"I DON'T have a piano at home any more, so when I saw the one at the EGREM studio, I went straight for it, and it seems they noticed what I did."
It seems so. Ruben Gonzalez, one of Cuba's most famous musicians, had come out of retirement. Ry Cooder, who recorded an album with Gonzalez in 1996, described him as "the greatest piano soloist I have ever heard in my life - bar none". They say he suffers from arthritis, but there are no audible sounds of this on his comeback solo CD, Introducing Ruben Gonzalez, due to be released any day on the World Circuit label. Though steeped in Cuban tradition - the album has its cha cha cha, its danzon (or more formal dance), and its bolero - the piano flows creatively against the Caribbean percussion at all times, and Gonzalez is most famous for "descargas", or "extended jams".
Now Gonzalez is touring Europe for the first time at the age of 77, with a seven-strong band of musicians calling themselves the Cuban All Stars. It's hard to say if this opening up of the Cuban musical world shows the strength or the weakness of the revolutionary society.
Probably, what it really shows is the rapacious magpie-like nature of the world music industry. Cuba, showered with musical riches because of the interplay of Spanish colonial culture and the percussive music of the African slaves, was one of the great musical power-houses of the world for most of this century. Before the revolution in 1959, Americans flocked to Havana and Santiago de Cuba, and the American big-band sounds infiltrated the native music, giving Cuban son and salsa, those distinctive interplays between African percussion and Spanish melody, an international sound.
The revolution means that professional Cuban musicians are paid a State pension. It also means that Cuban music is up against less competition from recorded international music. It does isolate the music artificially, however; part of the excitement of Gonzalez's music, which developed before 1959, is its obvious jazz and big-band, context.
Gonzalez, as is fitting for his years, sees no comparison between today's Cuban musical scene and the one in which he grew up, travelling once a week from rural Santa Clara to far-away Cienfuegos for music classes: now people play "more for money"; then "you had to be able to sight read any kind of music straight off". He may be quite right, and even if he isn't, a bit of nostalgia is the absolute right of a wonderful musician, who played with Enrique Jorrin, for instance, the man who created the "cha cha cha", born he says, "from the way people used to scrape their feet along the floor, dancing to that rhythm".