SONGS FROM A LITTLE BLUE HOUSE (1999): "Formell's sweet and sour vocals and the record's acoustic intimacy bring to mind international singer/songwriters ranging from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young." - Judy Cantor, Miami NewTimes

LAS CALLES del PARAISO (2002):"Las Calles presents a panorama of Cuban musical genres, from comparsa to bolero, woven into a modernist masterpiece. Formell's pellucid guitar and ethereal voice evoke Havana, a cityscape haunted by memory and desire. The poignant, beautiful songs reveal Formell as an imagist whose use of Afro-Cuban tropes connects him to the surrealist painter Wilfredo Lam as much as to Lecuona and troubadour Sindo Garay." -- Al Angeloro, GLOBAL RHYTHM MAGAZINE

CEMETERIES & DESIRE (2005): "A romantic with a heart like a laser beam, Formell deftly mines his Cuban musical heritage to create a set of non-trivial love songs inspired by new Orleans' 'cemeteries and desire'. Like Brazil's Caetaneo Veloso, Formell brings the rumba and bolero up to speed without tarnishing their essence." - R. Gehr, Village Voice

SON RADICAL (2006): "With his smoldering new band, Son Radical, the singer/songwriter/guitarist proves more hard-chargingly adventurous than ever. Instead of parting ways with the traditional Cuban son that spawned his U.S. solo career, he grafts it here with thinking-person's rock; check the refined electric guitar of the instrumentals "Insurrecion" and "Penetracion del Viento," as well as the politically pointed "Testamento," a track whose opening chords are so funky-groovy-jazzy they will have the musically intrepid checking Formell's tour calendar obsessively to see him rip the joint — any joint — up in person."-- Tammy La Gorce, ALL MUSIC GUIDE

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"Son Radical finds Formell backed by two fellow Habanero expats: drummer Jimmy Branly and bassist Carlitos del Puerto. Together they cook up a stunningly sophisticated sound that they call rock en clave. Smart and literate, wistful and playful, as Son Radical draws from a palette that's as much post-rock as it is post-rumba; as influenced by Steely Dan as by Benny More. And songs like "Control Control" and "Amor de Luna" go a long way towards sketching out a space for a new Cuban art music.."  --TP,  SING OUT MAGAZINE spring 2007

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"Arousing admiration with a brilliant display of of electric and acoustic guitar skills, Juan-Carlos joins forces with is two L.A. accomplices to create a very rare product: a truly delightful mixture of rock and son elements. SON RADICAL has managed to utilize traditional Cuban genres a sa point of support to develop a futuristic musical idiom without borders."

-- Luis Tamargo, LATIN BEAT MAGAZINE 11/06

Formell makes music firmly rooted in the Cuban son traditions, but with his new group Son Radical, he throws the clichés and expected mannerisms out the window. His show Saturday night at Helsinki was one of venture, passion and surprise.

The main culprit and catalyst here was Formell's use of the electric guitar. In the context of his melodic songs laced with traditional three-part harmonies and Latin rhythms, Formell took his ax on trips of fantasy, incorporating a lot of stuff that shouldn't have fit, but did. Formell bent strings like Dick Dale, and wasn't afraid to pour on the distortion and reverb, or the occasional Opry lick. Neither was he afraid to go off-rhythm and atonal. Every one of Formell's solos, whether over something resembling a bolero, a son-filin (the venerable son-form that spawned the bossa nova), or a dance-floor-ready rave-up, was a wicked, head-turning masterpiece. There were simply no boundaries. --Paul Rapp, Metroland

Radical Son:

Juan-Carlos Formell: I was raised from birth in the home of my paternal grandparents, and even though my grandfather died when I was very young, his presence permeated the house. He had been a composer, conductor, and arranger — he had written the music for the navy band, and been a director of the police band, as well as the conductor for the Radio CMQ Orchestra and the Havana Philharmonic. So the idea of music as a serious undertaking was an established idea in that house.

