There Is No Cat

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Monday, December 8, 2003

Introducing... Rubén González

Anyone who pays any attention to "world music" will have noticed the massive success of the Buena Vista Social Club, a collection of elderly Cuban musicians gathered together by Ry Cooder, Nick Gold, and Juan De Marcos Gonzalez to record music in the traditional son style. The (revised) original plan was to record a couple of albums, one billed to the Buena Vista Social Club and a second to the Afro-Cuban All Stars. One of the musicians recruited for the BVSC sessions was pianist Rubén González. At the time, he didn't even own a piano. But his enthusiasm was such that he was always the first musician to the studio, waiting for whoever had the keys to show up so he could get to the piano and play. And his playing was wonderful, fluid and lyrical. It didn't take much to convince Gold, the head of the record label sponsoring the sessions, to record a third album, a solo album by Gonzalez. I think of the three albums released from those original sessions, the solo album by Rubén González is my favorite. I even used a couple of piece of his when putting together music for our wedding reception earlier this year.

All of which is to say that I was saddened to read that Rubén González died today.

Posted at 10:32 PM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio


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[ photo of Mischief, a black and white cat ]

Mischief, 1988 - December 20, 2003

[ photo of Sylvester, a black and white cat ]

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