By PETER WATROUS

          HAVANA -- It was in the air: the thrill of the illicit and the new, the
          excitement of discovery and the charge of an encounter with idols.
          And it didn't take place on a baseball field.

          Just after the Baltimore Orioles broke ground by playing a Cuban team
          here, musicians by the score and fans by the thousands poured into the
          Karl Marx Theater on Sunday night in this city's elegant Playa district for
          the Music Bridges concert, the biggest convergence of foreign and
          Cuban musicians since the revolution. Before that came a week of
          impromptu collaborations outdoors and in makeshift studios.

          From the United States came singers like Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett,
          Beth Nielsen Chapman, Joan Osborne, Lisa Loeb, Burt Bacharach and
          more. The Cubans brought together musicians from the folk, rock and
          popular dance music scenes.

          In the end the all-star concert at the Karl Marx flickered and droned, the
          lead-up concerts had people dancing and cheering, and the future of this
          enterprise, musical or otherwise, seemed as hazy and unpredictable as
          anything else involving Cuban-American relations.

          Music Bridges, an organization that specializes in concerts in politically
          sensitive countries, had spent a year and a half pulling together the legal
          and practical permission from the United States and Cuba.

          Music Bridges, with its 40-some participating American musicians, had
          come to Havana and taken more than 120 rooms in the Hotel Nacional,
          overlooking the ocean.

          The organization filled the sixth-floor executive offices and the
          presidential suite, along with three rooms that had been converted into
          recording studios. For a week Cuban and American musicians were to
          collaborate on songs and to present the works on the final night in a long
          concert at the Karl Marx Theater.

          At events around the city American musicians were getting a feel for the
          power of Cuban music and its bacchanalian spirit. In the wee hours of
          Thursday night at La Cecilia nightclub, Michael Franti, a rapper and band
          leader from San Francisco, mounted the stage with Cuba's version of the
          Rolling Stones, Los Van Van, a 30-year-old institution playing
          hard-rocking dance music.

          Franti started rapping and repeating a phrase, and Pedrito, one of the
          group's singers, entered the fray; the two swapped nonsense syllables,
          but with rhythm. It would have brought down the roof, but La Cecilia is
          outdoors. Members of the audience -- made up of faranduleros, the
          habitues of Havana's night life scene, Music Bridges staff members and
          performers, and journalists -- were impressed and they danced.

          On Saturday at the Charlie Chaplin Theater in the Vedado district,
          Americans and what remains of members of Cuba's intellectual culture
          had the chance to hear the Buena Vista Social Club play cha-cha-chas,
          mambos and boleros that have mostly fallen into disregard.

          The performance, which was not part of Music Bridges, offered an
          opportunity to hear music with extreme grace and humor, one of the
          great musical syntheses of the New World, where classical, jazz and
          African music merged into something special. Played by old, weary and
          worn musicians, the music reflected the prerevolution grandeur of Cuban
          society, as does the best architecture of the city, also worn, weary and
          prerevolutionary.

          The American producer of the Buena Vista band, Ry Cooder, who was
          in Cuba for a screening of a new documentary about the group directed
          by Wim Wenders, said of the music: "I've never seen any scene explode
          as quickly as this. That's good, and that's bad."

          Regardless, it was one of the greatest windfalls of positive publicity the
          Cuban government has had in its post-Batista history. Though the
          economic embargo of Cuba, the Helms-Burton Act, leaves a loophole
          for cultural exchange, nothing of this size had been attempted before.

          The Cuban side, which has everything to gain from such exchanges,
          regularly proclaimed its happiness with events like this one; the American
          side was not so sure.

          Though many of the American musicians had barely a clue about either
          Cuban music or Cuban-American relations, the predominant view
          seemed to be that antagonistic relationships between the two countries
          did little for Cubans or Americans. Ms. Raitt, who came fully informed
          and loaded for bear, brought 37 guitars to give away, and a pile of
          medicine.

          "Everybody knows that the embargo the American government has
          placed on Cuba just hurts the Cuban people," Ms. Raitt said. "So I went
          to my guitar company and bought a bunch of guitars at cost, and I'm
          going to give lots away to the music school here, and the rest to people I
          know."

          In the last year Cuba has cracked down on the casual prostitution
          prevalent on the streets and in the dance clubs. Where clubs with live
          music were once almost too numerous to count, now nearly all have been
          closed by the government. One result is that the best bands no longer
          play regularly, and one of the world's great music scenes is moribund.