Later, my grandmother remarried a much younger man who was a merchant seaman, and he brought me a guitar and taught me Mexican songs. Even though I didn't live with my mother, in a way she influenced me. She had been one of the most well-known nightclub performers in Havana, and when I would visit her, I would hear her sing and also see many of her friends from the world of the Havana cabarets. I fell in love with a type of music called feeling from the 1940s and '50s — it was jazzy, late-night, cool music using guitar and vocals, with progressive harmonies and dissonant chords. I remember seeing the great guitarist/composers of feeling — José Antonio Mendez, Guyun, Froilan, and the great duo Los Compadres, who played guitar and tres [a Cuban guitar-like instrument with six strings doubled in three sets], and the blind guitarist Martin Rojas, who accompanied Omara Portuondo for years. That's what inspired me to play the guitar and compose.

Both. I've actually had several dreams that I was playing with Blind Willie McTell. There's an instrument in traditional Cuban music that's similar, called the laud, but it was too small for me to play comfortably. The first time I played a 12-string, which was a Taylor, I could play some of the lines of Cuban music that are normally played on the laud.

You explained to another interviewer that "the system of Cuba is not a political system; it's a form of mind control." Can you give readers a sense of how severely your artistic expression was restricted by the government-controlled music industry?

It was quite grim. I had no idea how limited the world of Latin music was — of course, it's a subculture here. Also, by the time I arrived, salsa as a movement had effectively died. New York was still defined by the mambo era of the 1950s. It was unthinkable to play Latin music without a piano and a horn section. And contemporary U.S. commercial Latin music was ruled by a narrow formula. It was unthinkable to be saying something.

The first format of Cubalibre, which I began in 1994, was a septet in which I played bass as the lead instrument and had a piano. Later, when I began to write the songs that became [the album] Songs from a Little Blue House, my wife persuaded me to switch to guitar. She said that we could always hire a bass player, but only I could play the songs on the guitar. We dropped the piano and used guitar as the lead instrument. That was in 1996.

Through coincidence, or harmonic convergence, or whatever one might want to call it, the music that I began to write and play in 1995 anticipated the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, which essentially was classics of Cuban son presented in an acoustic format. Everyone in Cuba knew all those songs — some of them were written in the 1920s — but they had no currency, because they were part of a discredited past. Ibrahim Ferrer was shining shoes; Ruben Gonzales didn't own a piano. The re-emergence of this music on the Buena Vista recording was hugely significant and subversive — it was like the re-emergence of spring in the landscape of the Narnian winter.

I think that many people still don't realize that part of the power of that first record was in the resurrection of the guitar and other stringed instruments as the focal point of Hispano/Caribbean music. It was so incredible that the mainstream Latin music business literally overlooked it even as the record was climbing the charts in Billboard. They were completely blindsided when it won the Grammy in the Tropical category — because music with the guitar in the foreground, played by a bunch of old-timers, was unimaginable and unacceptable to them. For decades, the guitar had been virtually eliminated from Tropical music in the United States. It wasn't part of the formula. It's sort of the way the idea of say, "Chinese food" was the chow mein, chop suey, and basic Cantonese menu until fairly recently, but if you were to go to China, you'd find a vast array of regions with different languages, not to mention completely different cuisines.

Cuba produced so many genres of music, but what Cuba exported to the world were just a few forms of piano-based dance music with horn sections. And that music took root here and became a significant style and influence on mainstream popular American music, especially in movies. It's all been wonderfully documented and preserved in so many films, beginning in the 1930s with what was called the rhumba, which was actually the beguine combined with son, then the 1940s had the conga, which is carnival music from Santiago de Cuba (which Mickey Rooney performed brilliantly [in Strike Up the Band]), and followed in the 1950s by the mambo (which was much, much, bigger in the U.S. than in Cuba) and the cha-cha. Meanwhile, in Cuba, the trova, son and bolero — all guitar-based music — flourished, but were unknown in the U.S.

