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• 01 / 03 / 2010

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Haydée Milanés is very devoted to her music. Art, romanticism and life go hand in hand when it comes to her work, and one gets a sense that the musical notes have come to her life naturally.

“My father and some of my brothers and sisters are musicians,” said Haydée, who notes that it was completely her own choice to take up music.

Milanés has studied different genres and areas that have contributed to her work as a musician. First, she studied piano, then choral direction, and finally graduated from music theory and sol-fa.

“But singing was always present in every stage of my studies. It is what I have enjoyed the most, what I have had to put less effort into as my only instrument is my own voice,” she said.

Haydée Milanés says that she first trained her voice singing her father’s songs, but was also heavily influenced by Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie and Elis Regina.

Art was a very big part of her childhood, which she says was amazing. “I was supposed to be in bed whenever there were gatherings at home, but I would hide and watch the grown ups while they sang and talked,” Haydée confessed.

“I still remember visits to the house in the early 1990s by Faustino Oramas (El Guayabero) and El Niño Rivera.

Haydée says she has inherited many musical aspects from her father. “He is always present when it comes to singing and in my musical preferences. Obviously, I admire him as a human being, and try to follow the positive things.”

Haydée is very much influenced by music from other latitudes “but my musical sentiment and tastes are firmly rooted in Cuban soil. I love my country. Havana’s Malecon is a place I need to feel really close to.”

Haydée Milanés began her career playing jazz, one of the most coveted genres of the majority of Cuban students of music.

“Hernan Lopez-Nussa was a real blessing to me as I was looking for that type of work for my voice. We recorded the From Havana to Río album in Brazil, where I sang the song Isla, one of the most important songs of the group,” she said.

After her first album covered songs by Descemer Bueno and her second was a live concert album, Haydée was ready to take a risk with her own compositions and express her own musical ideas mixing nueva trova, pop, soul, funk, and Brazilian music.

Her third album A La Felicidad, recorded under the Bis Music label and produced by Haydée herself, has 11 songs that she promoted during her recent national tour. Haydée says that the album is not idyllic, “I think it is a pretty real album, based on the good side of life.”

Haydée is now getting ready for a big concert on January 23 at the Karl Marx theatre in Havana with guest artists Omara Portuondo, Roberto Hernandez (singer of Los Van Van), Jose Luis Cortes (El Tosco), David Blanco and Pedro Aznar from Argentina.

“I feel really satisfied with the group I was able to bring together.” The recording process took two years, over which time Haydée was able to experiment with a lot of different genres and styles. “I don’t want to be typecast, I am a musician.”

Haydée has also performed songs by Yusa, Robertico Carcassés, