Richmond’s Cuban Spectacular celebrates 20 years
Arts
Thirty-nine years ago, music professor Mike Davison began his role as head of the jazz and trumpet programs at the University of Richmond. That same year, he created UR’s Jazz Ensemble. By 2000, he began hosting the Cuban Spectacular — an annual University of Richmond Jazz Ensemble performance celebrating Cuban music. His office walls are adorned with posters from the past 20 years of the multimedia event.
“The first event in 2000 was kind of thrown together,” he recalled. “We didn’t have the full big band.”
Offered as part of the Department of Music’s Free Concert Series, the Spectacular has come a long way. This year’s event included a jazz ensemble directed by Davison, Latin dancers, and professional musicians, including tenor saxophonist Tom Christensen, who has performed on Broadway for more than two decades.
On a large screen on stage, archival videos of Havana in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra, and Motown performers, including the Jackson 5, played in the background. The show illustrated the musical connection between salsa, mambo, jazz, and Motown.
“Mambo is a music which combines Cuban rhythms, basically Afro-Caribbean rhythms, with American jazz and popular music,” Davison said. “That's the kind of music I play, and that’s what the show was about.”
He recalled the heyday of mambo, when people would pack the Palladium Ballroom in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. “This was then a segregated United States, but there everybody danced with everybody,” Davison said. “It didn't matter your gender, color, size, or age. All they cared about was the music coming off the stage.”
Davison has traveled to Cuba more than 50 times over the past 30 years to study the music. He often walks with his trumpet and gets spontaneously asked to play at clubs in Havana. He is widely regarded as an expert in the genre.
He and collaborator and fellow musician Ed Tillett, a former public television and radio broadcaster, have created two documentaries about the music of Cuba — Cuba: Rhythm in Motion and The Sound of Santiago. They bring musical instruments to the children in Cuba and teach them how to play.
Davison was the first American to play in the Santiago de Cuba Jazz Festival and to play a classical concerto with the local orchestra. “Today, I know Havana almost better than I know my hometown.” It’s a surprising turn of events for someone who grew up in Wisconsin, what he jokingly calls “the hotbed of Cuban music and Latin American rhythms,” knowing that it’s anything but.
“Today, I know Havana almost better than I know my hometown," said Music Professor Mike Davison.
Lynda Buechel and Edwin Roa performed the mambo, salsa, and swing at this year's event.
Davison was at the Eastman School of Music (part of the University of Rochester) when he landed a gig with a salsa band in the mid-1970s. He had not played Latin American music before and was in for a surprise. He explained that most popular music is organized in three or four beats, with the first beat always the most important. In Latin American music, by contrast, “nothing happens on one. And so, it was like, Whoa!” he said. “So that was my first taste of it.”
Davison conducted the jazz ensemble in April’s spectacular, opening with Victor López’s “Sabor de Cuba (Taste of Cuba).” The crowd cheered when student Ryan Thompson performed “Fly Me to the Moon” in a voice that evoked Sinatra. Other highlights included trumpet players who entertained from the balconies on Davison's arrangement of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and Grammy-nominated singer-actress Desirée Roots Centeoio sang the Aretha Franklin classic “Respect.”
Dancers Lynda Buchel and Edwin Roa performed the mambo, salsa, and swing.
At the heart of the show were Cuban-inspired arrangements, including Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” as a cha-cha and Davison's salsa version of "Thriller."
“The show was inventive and creative. It was nostalgic music but with a twist,” said concert-goer Pat Tabb. Her husband Randy Tabb, a 1977 Richmond Law alum, said, “It was a walk down memory lane. We’ll be back next year for sure.”