I think that what Juan De Marcos saw in my music was that the son, which really wasn't going anywhere in Cuba — Buena Vista Social Club was a compilation of really old standards, so old that no one in Cuba could believe that the record became a worldwide hit — could flow and flourish again in a new repertoire and with a contemporary feeling. I owe him everything, because up until that night that he came to see me, no one had helped me — no one in the world of American music, and no one from commercial Latin music, who categorized my music as "jazz", which to them is definitely a four-letter word meaning unsalable, and certainly no one from the Cuban exile community. They could not have been less interested.

Juan De Marcos, after seeing my band, called up his label (Nonesuch) — which had released Buena Vista Social Club in the U.S., and got them to come see me. In the wake of that record's huge success, their presence at my shows helped to create the buzz about my music — and six months later, an Armenian musician and record producer, Harold Hagopian, brought BMG to hear me, and I was signed to my first label deal.

It's tremendously flattering to be compared to such great artists, but in reality, I don't know any Brazilian musician who thinks my music sounds Brazilian. I think that music writers in general are so uninformed about Cuban music and its relationship to Cuban literature, that they simply haven't heard the great Cuban guitarists of trova, son, and feeling. I think that what they're saying is that my music doesn't sound like the one or two kinds of percussion-dominated Cuban music they know, which is characterized by raucousness. So, to them, my music isn't "really Cuban". They are categorizing me by the coolness and volume level, which they find has a parallel in bossa nova.

Ironically, as a movement, bossa nova, which became popular in the late 1950s and in the U.S. in the early 1960s, owes a lot to Cuban music in two ways: first, the use of complex harmonies and dissonant chords in the guitar, which feeling was doing in the 1940s — the work of Jose Antonio Mendez has been recorded by many of the bossa nova artists — and second, the events of 1959. That year was such a turning point for Brazilian and Cuban music. On one hand, it's the year of the movie of Black Orpheus with its stupendous music score — it brought Brazilian music to world attention — and it's also the year that the Cuban music industry, along with every other industry in Cuba — shut down, due to the Castro revolution. The constellation of bossa nova rose in the space vacated by Cuban music in the world scene after 1959.

The guitar, for me at this point, is a revolutionary weapon. On the one hand, it refers to and invokes the spirit of the original son and trova — and on the other hand, in the context of Latin music today, where the most unimaginative, imitative, and vulgar use of synthesizers is taken for modernity, I can express something radical and truly modern with the shocking simplicity of a guitar. Don't you think it's interesting that there hasn't ever been a Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Jackson Browne of Spanish language music in this country? Generally, Latin music in the U.S. falls into several camps: the comfortable traditional music, like Norteano, that's sold to its ethnic constituency; the syrupy-overproduced "romantic" music of the Julio Iglesias type; the "barrio music" that presents Hispanics as vaguely menacing delinquents; the anglo-looking Latin pop star who is gringo-ized and made to sing in English; and then the few alternative groups that are trying to do something new — but they don't get on the radio. There's been one great exception recently — Juanes, who is from Colombia and lives in L.A. — he's a songwriter and pop star, and he keeps singing in Spanish.

Are the images of Cuba that you conjure through your music, particularly in your first two records, based on your own memories of growing up, or do they reflect a more collective sense of memory or nostalgia — where you imagine a world based on the stories passed down by people like your grandmother and others?

I feel that in my music I'm channeling the essence of Cuba — the past, present, and future. My music draws from the roots, and employs the tropes of Cuban music, but it's highly individualistic. I found myself doing concept records, which I don't think has been done before in Cuban music. The first record, Songs from a Little Blue House, was a meditation on rural Cuba, which is the source of the national soul, and it's also all about the daytime; the second, Las Calles del Paraiso, was constructed as the soundtrack of an imaginary movie in Havana, and it's all about the night; the third, Cemeteries & Desire, which is all ballads and boleros, is about exile — the love songs are to a people — but don't think it's nostalgia, which is a way of idealizing the past, a form of sentimentality and kitsch. I'm not doing that.

