This Ansonia compilation is a fascinating glimpse into the golden era of Cuban music that showcases some very rare recordings culled from 78 rpm singles by three seminal acts from the island: Orquesta Riverside, Orquesta Casino de La Playa and Celia Cruz. The ten cuts on this collection may indeed be echoes of a long gone Cuba of the past, but they are also an important historical document demonstrating that from its inception, Ansonia Records was committed to releasing popular Cuban recordings just as much as it was dedicated to Puerto Rican and Dominican music. Thankfully Ansonia decided to rescue them from storage and reissued the anthology first in 1983 on LP.

The Riverside and Casino de La Playa tracks come from a cache of obscure Ansonia 78s dating from 1950 – 1951. Orquesta Havana Riverside (as it was originally known at its founding in 1938) was a collectively run orchestra and arguably Cuba’s most important and popular “jazz band” (big band) during the 1940s and ‘50s. The height of that popularity was during the 1950s under saxophonist Pedro Vila’s directorship, featuring one of Cuba’s most beloved (and versatile) vocalists, Tito Gómez. Many other important singers and musicians passed through the ranks of Riverside over the years, including Miguelito Valdés, Pedro “Peruchín” Jústiz and several stars of Buena Vista Social Club fame including Orlando “Cachaito” López and Rubén González. Though Vila retired in 1960, the orchestra carried on for two decades in Cuba after the Revolution but with different musicians and an updated sound. The Ansonia collection kicks off with a fantastic upbeat rendition of Eliseo Grenet’s famous guaracha, “Mamá Inés,” which is done in a swinging and jazzy mambo style. The reverb effects take one back to the old days of recording technology where analog echo would be deployed to add ambiance. One can just imagine dancers in fancy dress swaying and twirling to an equally nattily suited big band belting out the classics in the Havana Riverside Nightclub and Casino with the river and tropical night sky visible through the tall windows lining the shore. The other numbers by Riverside are instrumental mambos aimed at the international dance crowd that was obsessed with the genre at the time, with “Mambo En Sax” and “Qué Rico El Mambo” being famous hit compositions by Dámaso Pérez Prado and “Mi Mambo” by the important Cuban composer, pianist, ethno-musicologist and band-leader Obdulio Morales.

Like Riverside, Casino de La Playa got its name from the venue where it began. And as with Riverside, Casino de La Playa was also a “jazz band” run by a members’ collective organization, in this instance founded in 1937 by its director, violinist, lawyer and politician Guillermo Portela. And again like Riverside many important musicians and vocalists were members of the orchestra over the years, including Pérez Prado, Arsenio Rodríguez, Anselmo Sacasas, Julio Gutiérrez, Walfredo de los Reyes, Miguelito Valdés, and Orlando “Cascarita” Guerra. The organization remained active through various lineups (and relocating for a time to Mexico City) until 1960. Even more than Riverside, from its inception Orquesta Casino de La Playa was crucial to popularizing the modern urban big band sound of Cuban music around the world and thus helped lay the foundation of what became known as salsa, not only through its recordings but also because of its connection to the world of hotels and gambling, where many foreign tourists would visit and discover the band, as well as various radio programs where it reigned supreme, plus countless international tours and the diffusion of its songbook to other band leaders and arrangers in metropolises like New York, Madrid, Caracas and Mexico City. Ansonia entered fairly early into Casino de La Playa’s career, releasing two 78s in 1951 with instrumentals on one side and vocals on the flip. For this compilation Ansonia chose two mostly instrumental mambos by Pérez Prado for this collection (there are brief chorus vocals), the obscure “Lola” and the more well known “Caballo,” both of which give us insight into the happy, swinging sound Prado would deploy in his years with RCA Records soon after he left Havana for Mexico City in 1949. It’s fascinating to hear these unfamiliar sides with Prado’s own arrangements featuring piano played in his distinctively dramatic style, set to wax in the earliest portion of his career before he made it big in Mexico and became a household name in the US. As was often the case throughout the label’s history, Ansonia was up on the latest developments in Cuban music right from the start, as these tracks amply demonstrate.

The Celia Cruz material comes from two 78 rpm singles recorded in 1949 in Caracas, Venezuela, where a 23-year-old Cruz was backed by the society big band Orquesta Leonard Melody (they were also released in Venezuela on 45). Leonard Melody was the stage name of Leonardo Pedroza, a well-known Venezuelan musician, composer and orchestra director active from the late 1930s through the 1960s. Cruz recorded these sides when she was on tour with Rodney Neyra’s Las Mulatas de Fuego (she had joined in 1948 as lead vocalist), and the songs are some of her earliest, predating her joining La Sonora Matancera by two years. She covered several upbeat popular Latin classics with Melody’s orchestra, namely the Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernández’s “El Cumbanchero,” and “La Mazucamba,” written by Cuban pianist and composer Orlando De La Rosa. Interestingly, the other two numbers are more obscure, down-tempo recordings showcasing Cruz’s moodier side and both have Afro-Cuban cultural themes. Cruz interprets the son afro “Mambé,” which was originally titled “Yo Mambé" and recorded by the great Afro-Cuban folkloric vocalist Mercedita Valdés with Conjunto Gloria Matancera (composed by L. Yañez and R. Gómez). “Mambé” is written in bozal, a stylized form of Spanish based creole with African language elements that was often used in Cuban songs of the afro genre in the 1930s and 40s. It tells of a proud drummer’s allegiance to his African roots. “Quédate Negra,” a ‘bolero negro’ lament in the afro genre, was written by the great Cuban composer and pianist Facundo Rivero and showcases lyrics advising the subject of the song to not pretend to be white, to “stay black” because that’s the way the narrator wants the her to remain and it would be futile to try and pass for white.

With a career that spanned more than half a century, Celia Cruz is one of the most influential and beloved vocalists in Latin music. By the time of her death in 2003, her singular contralto voice had graced hundreds of recordings and an immeasurable number of concert stages and performance venues the world over. Her zest for life, rhythm, movement and melody was deeply contagious and inspiring to millions of fans the world over. She really was a pan-Latin icon, and these obscure early recordings from Venezuela show that she was already well on her way to stardom, except the world hadn’t caught up to her yet.

Whether you’re a fan of Celia Cruz but don’t know her early work, or perhaps you’re into big bands from the swing era or a Cuban music aficionado or merely curious about the roots of everything from Buena Vista Social Club to salsa, Ansonia Records’ "Los Más Grandes De Cuba - Ecos Del Pasado" will provide you with a fascinating and fantastic selection of obscure vintage sounds from yesteryear that are every bit as infused with sabor (authentic Latin flavor) as anything from more recent times.

-Pablo Yglesias