"Every time I talk about this, I say: when the singer is singing, he must be respected, you must be able to hear what he's saying. You can't put a trombone and a drum up there, and a microphone on the drum, microphones on everybody. You can't hear what he's saying"
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Compay Segundo is arguing for something that sounds technical but is really moral: the singer deserves space. In an era when live music was getting louder, more amplified, more crowded with gear, he treats intelligibility as a kind of respect. You dont just drown a voice by accident; you choose a hierarchy, and he wants the human story at the top.
The repetition of "you must" gives the line a bandstand authority, like an elder correcting the room. Hes not theorizing about sound; hes policing a social contract. Son and traditional Cuban ensemble music are built on the voice carrying narrative, flirtation, pain, jokes, neighborhood gossip. If you cant hear the words, the song becomes decorative rhythm, a postcard version of the genre. His complaint about "a microphone on the drum" is almost comic in its specificity, but the target is bigger than one overzealous sound engineer: modern production that treats every element as equal, then solves the resulting mess with volume.
Context matters. Compay came to global fame late, as part of the Buena Vista Social Club wave that reintroduced pre-revolutionary styles to international audiences. Those tours placed intimate, lyric-driven music on large stages built for rock logistics. His insistence on clarity is also a defense against cultural translation by spectacle: dont let the arrangements or the technology exoticize the music into texture. Let the singer speak.
The repetition of "you must" gives the line a bandstand authority, like an elder correcting the room. Hes not theorizing about sound; hes policing a social contract. Son and traditional Cuban ensemble music are built on the voice carrying narrative, flirtation, pain, jokes, neighborhood gossip. If you cant hear the words, the song becomes decorative rhythm, a postcard version of the genre. His complaint about "a microphone on the drum" is almost comic in its specificity, but the target is bigger than one overzealous sound engineer: modern production that treats every element as equal, then solves the resulting mess with volume.
Context matters. Compay came to global fame late, as part of the Buena Vista Social Club wave that reintroduced pre-revolutionary styles to international audiences. Those tours placed intimate, lyric-driven music on large stages built for rock logistics. His insistence on clarity is also a defense against cultural translation by spectacle: dont let the arrangements or the technology exoticize the music into texture. Let the singer speak.
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| Topic | Music |
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