Biography

Among his songs, "Yolanda", "Yo me quedo", "Amo a esta isla", "Yo pisaré las calles nuevamente", "Para Vivir", and "El breve espacio en que no estás" are especially well-known.

On January 26, 2006, Pablo Milanés signed a petition supporting Puerto Rico's independence from the United States of America.

Discography

References

External links

Category:1943 births Category:Living people Category:Cuban male singers Category:Cuban musicians Category:Latin Grammy Award winners Category:Wrasse Records artists

Sosa performed in venues such as the Lincoln Center in New York City, the Théâtre Mogador in Paris and the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, as well as sell-out shows in New York's Carnegie Hall and the Roman Coliseum during her final decade of life. Her career spanned four decades and she has been the recipient of several Grammy awards and nominations, including three nominations which will be decided posthumously. She served as an ambassador for UNICEF.

Life

A supporter of Perón in her youth, she favored leftist causes throughout her life. She opposed President Carlos Menem, who was in office from 1989 to 1999, and supported the election of Néstor Kirchner, who became president in 2003. Sosa was a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In a career consisting of four decades, she worked with performers across several genres and generations, folk, opera, pop, rock, including Lucio Dalla, Nana Mouskouri, Andrea Bocelli, Holly Near, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso, Joan Manuel Serrat, Chico Buarque, Gal Costa, Gian Marco, Konstantin Wecker, Lourdes Pérez, Nilda Fernández, Pata Negra, David Broza, Franco Battiato, Luz Casal, Ismael Serrano, Charly Garcia, Joan Baez, Luciano Pavarotti, Shakira, Lila Downs, Julieta Venegas, Martha Argerich, and Sting.

Sosa participated in a 1999 production of Ariel Ramírez's ''Misa Criolla''. Her song ''Balderrama'' is featured in the 2008 movie ''Che'', starring Benicio del Toro as the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.

Awards

Her album ''Cantora 1'' won two awards at the Latin Grammy Awards of 2009. She won Best Folk Album and was nominated for Album of the Year. The album was also awarded Best Recording Package.

Death

Her body was placed on display at the National Congress building in Buenos Aires for the public to pay their respects, and President Fernández de Kirchner ordered three days of national mourning. Thousands had queued by the end of the day. She was cremated on October 5.

Sosa's obituary in ''The Daily Telegraph'' said she was "an unrivalled interpreter of works by her compatriot, the Argentinian Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Chile's Violeta Parra". Helen Popper of Reuters announced her death by saying she "fought South America's dictators with her voice and became a giant of contemporary Latin American music". Sosa received two Latin Grammy nominations for her album which is nominated for a total of three awards. She went on to win Best Folk Album about a month after her death.

Discography

She recorded forty albums.

Filmography

References

External links

Category:1935 births Category:2009 deaths Category:Latin Grammy Award winners Category:Spanish-language singers Category:Argentine female singers Category:Argentine activists Category:Argentine people of French descent Category:Argentine people of Quechua descent Category:Contraltos Category:Deaths from renal failure Category:People from San Miguel de Tucumán Category:Nueva canción musicians Category:Bombo legüero players

Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez (born November 29, 1946 in San Antonio de los Baños) is a Cuban musician, and a leader of the nueva trova movement.

He is considered Cuba's best known folk singer and known for his highly eloquent and symbolic lyrics. Many of his songs have become classics in Latin American music, such as ''Ojalá'', ''Playa Girón'', ''Unicornio'' and ''La maza''. He has released nearly 20 albums.

Rodríguez, musically and politically, is a symbol of the Latin American left wing. His lyrics are notably introspective. His songs combine romanticism, love (even eroticism), revolutionary politics, and idealism.

Biography

When the Revolution led by Fidel Castro triumphed in January 1959, Rodríguez was only 13 years old, and, like most Cubans of his generation, became involved in the new Revolutionary enthusiasm. He participated in the Literacy Campaign held in 1961, and then started working as a comics designer in a magazine. During this period a friend of his, Lázaro Fundora, taught him how to play the guitar.

Guitar playing took a major role in his life while he was doing his military service in the army, during 1964, but it wasn't until 1967, with his first television experience, that he started to become well known and influential among Cuban revolutionary youth. With pro-revolution yet very independent lyrics (together with his very informal dress code), Rodríguez soon attracted the animosity of some members of the new Culture Ministry, which was devoted to the eradication of the United States' influence in Cuban culture. In this context, a very important role was played by the cultural institution Casa de las Américas and its then director Haydée Santamaría, the former a respected revolutionary who participated in the Moncada barracks assault of 1953 and sister of Abel Santamaría, who was tortured and killed after the failure of the assault. Haydée Santamaría became a protective mother-figure of the young composers and of several of his colleagues at the time. Casa de las Américas became the home not only for the new Cuban ''trovadores'' but also for many other Latin Americans on the left. It was in this institution that Rodríguez met Pablo Milanés, and Noel Nicola, who along with Rodriguez would become the most famous nueva trova singers and composers.