          Instead, Havana seems to be undergoing renovation for tourists, and Old
          Havana is flooded with new hotels and stores that suggest that the
          economy is doing well. Unfortunately the average Cuban is not allowed
          to enter the hotels and has little or no access to the dollar economy that
          has sprung up alongside the peso.

          In a seeming effort to ensure that the city is safe for tourism and to reduce
          crime, the police, on nearly every corner, were stopping Cubans and
          checking identification. Some residents associated with the music
          exchange said that many Cubans from outside Havana were being
          shipped to jail or back home.

          While generally unaware of the politics, American visitors were stunned
          by the skills of their Cuban counterparts. Some musicians stayed at the
          Nacional and worked with their Cuban partners. Others, like N'Dea
          Davenport, the former lead singer from the British group the Brand New
          Heavies, stayed and worked in Old Havana with her writing partners.

          "I love it here regardless of the hardships," said Ms. Davenport, who
          now lives in New Orleans. "The reason I love New Orleans is that there's
          music everywhere, and it's the same here. Everybody sings or dances or
          plays an instrument. It's changing my life."

          The average Cuban musician, taught from age 7 in government-run
          conservatories, is among the best trained and musically literate in the
          world, schooled in classical music, pop and jazz. While the American
          musicians were discovering the riches of Cuban music, the Cubans were
          learning plenty from the Americans.

          Like most of their countrymen, Cuban musicians receive only bits and
          pieces of information from the outside world. They look to the United
          States for musical cues but get music from the most powerful stations in
          Miami or New Orleans, which guarantees a view of a music world heavy
          on Kenny G and the worst pop. Other information comes from furtive
          conversations or secondhand accounts of people who have seen bands in
          Europe. And maybe they will get the occasional recording.

          "The most amazing thing about this encounter is the ability to hang out
          with our idols, to learn what's behind the music that we've heard all our
          lives," said Luis de la Cruz, guitarist, composer and leader of the band
          Bolsa Negra (Black Market). "It's one thing to hear a bit of music on the
          radio, but to actually sit down with somebody we admire and ask
          questions and collaborate on something intimate like the writing process
          is really incredible."

          Carlos Varela, one of Cuba's most important singer-songwriters,
          collaborated with the Indigo Girls. He has played in the United States a
          few times and has flirted with major record labels. But Cuba's isolation,
          apart from the infatuation with the island internationally, almost guarantees
          the failure of an international career. For him the weeklong stay was
          important for another reason.

          "When I go to the United States the next time, I have a hundred
          telephone numbers of musicians to call, new friends I've made," he said.
          "People want me to come to collaborate, to write and record with them.
          For that reason alone this is invaluable."

          Chucho Valdes, the dean of Cuban musicians, pianist and leader of the
          group Irakere, thought the encounter was going to leave a permanent
          impression on the Cuban music scene.

          "I've never seen anything like this," said Valdes, who is also the director
          of the nearly annual Havana Jazz Festival, which usually attracts a handful
          of American musicians. "The things that we lack, a formal sophistication
          in pop music and harmonic sense, we're learning right now. And the way
          to produce sound, to get a good sound."

          Still, the final Music Bridges concert was pretty much an artistic disaster,
          unlike the weeklong exchange. Generally American pop musicianship is,
          to be kind, basic. The Cubans were often reduced to being the
          professional hired hands backing the illiterate boss.

          Most songs were in English, with Americans leading the bands. The
          Americans were mostly white, mostly folk-oriented and mostly second
          rate. It is an old history. The recordings of the concert, and the music
          made at the Hotel National may be released, depending on legal
          restrictions imposed by the United States.

          There were a few good moments. Ms. Davenport tore the place apart
          with a song she and the Cuban singer Rene Banos sang called "Que
          Importa," in which they listed the differences between them, including
          their beer-brand preferences.

          Ms. Osborne, backed by Manolito y Su Trabuco, sang a deep and funny
          blues that had the audience on its feet. There were some mildly political
          songs -- Ms. Raitt sang "Cuba Is Way Too Cool" -- but most
          performers stuck to "We Are the Worldisms." (One tune was called
          "One World.")

          But most people, though the musicians had worked hard on the songs,
          weren't really looking for an end. The means, in this case, was sufficient.
 
 
 
 

                     Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company