Alex Cuba interview
Alex Cuba is ready to take on the world
Published in The Calgary Herald on October 4, 2008.
You're part Bill Withers, part Seu George, I tell Cuban-Canadian musician Alex Cuba, and there's no reason why Canada shouldn't accept you as a mainstream artist.
After two wins in three years in the World Music Album category at the Juno Awards, even some of his competition agrees that it's time the man born Alexis Puentes began competing with the likes of Leslie Feist, Nelly Furtado and Michael Buble at the next Junos.
"It's one of my goals on my next album, to give the Juno people a bit of a shake," the 34-year old says in a lilting accent. "I've won the World Album award twice now, now put me in the mainstream category, please.
"It's only because I'm singing pop songs in Spanish, but otherwise I don't fit in the World Music category. Jesse Cook and I were laughing at the Juno Awards -- he was saying I should be in one of the mainstream categories because I'm so poppy. And I said, 'Because I'm catchy? I'm supposed to be catchy!' "
He's very catchy, with a breezy acoustic sweetness he's shaped from elements of traditional Cuban music, American soul and Latin balladry. That fusion earned him a 2006 Juno for Humo De Tabaco, and a 2008 Juno for its stronger successor, Agua Del Pozo.
"It took two albums for me to find my sound, to get to where I am," he says. "It was one of those natural developments. And I feel good because all the decisions have been my own, and I will fail or succeed with them."
Born in a highly musical family in Artemisa, 60 kilometres outside of Havana, Puentes was on Cuban television by age four, playing the claves (a percussion instrument). His father was a music teacher who believed Alexis would become a great instrumentalist, while his twin brother Adonis, who had a stronger, brighter voice, would be a singer.
Cuban music is traditionally performed in large ensembles, which requires the singer to have an especially powerful voice. And he did not.
"I never knew what I was going to be doing in music, I just knew that I wanted to keep playing," Puentes says. "So I started singing. And at first my father told me I didn't have the voice to sing, and that I should focus on playing bass guitar. And I gradually got pretty good on bass, I got to be one of the better bass guitarists in town. And so when I started to sing, my father said, 'No, please don't sing, you're doing so well on the bass, you should keep practicing that!' "
Puentes began practicing guitar, percussion, tres and bass near eight hours a day in his teens, becoming one of the best bass guitarists in Cuba. While his boyhood idol Michael Jackson has always lamented missing out on his childhood because of music, Puentes says he loved every minute of his.
"When you go through it, it's different, it was really fun," he says. "I won't say it was a drug, that's too harsh of a word, but I'll say it was like candy. I just wanted to do it, and the more I did it, the more I wanted to."
He soon found himself winning a national songwriting contest at age 18, and by 25 won Best Album at Cubadisco (the equivalent of the Juno Awards). After meeting and falling in love with a Canadian, Puentes soon moved to Smithers, British Columbia.
And in Canada, everything changed.
"I came to Canada and I found a pair of bellbottom jeans at a second-hand store and they fit perfectly," he says. "I took it as a sign. It represented all my influences, and I felt like Iron Man putting on his armor."
He reinvented his look, and today, sporting a healthy retro afro, tight bellbottomed pants and a boyish grin, he's hard not to notice in any room.
After an album of traditional Cuban music with his brother Adonis in 2001, which earned him his first Juno nomination, Puentes was inspired to finally have confidence in his own voice, in his own blend of acoustic Cuban soul.
"Canada completed the circle of who Alex Cuba is, because it totally relieved me of the pressure of conforming to Cuban music," he says. "Maybe it was because of the language barrier, I felt the need to become simpler with my music, where in Cuba, everything is becoming more complicated as musicians are getting more competitive."
His sweet simplicity has led to an invitation to the prestigious World Music Expo in Seville, Spain, this fall, while Agua Del Pozo has just secured a U.S. release through jazz label Blue Note Records (Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Al Green, etc.).
Cuba's next project is a massive undertaking, and astute readers will pick up on the following hint: he's co-writing a Spanish-language album for one of Canada's biggest female pop musicians. Yep, it's pretty much the first name that comes to your mind, and beyond that, I'm bound to secrecy.
"I like where she's going," he says of this artist, "and our work together so far has gone beyond my expectations.
"I think people will enjoy listening to the album when it comes out next year."
