A Fine Romance: Malena Burke Sings to Meme Solis
A musical love story recorded.
Meme Solis has known Malena Burke since she was a baby and he was a teenager playing piano for her mother, Elena Burke, one of Cuba’s greatest artists of all time.
“And one of the most important singers from the Americas,” Solis says with emphasis, talking to me on the phone from his apartment in Manhattan. Elena Burke (pronounced burkay), was one of the world’s leading jazz vocalists, a modern bolero singer who was dubbed the señora sentimento (Mrs. Feeling) after the American-influenced Cuban style that came out of bohemian gatherings in Havana in the 1940s and became known as filin.
In the fifties, as her fame was cresting, Elena Burke sent for Solis at the Hotel Hilton, where the young pianist had a gig with the crooner Fernando Albuerne’s orchestra. Solis’ first and high-profile professional job had been with the bolero star Olga Guillot, who needed someone to fill in for her pianist for a concert in the town of Santa Clara, where he was known as a kid who could play. It was Guillot who told him he should go to Havana.
“It was the nightlife capital. There wasn’t a scene like that anywhere.”
By the time he arrived, Guillot had spread the word. “I performed with Elena in the cabarets, the theaters, on television,” Solis remembers. “I was not only accompanying her on piano: she gave me a chance to sing,” recalls Solis, who has been called “the ultimate pop icon” to come out of Cuba.
Together they recorded Elena’s second album, La Burke Canta, in 1959. The album includes “Ebb Tide,” which had been recorded by Frank Sinatra the previous year, and three songs written by Solis, who has since gone on to write at least 500.
“I’ve probably lost track of how many,” he admits, adding, “Above all they are romantic songs.” Of that, there is no doubt.
Among the songs he wrote that Elena Burke performed live back then (and later was recorded by Guillot) was “Cuando me hablan de amor” (“When They Talk to Me About Love”), which is the opening track on the album Malena Burke canta a Meme Solis, Vol. 1 (Malena Burke Sings to Meme Solis, Vol. 1). The set includes twelve songs, half of the number that the pair recorded at Miami’s Criteria Studios. The album is a tribute to Solis, and also to the musical dynasty of Elena, Malena and Malena’s daughter Lena Burke, who produced the album. It was released late last year, followed by a concert in Miami. Last month, a sold-out show by Solis in Madrid featured Malena as a special guest. A second album of recordings from the session is still to come.
“This album captures a sentiment that should not die,” Malena told me. “It had to be recorded. This is the album that Meme deserves.”
As a young girl in Cuba, Malena studied violin and guitar. She debuted professionally with her mother in 1980 in the Salon Parisien at the Hotel Nacional. She was a spotlight performer at the Tropicana club and with its traveling company over the next decade, and she became a figure for a new generation in Cuba when she recorded with seminal timba band NG la Banda.
As heard on Malena Burke canta a Meme Solis, Elena passed on to her a talent for the wringing interpretation of torch songs, a deep and wide voice and a gift for phrasing, a throaty laugh, and the confidence that belongs to an artist who is a performer by birthright.
Listen to Malena Burke canta a Meme Solis, Vol 1:
“A Moraima,” the second track, is dedicated to Moraima Secada, another of the great female singers of Cuba who performed with Solis. Together with Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo and her sister Haydée, Secada was a member of the Cuarteto D’Áida, the group led by pianist Áida Diestro. Superlative singers and hard-living women, their presence still burns in the vintage videos of the group on YouTube. They were riot grrls of their era.
“Moraima was one of the great artistic loves of my life,” says Solis, who played with the group for a brief time. Secada, who died in 1984 when she was just 54 years old, was the first member of Solis’ own vocal harmony group, the Cuarteto Meme Solis, which he formed in 1960.
Secada later left for new opportunities; Solis’ group continued as Los Meme, and in the mid-sixties, they were getting groovy. Los Meme made it big with “Otro Amanecer” (“Another Dawn”), which became a hit after the group performed it on TV.
“We were idols for the young people,” Solis recalls. “What we were doing was new.” Meme liked The Beatles. He let his hair get shaggy and wore a vinyl jacket, details that increased his star appeal for teens but also drew the authorities’ attention. At Cuba’s Veradero Song Festival in 1966, the band performed a song by the composers Piloto and Vera called “Solo tú y yo.” Solis arranged it with a rock-and-roll backbeat.
Solis later said that the audience went crazy for the band’s performance and that reaction should have clinched the song contest for them. But his band didn’t win. Like some other artists at the time, notably the vocal group Los Zafiros, Los Meme sounded out of synch with the idealistic nueva trova folk movement that was in favor with government culture officials. In 1969, as he was pushed out of the spotlight, Solis decided to leave Cuba. But he was not granted an exit visa, and his career was effectively cancelled in Havana. So began an almost twenty year period of ostracism, a purgatory in which he was a non-entity in Cuba but could not leave. Solis later told a journalist for Miami’s El Nuevo Herald that for the first part of the 1970s, he alternated between crying and getting out his emotions by writing songs.
By 1980, Solis was putting all of his energy into leaving the country. The chance didn’t come until November 1987, when his efforts to call attention to his cause reached Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González, who negotiated with Fidel Castro for Solis’ freedom, along with that of others who had been branded political dissidents. He left for Madrid. In 1988, he gave a concert in Miami that the Herald described as “a night of songs, memories and tears” during which a generation of Cuban exiles in Miami “relived its youth,” singing along to his songs, as they still do when he performs. He lived in Miami for several years before settling in New York City.
The album with Malena reflects his personal journey and the accompanying evolution of his music.
“My songs became more optimistic once I got out of Cuba,” says Solis, now 85, who in concert appears impeccably dressed in a white dinner jacket and dress pants with patent leather shoes. His piano playing and his voice do not falter. “My music always has a romantic vibe, although I’m always updating it, and and I’ve taken different things from different countries.”
In Manhattan, the city of George Gershwin, he has indulged his love of musicals and the great American songbook. After first arriving there, he wrote “El Olvido,” which he says is about “a person who is able to fulfill his desire to forget some of the things that have happened in his life.”
He wrote “Ya se un día volveré” (I Know I’ll Return Someday”) after that first encounter with his public in Miami. “I’ve never gone back [to Cuba] but I wrote the song,” he says with a dry laugh. “You can’t help but feel nostalgia for the country where you’re from even if you don’t want to.”
Malena Burke relocated to Miami in 1995, where she quickly became a an iconic performer at Cuban clubs in the city like Hoy Como Ayer and continued to record. Malena and Meme were reunited.
“Meme had the greatest chemistry with my granma,” Lena says of Elena, who died in Cuba in 2002. “When my mother got here [to Miami] she and Meme started to perform together, and they’ve been getting together to perform for 30 years. She’s been singing his songs her whole life.”
“They have this connection that is beyond artistic, it’s familial – it’s something very beautiful.” Malena Burke canta a Meme Solis, Vol. 1 is the first full-length album they have recorded as a duo.
Lena, who early on in her career made appearances accompanying her mother on piano, has forged her own way as a well-known Latin pop singer and songwriter. She makes her debut as a producer with this album.
“I believe in authenticity,” she says. “I didn’t want to make them sound ‘modern.’ I didn’t want to kill their essence in any way. I just wanted them to be themselves.
“Younger people who listen to it will get that,” she adds. “This is music that you feel. You can’t put an age to it.”
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I really love the analogy of D'Aida's as the riot grrrl of their time. Thanks for this piece that claim an essential part of our cancionero.