I think of the emotion of my music as pothos, which is an expression of longing for a distant love. You can long for the revelation of the future. The last song on Songs from a Little Blue House uses the pregon, or song of the mango sellers, as a jumping-off point, and ends with an invocation of the future — "Cuba will be free someday, so say my people, my song, and my Obatala, and I declare this before Elegua, so that he'll open the path...don't give up, the day is coming..."

Yes, I was, because there hadn't been a lot of promotion for the record, and the label had ignored my request to present the music as related to Buena Vista Social Club, which it was, and instead, to my great frustration and at times, anger, tried to use the success of my father's 16-piece dance band [Los Van Van] — a type of music that could not be more different than mine — to define me and my work. It was very counterproductive, because, as I told them, my father's fans don't get my music; it's not nearly raucous enough for them. And it was ironic, because my father's record was also nominated that year in the Salsa category, while mine was in the Traditional Tropical category — along with Eliades Ochoa, one of the Buena Vista Social Club members. We did a concert together in New York on Grammy night, and it was wonderful. For me, that was like winning.

They are the twin cradles of popular music in the Western Hemisphere, and they have much more in common than many people realize. To begin with, they were built by the same people. The French Quarter, which is the core of New Orleans, was actually built by the Spanish. At the end of the 18th Century, New Orleans was an outpost of the Spanish empire, whose administrative center was Havana.

These Francophone colonials brought their music with them. The contradanza, the first national dance of Cuba, is derived from French music. The same diaspora gave New Orleans one of its most outstanding musicians: the great pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whose mother was a refugee from St. Domingue. Gottschalk came to prominence using Caribbean rhythms and themes, and he had a profound relationship with Cuban music — he spent a year there giving concerts, and befriended the Cuban composers Espadero and Saumell and helped to get their work published and disseminated.

songs from a little blue house (1999)

produced by John Fischbach

"Juan Carlos Formell is a leading figure among a new breed of Cuban singer-songwriters who draw on the earliest traditions of trova and son." -- Philip Sweeney, The Rough Guide to Cuban Music

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"Formell, who is 35 years old, describes his wonderful debut recording as "the new music of Cuba." He left the island in 1993, but Songs from a Little Blue House is indeed a watershed for fans of Cuban music; the record has a sense of sophistication yet an uncluttered simplicity that will appeal to the Buena Vista Social Club crowd. Formell, who sings as well as plays dazzling guitar and bass on the album, is clearly heir to the spontaneous vocal stylings and ingenious swing of those Grammy-winning old-timers.

"My intention was to create danceable music that you can also sit and listen to, the way Cuban music was in its golden age," he says. "It's an album that makes reference to varied styles of Cuban music, thus it is postmodern. At different moments you can hear different types of folkloric music, charanga, timba. My music takes you a little by surprise." Formell's point of departure is his nation's folk tradition, but he notes that his references are traditional Cuban country genres -- acoustic son and changui -- rather than the Sixties ballads of the island's revolutionary troubadours, whom he believes merely imitated the American protest songs of the same era. While rooted in traditional Cuban genres, Little Blue House is woven with jazz guitar, rolling drums, and horns, as well as acoustic rock riffs. Produced by John Fishbach, who has worked with Stevie Wonder and Carole King, the album was recorded with both American and Cuban musicians, including jazz guitarist Mark Whitfield, saxophonist Mario Rivera (a veteran of the New York salsa scene), Cuban drummer Horacio "el Negro" Hernandez, and folk singer Pedro Pablo Martinez. Sliding smoothly from euphoria to melancholy, or holding steady in between, the music on Little Blue House evokes the emotional rollercoaster that is Cuba, for those who live inside or outside the island, as well as those who have come to know the country and its people well.

The album's resulting soulful synthesis is totally unlike the forced fusion of today's "hot" Latin pop crossover products, and is devoid of musical and textual clichés. Formell's sweet and sour vocals and the record's acoustic intimacy bring to mind international singer/songwriters ranging from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young." - Judy Cantor, Miami New Times

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las calles del paraiso (2002) EMI Latin -  produced by John Fischbach

cemeteries & desire (2005) Narada produced by Juan-Carlos Formell & John Fischbach