Word: segundo
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Died. Compay Segundo, 95, troubadour and godfather of traditional Cuban music who achieved late-life fame for his appearance on the Grammy Award-winning 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club and in a starring role in the subsequent documentary; in Havana. The album reintroduced the world to Segundo and other aging, all-but-forgotten masters of son, a style that layers Spanish melodies over African rhythms. Segundo, with his ever present cigar and Panama hat, played around the world and recorded two more albums. "The flowers of life come to everyone," he said. "Mine arrived after...
...Segundo came to see us on occasion because our opening band was often Los Nietos de Compay Segundo (The Grandsons of Compay Segundo). He even sat in with our group, his baritone a graveled wonder as it worked through the peasant songs he was so famous for. But he was not there to dote on his grandkids or to pass stern lessons to the next generation of musician, as would have been his right. Rather, he was there to have a good time. He drank well and laughed often, smoked constantly and chatted up everyone who came to wish...
...once before that summer of 1999, several months earlier. He had stood 12 feet tall, on a movie screen in San Francisco, taking his unlikely star turn as himself in Wim Wender's documentary about the Buena Vista Social Club, the band that a year earlier had won Segundo a Grammy and generally elevated him and a handful of his compatriots from obscure relics of Cuba's golden age to international superstars, icons of the newly rediscovered grace and warmth behind the iron veil of the Cuban embargo...
...Watching him hold court on the terrazzo patio, it wasn't lost on me that the origin of his birth would probably have kept him out of such places in pre-Castro Cuba. Segundo, born Maximo Francisco Repilado Mu?oz in Siboney, Cuba, was the grandson of a freed slave. When fame came knocking on his door again, I think Segundo did not mind becoming another feather in Castro's utopian hat, adding poetry and charm to the drier accomplishments of universal health care, equal job opportunity, and subsidized education...
...brutal crackdown on dissidents and independent journalists. Hijacked crop dusters and military planes are landing with increased frequency at the airport in Key West. In April, three young men who had hijacked an aging ferryboat in Havana Bay were executed by firing squad. This week, just days after Compay Segundo's death, two separate boat hijackings left 3 dead and a 10-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to the head. On Wednesday, Celia Cruz, the Cuban-born "Queen of Salsa" whom Castro barred from ever returning to Cuba, died in exile in New Jersey...