Rhythms Del Mundo features collaborations between an all-star cast of Cuban muscians - including Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo of the The Buena Vista Social Club™ - with the hottest UK/US Artists.
The project will be launched in 57 countries around the world in mid November.
Album proceeds will benefit disaster relief efforts and climate change awareness.
Rhythms Del Mundo fuses hot Afro-Cuban sounds with tracks from artists such as U2, Coldplay, Sting,Radiohead, Jack Johnson and Maroon 5 as well as some of the buzziest bands, including The Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, The Kaiser Chiefs and many others.
Arranged by Demitrio Muniz, 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, members 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. Their noted and exceptional musicianship seduced even the notoriously protective Arctic Monkeys into handing over their track. As a rule, the band has never licensed their music for compilation albums, but were so enamoured with the result that they were happy to have it included on the album. In addition to the Arctic Monkeys' track "Dancing Shoes," "Rhythms Del Mundo" includes reworked tracks such as "Clocks" by Coldplay, Jack Johnson's "Better Together", "She Will be Loved" by Maroon 5, "High and Dry" by Radiohead and others.
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 members of 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.
Kenny Young, Founder and Trustee of APE, explains how the project emerged: "The project was sparked off by the devastating Tsunami of Christmas 2005. The idea came in to do a project with members of 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."
The artists on this album fully support the record as a show of commitment to the music and to the cause that it endorses. 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."
Tags: Rhythms del Mundo Kenny Young Berman Brothers
