Felix Cabrera

Felix Cabrera is really a rarity: a blues-oriented vocalist, harmonica participant, and composer who spent the majority of his pre-teen years in Cuba. The bilingual Cabrera, who today lives in NEW YORK, isn’t a blues purist; not really everything he will adheres to a normal 12-club blues framework, and he provides mixed the blues with components of rock and roll, spirit, funk, and Afro-Cuban music. But blues is certainly his main concentrate, and it really isn’t each day that certain encounters a Cuban musician would you what Cabrera will. That isn’t to state that he’s the very first Cuban musician who brought the sensation from the blues to his function. There were a lot of Cuban jazz performers who used the feeling from the blues — Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, among numerous others — and there were many Cuban salsa performers who were inspired by spirit, funk, or jazz. But a Cuban musician who, like Cabrera, in fact includes a blues orientation may be the exception rather than the rule. Further, one rarely finds someone in the blues circuit who includes Afro-Cuban components just how that Cabrera includes them; sometimes, Cabrera tasks a vibe that brings to brain Carlos Santana carrying out “Dark Magic Girl” or “Bad Ways.” However when Cabrera applies Afro-Cuban components, he does therefore in a simple fashion, and several of his affects aren’t Latin performers. Cabrera’s long set of non-Latin affects, immediate or indirect, runs from Buddy Man and Muddy Waters to Paul Butterfield, Albert Ruler, Charlie Musselwhite, and Jimi Hendrix. Also, periodically Cabrera brings to brain War, an excellent ‘70s funk/spirit band that acquired definite salsa/Afro-Cuban affects and could end up being quite bluesy sometimes; a few of Cabrera’s harmonica solos possess suggestions of Lee Oskar, whose unique harmonica graced a lot of War’s main hits back the ‘70s. Given birth to in Havana, Cuba in 1949, Cabrera was 12 when, in 1961, he relocated to Miami, a favorite destination for Cubans after that and today. But unlike many Cuban immigrants, he didn’t stay in South Florida; in 1964, a 15-year-old Cabrera relocated north to Union Town, NJ, that is where he significantly experienced the blues (together with already preference salsa/Afro-Cuban music, rock and roll and R&B). In 1974, Cabrera and guitarist Arthur Neilson (a regular collaborator over time) co-founded the A Teach Blues Music group, which preferred a Chicago-minded blues audio but performed around northern NJ and NEW YORK. By the first ‘80s, Cabrera experienced left NJ for N.Con.C., where he created a band known as Felix & the Havanas in 1984. Throughout their five-year operate, Felix & the Havanas opened up for main performers such as for example Dr. John, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Wilson Pickett. It had been through the ‘80s that Cabrera documented his first recording, Next, that was accompanied by his second recording, Cu-Bop, Cu-Blues, in the past due ‘90s. In 2001, Cabrera’s third recording, Pressure Cooker, premiered on Fountainblue Entertainment, and his 4th recording, For Green, arrived on Si Information in 2004.