Albita

Cuban music has never been hipper than in the hands of Albita. She is a musical maverick, a political renegade, a suave diva of Cuban song in tailored suits and slicked-back hair. An instant sensation since her arrival in Miami in 1993, Albita has rekindled the passion of the Cuban exile community with roots music steeped in the rhythmic spirituality of the Afro-Cuban tradition. Now Albita is seducing the world with her first US album, No Se Parece A Nada (Unlike Anything Else), on Crescent Moon/Epic Records.

Albita's music honors Cuba's past even as it charges forward. She infuses traditional Cuban rhythms with modern arrangements, fresh poetry and a hipster's flair. On stage, Albita is a study in smoldering sensuality and daring rakishness, making audiences swoon with her potent voice and her electric moves. Watch her hips dissolve into a polyrhythmic son, and you'll understand why her reputation as an intoxicating performer has preceded the release of No Se Parece A Nada.

In Cuba, Albita was credited for reviving styles of indigenous country music that had gone out of fashion before she was born, giving a contemporary twist to guajiras and sones--folk music melded with the island's Spanish and African influences. She was a retro pied piper, drawing out reluctant kids who, like herself came of age rocking to contraband Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath records.

Albita Rodriguez, age 33, was born into Cuban music, the daughter of country music performers. Her parents bought her first guitar when she was 15, introducing her to punto guajiro, a guitar-plucked tune with improvised lyrics born in the Cuban countryside, and to son, the polyrhythmic Cuban genre that was long ago exported to the world and subsequently gave rise to today's internationally popular salsa.

By the time she was 19, Albita was the youngest performer on Cuba's television showcase, the weekly "Palmas y Cañas", which is akin the United States' Hee-Haw. Albita's own generation scoffed at the show a throwback for the old folks, but she never have up on the music her parents taught her.

Albita was country when country wasn't cool. She and her band were a bunch of young kids passionately playing their grandparents' music in torn jeans and studded wristbands. "I was well-known in Cuba", Albita recalls today, "but I wasn't old-fashioned, even though I always tried to modernize it." But Albita managed the famed Tropicana. Her first album, Habra Musica Guajira, released on the state label Egrem in 1988, sold more copies on the international market than any other Cuban record. As "official" artists, Albita y Su Grupo were permitted to travel to music festivals in Europe and Latin America, headlining for popular acts like Juan Luis Guerra y 4.40 and Oscar de Leon.

In 1991 Albita was offered a major recording contract in Colombia, for which the Cuban government allowed her to live abroad. The singer recorded two more albums which sold widely through Colombia and South America, but she was still beholden to Cuba, which controlled her music and took a huge percentage of her earnings.

In April 1993, at the height of their career, Albita y Su Grupo finally decided to break away. They set up a visit to a recording studio in Mexico, went to the US border and casually walked over the bridge into El Paso, Texas (the action was described by one Miami journalist as a "cold bucket of ice water falling on Fidel Castro's head.") Upon hearing the news of Albita's defection, Miami's dynamic Cuban community burst with excitement, anxious to possess the priceless jewel that had slipped loose from Castro's crown. From an unpretentious stage in tiny Cuban restaurant, her performances attracted the spotlight of international attention to the local music scene.

Albita's perpetually-packed performances at Little Havana's Centro Vasco have attracted a trendy following of South Beach club hoppers, jet-setters, including such celebrities as Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, Liza Minelli, Marisa Tomei, Billy Baldwin, Rosie O'Donnell, Cindy Crawford and Gianni Versace. In 1994, shortly after music mogul Emilio Estefan and his wife Gloria caught her Centro Vasco act, he signed Albita to his Epic- distributed Crescent Moon label. Estefan's mission is to turn Miami into the Motown of Latin sound. Albita figures prominently in the equation.