustic version of The afternoon, by Sindo Garay.

Then I went to study in Havana and I met Carlo again on my return, on those nights at the El Chismecito bar and at the itinerant peña that was once established in the Sala White, where I dared to sit at the piano to accompany his Severe Song III.

Today I don't think it's necessary to talk about all the prizes awarded to Carlo, the productive 2020 that earned him the Lucas in the category of New Artist, or that the album in the arms of the world (Egrem, 2020) is recommended by the keen ear of Joaquín Borges-Triana. The last contest won is just the pretext to go up to the roof of one of the tall buildings on Contreras Street, and start talking. Sitting in the shade, we are accompanied by the glow of the afternoon, the Sauto, the bay, the sounds and the landscape of the city settled around us.

How has Matanzas influenced your work? 

“Matanzas is definitely in my songs, although what comes most naturally to me is trova. Obviously, because of the tradition of troubadours in this city, which was the first thing I met.

“I studied chess until I was 18 at the Matanzas academy, and there Raudel —a custodian who was called El Brujo and who was a friend of Santiago Feliú, Raulito Torres, Ernesto Pita— played tremendous guitar. I remember that I would go home after training and return to the academy with Raudel at night, from eight, sometimes until twelve. My parents had to go looking for me, because I didn't leave there: playing guitar, singing songs, talking about all the epics of the troubadours of El Parnaso, everything I didn't know about those people who emigrated, Rubén Aguiar, Raúl Torres ( who later returned), Lázaro Horta, Ernesto Pita. I got to know his songs thanks to Raudel.

“Then it was the danzón, its rhythmic cell that curiously I have very incorporated, and some rumba”.

Carlo Fidel Taboada. Photo: Ivan Soca.

What happen after?

“I started making songs when I was 18 years old. Then I started playing here in the city in some places, during the first and second year of the Civil Engineering degree. First it was a rock at the Abraham Lincoln Community Center and from there came the one at the Museo Provincial Palacio del Junco, together with Miriel Santana. At that time, Lien and Rey had stopped doing their peña in the Hermanos Saíz Association, and ours was putting on… I had just three songs and none of them worked. Miriel had three in the same conditions as mine, but it was still filled with young people and people of all generations. My dad helped me with the production and we brought artists like William Vivanco. It was a beautiful and formative moment for all the troubadours of my generation such as Rey Montalvo, Aliesky Pérez, Miriel and Silvio Raúl”.

One of the things that attracts about your work is the accompaniment of a concert guitar. How do you play with so many technical resources, timbres, tunings and virtuoso passages? How, in the absence of lyrics in the song, does the guitar continue its story?

“Since I was little, my mother played at home when the power went out during the hard years of the Special Period, and that was my first approach with the instrument. I like music as an individual language without the text, but I almost always get things with a song structure. When I started studying classical music with María Victoria [Oliver] I became familiar with the basic guitar language. I was captivated because the guitar is fascinating. So I decided to exploit the instrument more and that it would not remain as it is traditionally seen in the environment of the song, in the role of accompanist nothing more”.

And how do you do it?

“I have taken a lot from the Assad brothers, their duo work defined the path of Brazilian classical guitar. Badi, for example, open to any language of music, explores a lot of the histrionic on stage. I am fascinated by what he does because it is an author's song enriched with his classical training. I am also influenced by what Gismonti, Bartok, Ravel and Debussy do, which are something wonderful. Already in the song, Silvio, Lien and Rey —which allow me to get away from that somewhat vitiated vision of what trova is. There is also a reduced idea of what is the author's song that is actually infinite, I don't have to always enter with verse chorus verse... Lien and Rey, like Silvio, do recitatives and I try to move along that wave.

“Someone who has marked me in the work of tuning is Santiago Feliú. In fact, they have put a certain sign on me that bothers me because it is not fair to him or me. In the trova you see a person who studied guitar and they immediately compare him to Santiaguito and that's not the case. It is true that it gave me a lot. I find out about the tunings because Santiago explored them with the blues. They tell me that he was a friend of Tomatito and in flamenco they also work a lot with other tunings. From then on I've started to try, change things on the guitar, and I've come up with crazy tunings that I don't know if they will be used or not, but they work for me.

