Puerto Plata

about

Puerto Plata is a veteran of the guitar tradition of the Dominican Republic, adept in all of its many forms—bolero, merengue, ranchera, mangulina, bachata—and above all, son. Son is a style which is most often associated with Cuba, and soneros all over Latin America owe a tremendous debt to great Cuban groups like El Trio Matamoros, El Septeto Nacional, Los Compadres and Antonio Machín. Nevertheless, the Dominican Republic is home to an unbroken native son tradition, and José Cobles has personally lived a good part of its history. He offers us a taste of the living music of the great soneros which only a contemporary of theirs could give us, yet his interpretations of classic sones and boleros have a particularly Dominican flavor. When he plays merengue, he takes us back to a time, before the dominance of saxophone and accordion, when son, merengue, guaracha and música jíbara were much closer in their nature, being merely different regional variations of the same Afro-Iberian fusion. Born in the resort town of Puerto Plata in 1923, Cobles combines the wisdom of an elder statesman with an astounding vigor and charisma which one would expect of a much younger man. His three uncles were musicians and he recalls Sundays spent at their house in the presence of such legends of Dominican music as composer Juan Lockward and singer Eduardo Brito. His mother died when he was young, and upon the death of his grandmother when he was 16 he went to work as a carpenter for the United Fruit

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