Skip to main content
City of Santiago de Cuba to Reopen its Doors Again to Jazz
06September
News

City of Santiago de Cuba to Reopen its Doors Again to Jazz

The seventh meeting Friends of Jazz will take place in this city from Sep 20 to 23 in continuity with the efforts to promote this musical genre, the organizers informed today.
 
Sponsored by the branch of the National Union of Writers and Artists and with the collaboration of cultural institutions from Santiago, the event will take place in the centrally located Marti Theatre, Concert Hall Dolores, La Jutia Conga Courtyard and the Iris Jazz Club.

Ivan Acosta and We Are Cuba, Magic Sax Cuartet and the group Influences will take part in the days with Orlando Valle 'Maraca', Carlos Miyares, Hector Quintana and his quintet, Acana and Mestizaje, as well as about 40 U.S. musicians led by Mike Davidson.

The appointment is inserted since 2011 in the diffusion of that sonorous aspect, that according to scholars arrived to Cuba by this city at the end of the 19th century and has interpreters and an enthusiastic public, in the middle of the preeminence of other Cuban traditional rhythms that distinguish the city.

A significant step in this effort was the opening of the Iris Jazz Club, located in one of the corners of the central Plaza de Marte, which has become the axis of the jazz boom in the city.

The late musician Juan Formell, director of the Los Van Van orchestra, praised the initiative and predicted its success, while urging those responsible to preserve it as a privileged space for such a special sonority.

During the International Jazz Plaza Festival, in 2016, the city was co-host and welcomed important cultivators of this aspect, inside and outside Cuba, in another chapter of the expansion of the sound universe of the Cuban musical city par excellence.