Rare "Pre-Castro" Cuban Jazz Record By Chico O'Farrill
Recorded In Cuba on the Original Panart Label
(Now Playing - Chico's PanArt Label "Havana Blues" and is Available on the Latin Jazz Records & Rare Recordings Pages)
Chico O'Farrill was born Arturo O’Farrill on October 28, 1921 in Havana, Cuba. Chico was right in the thick of the Afro-Cuban and Latin waves that hit jazz in the late '40s and '50s. His sophisticated writing for Latin big bands of the early '50s was often bold, brassy, and tense, yet he could also achieve a delicate, almost classical ambience
Having moved from Cuba at an early age, Chico lived in the U.S. and Mexico but returned to Cuba between ’55-’57 where he made the LP “Chico's Cha Cha Chá” on the Panart label with his All Star Cuban Band featuring Peruchín (Pedro Jústiz: 1913-1977), Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros, and others. He also recorded “Fiebre Tropical” on Panart, which was later reissued as “Tropical Fever” on Fiesta.
Panart Records, the first Cuban record label, was founded in 1943 by Ramon S. Sabat, a musician and engineer who set up his business in a refurbished colonial house bordering Havana's downtown shopping district. Offices were at San Miguel 410, between Campanario and Lealtad in Havana, with the factory outside of the city. He christened his new label Panart - short for Pan-American Art.
"The best catalogue of Cuban music was on Panart," asserts Pedro Alvarez Cepero, owner of Casino Records, a Latin music store on SW Eighth Street. "No one has produced popular Cuban music like Panart did."
Luis Diaz Sola, who had an advertising agency in Havana, says "Ramon Sabat called me and asked me if I would dare to try and do a record cover". The color separation process was not yet available in Havana, so Diaz Sola found a printer who could do it in Miami. Then he and New York-based photographer Charlie Varon set out to evoke the tropical allure of Havana's pulsating nightlife.
In those days no place symbolized the seductions of a weekend in Havana better than the Tropicana Club. It was the obligatory place to go in Havana. Diaz Sola hired Tropicana showgirls as models for his covers and staged most of the shoots on the club's lush grounds.
Seen today, the Panart covers are campy studies in tropical sophistication: palm trees and black tie, congas and martinis, and, always, beautiful girls in brief costumes.
In the early Sixties the Panart parade of hits became the stuff of memories. Those sounds of that period ended when the Cuban revolution began. Castro's government claimed possession of the label's master tapes and then took over the studio.
