Rhythms del Mundo is a nonprofit collaborative album, which fuses an all-star cast of Cuban muscians including Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo of the the Buena Vista Social Club with tracks from US, UK and Irish artists such as U2, Coldplay, Sting, Jack Johnson and Maroon 5 , Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and many others.


Background

Kenny Young, Founder and Trustee of APE, explains how the project emerged: “The project was sparked off by the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The idea came in to do a project with The Buena Vista Social Club to fuse their Latin sounds with Western artists and their familiar popular songs. The project evolved when more environmental disasters struck — the Asian Earthquakes and Hurricane Katrina. But the big picture was climate change. You can call these natural disasters but after all the research and scientific data, we know that we’re at least partly to blame for some of these disasters. Global warming is now in the news daily. If we don’t act in the time frame our experts give us, our grandchildren will curse us eternally.”

Thom Yorke comments, “We need a law, we need to have the Government put climate change in its place. If you leave industry to sort it out on a voluntary basis that’s never going to happen. So everybody, if they’ve got any concerns about climate, change has to register that concern with their Government officials because it’s the only way to go.”

Charity

Album proceeds will benefit the environmental nonprofit organization Artists’ Project Earth (APE), which raises funds for disaster relief efforts and climate change awareness. The artists on this album fully support the record as a show of commitment to the music and to the cause that it endorses.

Music

The main recording sessions took place in Havana at Abdala Studios from April 2005 to June 2006. While the majority of the vocals remain the same, the musicans of the Buena Vista Social Club took the original orchestration from each song and created something utterly unique, casting their trademark mastery over each track. “Rhythms Del Mundo” includes reworked tracks such as “Clocks” by Coldplay, “Better Together” by Jack Johnson, “She Will be Loved” by Maroon 5, “High and Dry” by Radiohead and “Dancing Shoes” by Arctic Monkeys.

“Rhythms Del Mundo” also includes music by famed Cuban singers Omara Portuondo and the last vocal recording of Afro-Cuban bolero singer, Ibrahim Ferrer, who passed away in 2005. The other Cuban musicians from The Buena Vista Social Club who perform on this album are as follows: Barbarito Torres, Amandito Valdes, Virgilio Valdes, Angel Terri Domech, Manuel ‘Guajiro’ Mirabal, Orlando Lopez ‘Cachaito’ and Demetrio Muniz. This project is the brainchild and concept of Kenny Young and the Berman Brothers. The trio also produced the 16 new original recordings on the CD.