{"id":12555,"date":"2022-11-22T22:54:24","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T03:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/?p=12555"},"modified":"2022-11-22T22:54:24","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T03:54:24","slug":"pablo-milanes-nuestra-vida-a-traves-de-sus-canciones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/pablo-milanes-nuestra-vida-a-traves-de-sus-canciones\/","title":{"rendered":"Pablo Milan\u00e9s, our life through his songs"},"content":{"rendered":"

As happens with artists who over several decades manage to draw a precise image of the country to which they dedicate their works, the songs of Pablo Milan\u00e9s are an accurate chronicle of our collective memory, dilating in them both the most intimate and the most public. Since 1963, when he signed <\/span>You, my disappointment<\/span><\/i>He was creating an arc of powerful resonances in which the echoes of tradition and the new air that his generation brought to our already rich musical panorama were fluidly united. Endowed with a prodigious voice, the Bayamese born in 1943 and whose death now pains us so much, was capable of singing the same old popular tunes as Marti's or Guill\u00e9n's verses, or a bolero or a song that we repeated in chorus at his concerts, like a throat in which several generations could fit. Part of a fundamental part of this process that began in 1959, Pablo Milan\u00e9s added to his repertoire his own and other people's songs that also reflected the contradictions and contradictions of this becoming, leaving us an album through which we can read the history of the country and its citizens, in a sort of parallel review to the one that, through great phrases and postures stopped in a not always functional epic, other hands have written, and through which that other look, that shudder that his death makes us feel in a deeper way, is filtered.<\/span><\/p>\n

After his time with Los Bucaneros and the Cuarteto del Rey, where he trained in the dialogue with fashionable rhythms and felt the influence of Michel Legrand, among others, Pablo responded to the teachings of Luis Carbonell and other masters with his first creations. As a bridge between the filin movement and the need to capture the frenzy of the early 1960s, he ended up protected by the mantle of Casa de las Am\u00e9ricas and ICAIC when he joined the New Trova Movement, which is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. His songs were recorded by Elena Burke and other risky figures before his first solo album appeared in 1975, musicalizing Mart\u00ed's verses. A decade had passed since his time in the Military Units of Aid to Production, where he was driven by envy and suspicion suffered by many at that time. It would take him a long time to talk about that period of his life, because there are pains that even time heals very slowly.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the Nueva Trova, Pablo, Silvio, Noel, Sara, Eduardo..., and many more, with the Grupo de Experimentaci\u00f3n Sonora (GES), recorded songs that little by little allowed them to be recognized and that were integrated to the choral that from Argentina, Chile and other countries of the continent testified of new urgencies. The second half of the 70's found them in maturity, and from there came classics like <\/span>Yolanda<\/span><\/i>The albums, which encoded an idea of Cuba, of its sentimental history in that event that tried to change everything, and which, together with other creations of his GES colleagues, still serve as clear references of those discoveries and heartbreaks. Records and concerts, tours and creations for the cinema, are part of that promising period that lasted until well into the 80's, as evidenced by his double album <\/span>Querido Pablo<\/span><\/i>launched and conceived on a scale rarely granted to a Cuban artist from the island at that time.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the arrival of the 1990s, that also changed. The birth of the Pablo Milan\u00e9s Foundation would be the axis of a major conflict that ended in crisis after its closure and a controversy with the Minister of Culture, Armando Hart, which marked the beginning of a long series of disagreements. In spite of this, Pablo never stopped returning to Cuba, neither to record here nor to offer his songs to series or television programs. It would be necessary to add the controversies of the previous decade during his tenure as director of the Varadero International Festival, or his brief stint on television as the star of <\/span>Proposals<\/span><\/i>a title that was repeated in the magazine of his defenestrated Foundation. These are episodes that are probably not evoked now in the official notes that mourn his loss, but through them the chronology of many other clashes can be recomposed, which the rest of Cuban creators lived in different dimensions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Coming and going from Spain to Cuba, Pablo Milan\u00e9s always had the gesture of recognizing other creators, new or established, being accompanied by them in his concerts and albums, as proof of a generosity not very abundant in the medium. When he was awarded the Latin Grammy for artistic excellence in 2015, he was already a continental classic, with the virtues and dangers that such term entails. During these last years he offered critical statements, demanding changes in his country, which his work continued to portray in an indelible way. This cost him veiled or direct attacks that unfortunately, through voices that did not reach half his stature, haunted him until his final days. Fortunately, that figure is all too undeniable and, over and above those silences and insults, it was impossible to deny him at all. He sang in Miami, and also survived that intense tidal wave of applause and shouts that his presence unleashed there. His farewell concert (as many of us sensed) this year at the Ciudad Deportiva was also part of that controversy that he embodied in the sight of officials and bureaucrats, which was resolved with that crowd that filled the Coliseum, reaffirming how he and his songs were a single essence through which we also reinvented our lives in the hard present of the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through his biography and his albums, this life is told in a different way. The young people who went to the Ministry of Culture a year ago in search of a new dialogue, sang her songs there. The rebroadcasting of a soap opera produced 30 years ago brings us back in the afternoons his voice, fresh and full of lyricism, regardless of whoever it may concern, intoning traditional Trova songs (to which he bowed down by recording <\/span>Years<\/span><\/i>The album series that rescued that legacy long before the Buena Vista Social Club effect), and others that still sound as if they were created yesterday. Pablo Milan\u00e9s belongs to us as part of our lives, because like a mirror inhabited by words and chords, we can also recognize our individual joys and losses through his songs, as a coherent trace of words, questions and ideas that say how intense everything has been, and persist in reminding both his enemies and his faithful, that we should learn something from all that. That pursuing beauty has its price. That life is not worth anything, that it has not been easy, that in the brief space in which we are, or no longer are, we are identified by the truth that we defend, and that truth, at times, can be as memorable and as brief as the melody in which today, to recognize ourselves, we seek ourselves in its infinite voice, which is that of Cuba.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pablo Milan\u00e9s belongs to us as part of our lives, because like a mirror inhabited by words and chords, we can also recognize our individual joys and losses through his songs, as a coherent trace of words, questions and ideas that say how intense everything has been, and persist in reminding both his enemies and his faithful that we should learn something from all that.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":183,"featured_media":12549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1766],"tags":[8456,292],"coauthors":[310],"class_list":["post-12555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articulos","tag-movimiento-de-la-nueva-trova-en-moron","tag-pablo-milanes"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/magazineampm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/portada-eternamente-Pablo-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C548&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12556,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12555\/revisions\/12556"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12555"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}