Singer Back After Break For Politics

2009-12-16 (수) 12:00:00

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By LARRY ROHTER

Ruben Blades has a specific reason for calling his current tour “Todos Vuelven,” or “Everybody Returns.” After suspending his music and film career for five years to serve as a cabinet minister in Panama, his homeland, he is back, trying to figure out whether the entertainment business still has a place for him.

“The world changed while I was away, and the idea now is to see how to fit in,” Mr. Blades said recently at a Cuban-Chinese restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that he has frequented since the mid- 1970s, when he experienced his first success as a salsa star .

At the Latin Grammy Awards last month in Las Vegas, he sang with Calle 13, a Puerto Rican reggaeton and hip-hop duo .

“Ruben is one of the few artists who can disappear and come back with the hope of attracting a young audience, and that’s because of the quality of his songs,” said Rene Perez, 31, the lead singer of Calle 13. “I wasn’t really following his political life, but in musical terms, it’s like he’s the teacher and we are his students .”

Mr. Blades, 61, who is also a lawyer with degrees from the University of Panama and Harvard University, was Panama’s minister of tourism from 2004 until this summer. When he started off, Mr. Blades seemed to be a salsa singer in the classic mold and a songwriter valued for his ability to wed socially conscious lyrics to danceable rhythms.

But over the years, he strayed further and further from that formula. He performed in Paul Simon’s failed Broadway musical “Capeman” in 1998 and early this decade recorded a pair of albums, “Tiempos” and “Mundo,” which incorporated jazz, folk and even bagpipes.

“The problem with being a writer in salsa is that the genre is pretty much defined by the appeal of the music to the feet,” Mr. Blades explained. “And that’s fine. I will never put that down. That’s the way it is. But those limits, those structures, were something I was trying to break away from.”

Many of the songs on his new CD, “Cantares del Subdesarrollo” (“Songs of Underdevelopment”), have the politically charged lyrics for which he is famous. But the sound is stripped down and acoustic .

One song attracting a lot of attention in Latin America is “Pais Portatil” (“Portable Country”), whose title comes from the novel of the same name by Adriano Gonzalez Leon. The song speaks of “a place without memory/where nothing is surprising anymore/ not a crime pardoned/or a charlatan as president.”

Because Mr. Gonzalez Leon was a Venezuelan, there have been suggestions that Mr. Blades is writing about Hugo Chavez, the populist president of Venezuela. Mr. Blades said he was describing a phenomenon common in Latin America. But he criticized Mr. Chavez for “insisting on adopting a system that has been demonstrably proven not to function.”

Mr. Blades said he had left government service feeling hopeful. At a meeting of Western Hemisphere leaders in April, he saw El Salvador represented by incoming and outgoing presidents whose parties were engaged in a civil war two decades ago.

“Look how things have changed,” he said enthusiastically. “So yes, I’m very optimistic.”

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