“It is very difficult to find something new. I like searching, I compose little, precisely because I compose when I think I've found something. There are issues that trigger the song. I'm always playing the guitar, although it's hard for me to maintain a study routine if I'm quite disciplined. I learn works that I like. If I see a score by Gismonti, for example, I study it but not rigorously. And so it is to compose. But the fact of having the guitar constantly in hand makes things come out, first the music and then the lyrics. Very rarely has the song come out from top to bottom. In the end it is a mystery and I prefer it that way. I like to respect the mystery of the song.”

How did you manage to acquire knowledge like harmony and voice work without going to any academy? Who influenced your training?

“When I discovered Lien y Rey I heard a daring harmonic proposal, with an interest in sound singularity, in harmony, in creating aggressive textures. We have flawed tonal music and that is only a small part of the universe. The mystery is there, you have to respect it and know that it is seductive, that it invites you to continue. I had no idea that expressive language existed, I understood that I had a predisposition towards that aesthetic of contemporary music, dissonances, textures and certain types of scales. I was 25 years old when I studied piano with Elvira Santiago, with her I learned everything. Even today I take what I write, the arrangements. I enjoy sitting down with her and reading the sheet music without the accompaniment of the piano or other instrument. I admire that.

“Another question is the sound, which I understood when I studied with María Victoria the expressive resources of the classical guitar. I concentrated a lot on the sound when I studied, the pure sound, without notes, without anything. Everyone has their own conception of sound and I like that of classical guitar, round and clean. I unconsciously look for it when I make an arrangement or when I'm recording. I am concerned that the voices of the chords are understood. Maybe that's why I'm associated with the academy all the time. And the audience for the song is not interested in that, but somehow it gets to them.”

Carlo Fidel Taboada. Photo: Carla Valdes.

When you look for people to leave the concert with the song inside —as you have mentioned other times— you focus on delivering a work that I can think of defining with the term “concert song”. How do you see the song?

“In essence I am a troubadour, a singer-songwriter, it is my natural language. But sometimes it's complicated for me in the same trova environment. Not everyone identifies with that song. But interest in the instrumental is becoming more common. One of the singer-songwriters that I think best represents the song at this time is Leonardo García. He has basic guitar training and there is an interest in taking care of the sound, the tuning, the melismas he uses... There are young people and people from my generation who are paying attention to that, the ear and the context are changing.

“The song is a gift, an offer. On the other hand, one has to be clear that it does not exist for you to be more, one is nobody in that sense, one is the path and that for me is fundamental. The topic  Before the first sound It has to do with that."

There is also a very spiritual issue that I think everyone who feels like an artist accompanies him. It is non-existence when on stage, the annulment of being or ego to embody the spirit of music which, in turn, leads us to a state of meditation. Is that what it's about Before the first sound?

“For that theme I was inspired by what I read about Leonard Cohen. His life is very curious, he spent five years in a Buddhist monastery, and he had a very interesting philosophy. He said that artists had to learn to step aside, that the ego had to disappear on stage. I also read José María Vitier, what he felt before playing the first note and that was what caused the song. I assume it this way: one is nobody, or absolutely nothing, and if you are virtuous, better because you can bring that mystery to people. One has a responsibility with the song, which must come from a completely human position.

“It's like when you lose the perception that there is a person and that all that exists is the music that is playing. That happens rarely and is a state of enlightenment. Kundalini is a higher state of consciousness. There is no formula to get there, it is an energy that comes from you but that comes from another place. It is thought that Glenn Gould reached this state when he played, it is one of the many theories about his virtuosity. What is certain is that the artist has to leave his ego in the dressing room, or keep it in his pocket”.

Carlo Fidel Taboada. Photo: Luciana Fabrizzi.

Have you experienced that when you play? Has it happened to you that you stay connected with the feeling of the music for days?

