MikePadgett.com

At the time of writing, the Cuban singer is seventy eight years old and when she wants to, she can still belt them out. There just wasn’t much cause to do so this evening.

Before a rather small crowd in Brussels’ crummy Cirque Royale, which these days shares more in common with Morley Con Club than it does with the Big Top, Portuondo tried to raise the temperature to lukewarm and more or less succeeded to the relief of many slightly embarassed spectators.

Her band, who could have well have done a residency at the Morley Con Club, was very patchy and seemed unrehearsed. Consistently incapable of matching Portuondo’s improvisational approach to standard songs, they struggled as individual musicians to pull together. The pianist bashed away at his Steinway, not without skill, but hopelessly without context; the guitarist and percussionist were equivocal at best; the double-bassist, to be fair was a swan surrounded by ducks. The gum-chewing drummer, plucked from Ipanema and probably handy with a beach ball if not a drumkit, was so self-absorbed that he may as well have been playing at a different gig.

Omara Portuondo, wearing what looked like a pink dressing gown and pyjama combo, seemed so disconnected at times that it felt like visiting your slightly mad granny. Either the star of Buena Vista Social Club was coasting through a tough night and a wooden crowd, or she needs to sack the band and take a well-earned holiday. And I for one wouldn’t blame her at all.

• Director: Wim Wenders
• Germany, 1999
• 

Ry Cooder visited Cuba in 1996 to record sessions for an intended Afro-Cuban collaboration. The Africans never made it out of Mali leaving Cooder and World Circuit’s Nick Gold high and dry. What followed was pure serendipity: within three days Juan de Marcos González managed to put together an extraordinary collective of musicians whose output became the Buena Vista Social Club album.

Cooder has been a frequent collaborator on Wenders’ films and the latter agreed to shoot the documentary on digital in 1998, with the former becoming a sort of central character. One might argue that with such colourful subjects against the dilapidated, colonial Havana backdrop, the film could have made itself.

The digital format gives the documentary a welcome rawness and interviews with each of the main Buena Vista players sets the scene for a triumphant coda in which these humble old gents gaze in awe at New York, most having never before left Cuba. A deserving Oscar winner even if rather uneven at times.