In 1969, for almost five months, he worked as part of the crew on the fishing boat Playa Girón, and during this fertile episode he wrote 62 songs, among which are the famous "Ojalá" and "Playa Girón." The lyrics and music of these songs became a book named ''Canciones del Mar''. In 1976, he decided to join Cuban troops in Angola, playing for the soldiers.

After more than 40 years of artistic work, Rodríguez has now written a vast number of songs and poems (said to be between 500 and more than one thousand), many of which have never been set to music and probably never will be. Although his musical knowledge has been continuously increasing (counting among his teachers the famous Cuban composer Leo Brouwer), he is more widely praised for the poetry in his songs than for the accompanying music. His lyrics are a staple of leftist culture throughout the whole Spanish-speaking world, and he has been banned from the media during several of the dictatorial regimes that ruled Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

His debut album was ''Dias y Flores'', launched in 1975. ''Al Final de Este Viaje'' and ''Cuando Digo Futuro'' feature songs he composed before ''Dias y Flores''. He reached international popularity in the early 1980s with ''Rabo de Nube'' and, in particular, ''Unicornio''. In the early part of his career his work displayed a fair amount of revolutionary optimism. ''Mujeres'', released in 1979, is in contrast a romantic and highly intimist album. In the middle of his career, Silvio Rodriguez experimented with sounds and rhythms departing from his trademark acoustic guitar, accompanied by the group Afrocuba (e.g. in ''Causas y Azares''). At maturity, Silvio Rodriguez thoroughly purified his sound through a return to acoustic guitar, great care and sophistication in the voice, and exclusive control of the production process from beginning to end. His lyrics became more introspective, at times even self-absorbed or self-justifying, expressing melancholic longings about the shortcomings of real-life socialism in Cuba while vindicating idealism and revolutionary hope amongst the youth. The trilogy, called ''Silvio'', ''Rodriguez'', and ''Dominguez'' (his first name, his father's last name, his mother's last name) displays sound artistic talent. The doubts, absent in the early part of his career, also correspond to the fall of communism worldwide and the so-called Special Period in Cuba. An unnoticed recurrent theme in the lyrics of the early part of his career is that of death, particularly although not only as associated with guerrilla warfare. In contrast to the explicitness of his early songs and political positions, there was a displacement of emphasis in his later years toward fantasy and dreams. Both, however, are about an alternative that is not present but is called for, or what Laclau would call a longing for a "missing fullness". This is true politically, romantically, and existentially. In a similar way, the unusual confessional tone of many of his songs allows for an unorthodox combination of transgression, eroticism, longing, and at times (probably accurate) self-deprecation in many of his lyrics.

The entire work of Silvio Rodriguez offers an intimate and introspective window into the life cycle of the artist. If the lyrics of the early part of his career are about revolutionary enthusiasm, love encounters and disappointments, as well as sensual desire, and if the middle-aged Silvio is more self-questioning, often looking backward; his most recent albums, such as ''Cita Con Angeles'', talk in part about his life as a grandfather and has a certain focus on children, while ''Erase Que Se Era'' is the release (with all the means that come with being an established artist) of songs written early in his youth but never previously recorded. ''Mariposas'' also featured two classics composed in his youth.

Silvio Rodriguez stands out in the Spanish-speaking world for the intimacy and subtlety of his lyrics, as well as for his acoustic melodies and "chord picking." He is particularly popular amongst intellectual circles of the left in Latin America and Spain. He has also often served as Cuban cultural emissary in events of solidarity, whether in Chile (''Silvio Rodriguez in Chile'', 1991) or Argentina (En Vivo en Argentina, recorded in 1984), both massive concerts given shortly after the fall of the right-wing dictatorships. Cuban flags are always conspicuous during his concerts in the crowd.

In 2007, he received a doctorate ''honoris causa'' from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru. (Lima, Peru).

Rodriguez has been a major influence on many folk artists, including the Swedish artist José González.

U.S. Appearance

Discography

References

External links

Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Cuban male singers Category:Cuban musicians Category:Cuban communists Category:Cuban people of Spanish descent