Lágrimas Negras

Diego El Cigala's "Lágrimas Negras" — Black Tears — is one of the landmark cross-cultural recordings of the early twenty-first century, pairing a Gypsy flamenco cantaor from Madrid with the legendary Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés (then in his eighties and in exile in Stockholm), and discovering that flamenco and Cuban son occupy the same emotional territory through completely different routes. The song itself is a classic of the Cuban repertoire, and Valdés plays it in a style that carries the memory of Havana in the 1950s — the rhythmic elegance, the sophisticated harmony, the lightness of touch. El Cigala sings it as if it has always been flamenco, his nasal, microtonal delivery ornamenting the melody in ways the original never anticipated and absolutely cannot resist. The recording was made live in the studio, the two musicians responding to each other in real time, and that immediacy is audible in every bar. What makes it transcend the concept of "fusion" is that neither artist compromises — Valdés plays Cuban piano; El Cigala sings flamenco; they discover each other's music has always been about the same thing: the impossibility of forgetting what you have lost.