His work has been honored with CableACE, Independent Spirit and ALMA Awards and honored with the Raúl Juliá HOLA Founders Award and the Hispanic Heritage Foundation’s Arts Award. Blades joined the Chick Corea Spanish Heart Band Antidote album and 2019 tour as vocalist.Īs an actor, Blades has played memorable roles in films by such acclaimed directors as Robert Redford, Robert Rodriguez, Spike Lee, Alan Pakula and Jack Nicholson. Blades’s 2017 Salsa Big Band was named the Latin Grammy Album of the Year, and in total, he has won 17 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards. His landmark albums in classic Afro-Cuban salsa are touched with rock, jazz, Pan-Latin and worldwide influences. The ultimate summation of Blades' dramatic vision with Colón's expressive musical abilities, Maestra Vida is ambitious, freewheeling, and celebratory - not an immediate success, but a rewarding listen for those who've heard the six-minute snapshots from Blades' earlier recordings and want to hear the full-length treatment.Latin music icon Rubén Blades was at the center of the New York Salsa Revolution in the 1970s. "La Fiesta" provides some light comedy (it's an instrumental, but with reveling voices in the background) before the couple's son Ramiro is born. "Manuela" is the closest the entire LP comes to straight-ahead salsa, followed by themes for Carmelo the husband and then Manuela the wife, Blades' own mother, Anoland Diaz, taking the vocals for Manuela (who joins her son in a warm duet). The five-minute "Prólogo" introduces the story with an orchestral fanfare and a beginning narration that places the characters in their context. One of the first (and only) salsa operas, Maestra Vida introduced the characters Carmelo and Manuela, a couple whose story, as the narration suggests, could be the story of innumerable descendants of the musicians who appear here. By 1980, Rubén Blades had been a working-class hero for nigh on ten years, singing of everyday life in classics like "Pedro Navaja," but with help from Willie Colón, the two-part epic Maestra Vida ties music and narrated drama like nothing else in his catalog.
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