“It has happened to me, only twice. I remember a concert in the Theater Hall of the National Museum of Fine Arts. I may have been wrong but it is not the fact of being wrong that matters, it is something else, it is what happens inside. Suddenly you stop being stressed, you feel the connection of the public that they are enjoying, and it is something basic that should always happen but it does not. It also happened to me at a concert in Argentina and we said, you have to go home now, this is incredible. And one stays a few days as very calm. In those two cases that I remember, I have felt peace, not even happiness or pride. And when that happens, it's a good sign."

What are your listening habits? What sounds accompany you?

“Right now, a Brazilian named Lenine; put some riffs with good energy and his sense of harmony is interesting. Someone I will never stop listening to is Silvio, for me that is the song guru… I have listened to a lot of music, but none like his, which surprises you with pure magic, that of his resources. They may seem limited to you but they are not, there is an infinite question in what is limited. And that works in any context. Stravinsky said that he had found the greatest freedom in traditional harmony. The most difficult thing is to be able to get something out of the traditional forms, which are not for nothing, in the standard there is also beauty, beauty is hidden anywhere, also in the traditional form, in harmony and structure.

“I like to listen to rock and roll and these days I'm listening to artists from Ireland like Sinéad O'Connor and the band The Cranberries. Another discovery was Pat Metheny and his album A Map of the World, because of the spectacular way it is orchestrated and the variations it makes. Paco de Lucía is also one of my references”.

Just as Pablo has his Yolanda and Santiaguito his Barbara, I think Carlo Fidel has Giselle. Would you dare to break that scheme of women as the idyllic muse of love or inspiring motive of the songs, as we have traditionally seen throughout the Cuban trova movement?

“I wrote to Giselle because I was in love. It is very difficult to break with that, I think it is what gives singularity to what one is feeling at that moment for her. On the other hand, in Lullaby for a contemporary child it is as if I were a woman and I have a conversation with a child in the womb. It caught my attention not as a gender issue, but rather as something that is wonderful, a privilege that is reserved only for women."

Standing out for its excellent invoice arrives in the arms of the world, your second album. What did you set out to deliver in this production?

"in the arms of the world covers a creative period of 10 years, travels through different stages of my artistic experience, collecting small sound fragments of my life that are articulated to form a set of themes whose essence lies in the author's song. It is also an album sprinkled with elements from jazz, classical concert music, and other sound worlds. For the selection of the themes I started from the assumption of integrating the language of chamber music to the songs whose nature suggested this aesthetic. This album is a portion of my life told with absolute sincerity, with no other intention than to convey a testimony and make the listener find the path to shock within himself”.

What satisfactions come to you with the production of this phonogram?

“We really enjoyed the recording process of this album at the Areito de la Egrem studios. I was accompanied by friends to whom I am very grateful: Camila Inclán on the violin, Sandra Ivette on the viola (both do the voices in In front of the mirror), Darío Pozo on cello and Yonier Rosquete on bass. Jessica Zequeira, singer, and Noslen Porrúa, singer-songwriter, did the voices in the rest of the phonogram. Noslen also helped in the production, indicating from the booth and reviewing all the themes. Of the songs on the album, it was made into a video clip In front of the mirror, directed by Leomar González, and will soon be released Lullaby for a contemporary child and will not be spoken".

How can the new rhythm imposed by the current pandemic scenario influence a singer-songwriter like you? What initiatives and tools have you used to maintain your work?

“I started very motivated to work on social networks, I did two cycles of presentations, I did things with Rey Montalvo, with other friends in the Canary Islands and interesting encounters arose, only that doesn't pay much anymore. Sometimes you don't even feel like studying. One feels that what is happening is so great, it transcends us so much, that now what is happening is something else. I don't stop studying, listening to music... but I feel that making a song is too small, in the sense of being useful to society”.

Marina Abramović recently commented in an interview that when the pandemic ends, the world will experience an explosion of human contact. How do you imagine your life and your songs after this experience?

“I think when it's over there's going to be an explosion of everything we stopped doing. I hope that festivals arise even though there is no budget, and that people say: it doesn't matter, don't pay me, I'll still go and sing. Beautiful things can come from there. I will try to go somewhere to play, although I am afraid that the creation will not come out anymore. As she comes, she goes. If I could do another song, I would feel calm.”