When Juan Formell was born in Havana on August 2, 1942, Cuban music possessed a prodigious wealth of traditions, yet they existed in separate worlds: son held its rural throne, feeling lingered in the shadows of the bolero, and jazz remained viewed with suspicion by a select few. Sixty-eight years later, when he died in 2014, Formell left behind a body of work that had established a new tradition\u2014one without which Cuba\u2019s sonic landscape cannot be imagined without the imprint of Los Van Van. Musicologist Laura Vilar captures it with a precise image: \u201cFormell achieved what seemed impossible: he made a popular dance orchestra think like an avant-garde ensemble without ever losing the pulse of the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Formell was not a child prodigy but rather a young man who grew up surrounded by records by Arsenio Rodr\u00edguez and Cachao\u2019s jam sessions, with one ear tuned to the radio and the other to the conversations of musicians who frequented his father\u2019s home, including his father, the musician Francisco Formell. Before turning twenty, he was already working as a bassist in the orchestra led by Pedro J\u00fastiz (Peruch\u00edn), and soon afterward joined the legendary band of Carlos Faxas. Those years of intense apprenticeship, between cabarets and Radio Progreso studios, shaped a question that would follow him for decades: why should Cuban dance music limit itself to repeating formulas when the country itself was changing so rapidly?<\/p>\n
The answer came on December 4, 1969, when he founded Los Van Van with a repertoire that bewildered critics and dancers alike. That first lineup featured violins, cello, flute, and a rhythm section that fused the foundation of son with patterns from contemporary music. Formell introduced the electric guitar, the electric bass with an unprecedented melodic role, trombones influenced by rock, and, above all, the concept that would become his signature: a rhythmic structure built on overlapping irregular accents, inspired by the patterns of chang\u00fc\u00ed from Guant\u00e1namo that he had heard as a child. Researcher Jos\u00e9 Reyes Fort\u00fan argues that songo is not a genre but rather a way of thinking musically\u2014a method that allowed Formell to incorporate any influence without ever losing a profoundly Cuban sound.<\/p>\n
That ability to integrate explains the central paradox of his legacy: Los Van Van became Cuba\u2019s most popular band precisely because it was also its most experimental. While other groups repeated proven formulas, Formell wrote pieces such as \u201cChirr\u00edn chirr\u00e1n\u201d (1974) and \u201cEl baile del buey cansao\u201d (1978), works that demanded from dancers a new perception of rhythm and movement. Choreographer and critic Rosario C\u00e1rdenas has noted that he \u201ceducated the ears and feet of three generations of Cubans. He forced them to dance off-beats, to anticipate accents where none were expected, to listen to silence. In his own field, he was a radical and joyful educator.\u201d<\/p>\n
The phenomenon extends far beyond music itself. Formell\u2019s lyrics created a social chronicle of Cuba over four decades without resorting to propaganda or moralizing. From the everyday irony of \u201cLa Habana no aguanta m\u00e1s\u201d to the despair disguised as rumba in \u201cSomos cubanos,\u201d from the playful eroticism of \u201cQue no, que no\u201d to the generational tenderness of \u201cPor encima del nivel,\u201d Formell portrayed the dreams, hardships, and daily resilience of his contemporaries through a language that blended colloquial speech with streetwise lyricism.<\/p>\n
Poet and essayist V\u00edctor Fowler, in a study on the relationship between popular music and literature in Cuba, states that \u201cFormell belongs to a rare lineage of chroniclers who transformed the danceable refrain into a vehicle for exploring national identity. His songs are part of the canon of contemporary Cuban oral tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not everyone understood the scope of his vision in the early years. Certain musical traditionalists accused Los Van Van of \u201cdiluting\u201d tradition with foreign elements, a criticism Formell dismissed with the same ironic elegance that characterized his songwriting. He continued incorporating synthesizers in the 1980s, flirting with hip-hop in the 1990s, and engaging with reggaeton in the first decade of the 21st century, convinced that Cuban identity was not a museum piece to be protected but a living organism that breathes with the changes of its time. Musicologist and National Music Award winner Alicia Vald\u00e9s defines him this way: \u201cFormell did not modernize Cuban music; he understood that Cuban music itself was a modernizing force. That intuition sets him apart from any imitator.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although it is tempting to view Formell\u2019s career as a straightforward triumphal arc, that would be an unfair simplification. His life was marked by the hardships of the Special Period, the diaspora of essential musicians\u2014such as Pedro Calvo, whose temporary departure in the 1990s wounded the group\u2019s sound\u2014the aesthetic debates with younger generations, and, above all, the daily challenge of sustaining a fourteen-member musical machine in a country where material hardship was always present.<\/p>\n
Even so, Juan Formell never stopped composing, rehearsing, or refining arrangements until the early hours of the morning. Art historian Graciela Pogolotti has emphasized this ethical dimension of his work: \u201cIn a context where so many things were falling apart, Formell embodied the determination to pursue excellence. His discipline was not rigidity, but rather a form of faith in the value of craftsmanship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thirteen years after his death and as another anniversary of his birth is celebrated, Los Van Van\u2019s music continues to resonate on every corner of the island and in every Cuban community abroad. Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect is the survival of his method. Songo did not remain a museum artifact; it permeated the ways of creating timba, the explorations of young musicians such as Alain P\u00e9rez, the Afro-Cuban jazz movement, and even certain areas of Latin pop that remain unaware of their debt to it. The question Formell posed in the 1960s\u2014how to sound Cuban without repeating oneself, how to remain contemporary without losing one\u2019s roots\u2014remains the central question of Cuban music today. And the answers, fortunately for everyone, are still far from definitive.<\/p>\n
Juan Formell\u2019s work did not close a chapter; it kept open the possibility of imagining Cuban identity as a territory without sealed borders, a place where tradition does not look toward the ground but toward the horizon.<\/p>\n
Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Juan Formell\u2019s work did not close a chapter; it kept open the possibility of imagining Cuban identity as a territory without sealed borders, a place where tradition does not look toward the ground but toward the horizon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5191,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1192],"ppma_author":[14],"class_list":["post-5190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-specials","tag-juan-formell"],"authors":[{"term_id":14,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"lazaro-hernandez-rey","display_name":"L\u00e1zaro Hern\u00e1ndez Rey","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5192,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190\/revisions\/5192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5190"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radioenciclopedia.cu\/cultural-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=5190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}