At that time, I’d also started to understand a bit more about which Cuban music I liked : Guillermo Portabales, Abelardo Baroso, so a lot of music from the East (the Santiago area). In Celina Gonzalez’s band, there was a musician called Barbarito Torres, and I just had an idea that bringing those musicians together might be interesting. I knew Bassekou Kouyaté and Djelimady Tounkara, and I think I’d heard Djelimady do Cuban style recordings. This record had very strong Cuban influences on it. And maybe the first African record I completely fell in love with was an Orchestra Baobab record, which we eventually found and released later (in 2001) as Pirate’s Choice. Especially in Bamako, in bars and so forth. And then, when I started working with Ali, as I first started going to Mali, you heard Cuban music a lot.
She did country music, but not like American country music, but rural Cuban music… and she was fantastic! We licensed the record from Egrem, the Cuban state company, and anyway I enjoyed that very much and started to listen to bits of Cuban music and I just fell in love with two records by Arsenio Rodriguez, a Cuban musician that became very important in the 1940s.
Well, I had heard bits of Cuban music, but not a lot, when – it was in 1986- Ann and Mary (founders of World Circuit) brought over from Cuba a singer called Celina Gonzalez. After having produced African artists such as Ali Farka Toure or Cheikh Lo, how did you get involved into Cuban music?