The death of a prominent artist prompts the music community to reflect on the gap left by their absence. Normally, this reflection tends to be favoured by hindsight, focusing that past times were better and other such sentimentalities. Yet, what should be said of those unspoken heroes, the musicians that tend to accompany a band, but nonetheless stand out for their forward thinking? The recent death of Orlando “Cachaíto” Lopez reminds us that an artist doesn’t need to shine in the limelight in order to leave a widespread impact in their field.

“What happens is that people feel more comfortable with the old, but one can’t stay put”

Burdened with the duty of following the steps of a long line of bassists in his family, Cachaíto, dubbed one of the best bassists in Cuban history, took his role rather lightly. He considered his position in a band as a “mattress” for the solo player to lean upon whenever they needed it. It’s no wonder then, that he is one of the few musicians to appear in all of the 1996 Buena Vista Social Club (BVSC) recordings. As a part of this group of the greatest performers of Cuban music, he remained humble towards how he needs to interact with the lead players. When he worked with pianist Rubén González, he improvised freely and created a piano-bass dynamic “by the way he moved his hands, sometimes how he looked at me or did a movement with his head”. On the other hand, with singer Omara Portuondo, he responded to her fílin (feeling): “she gives me a phrase, I respond and she gets inspired by it”. This give-and-take with his band mates was adopted over his genre-hopping career working with groups ranging from the more traditional (Arcaño y sus Maravillas) to jazz influenced bands such as Orquesta Riverside. His impulsive energy eventually led him to be a part of a new musical sound called descarga, a jazz soaked improvisational style of Afro-Cuban influence.

However, after the success of BVSC, his true musical direction culminated in his first and only album entitled simply Cachaíto. It is in this 2001 debut where his flexibility and experience merged to create a new Cuban sound which wasn’t as nestled in the past as his fellow BVSC members’ solo albums. “What happens is that people feel more comfortable with the old, but one can’t stay put”, he once stated. This restlessness is reflected in an album that reads like an autobiography of Cachaíto’s interests: both the bass and the congas are put at the forefront of the mix, while an improvisational feeling is felt throughout, evidently an inheritance of the descarga movement. In the same line, the song ‘Tumbao No. 5’ is dedicated to Charles Mingus, underlining Cachaíto’s jazz influences. It is also an album where new blood is incorporated into the building blocks of son cubano in the form of its non-traditional guests: In ‘Redención’, Clifton “Bigga” Morrison’s Hammond organ follows Cachaíto’s introductory bass notes; ‘Cachaíto In Laboratory’ features French DJ Dee Nasty mixing and scratching. Surprisingly, the album’s most conventional guest star, Ibrahim Ferrer, seems incredibly out of place in comparison when he comes in ‘Wahira’ on the second half of the album.

Miguel “Angá” Díaz, percussionist and musical director on Cachaíto, said that “Cachaíto’s real world has always been the descarga, the mixture of music, of latin jazz”. If this statement is true, then it shows that this bassist, one of the most overlooked musicians in modern bands, was more in touch with the sensibilities of 21st century music than most of his colleagues. The musical heritage left by Cachaíto is a great one, not only by his position as the backbone for BVSC and other countless bands, but as a teacher who led the region’s music in a new direction. When asked how it felt to be one of the creators of descarga, he humbly replied, “Some people have said that we invented a new music, but no: it’s simply looking for freedom, thinking that everything fits”. Hopefully, a new generation of musicians will achieve this hard earned freedom by perfecting their craft and building upon the sound that Cachaíto spent most of his life moulding.

Photo by volume12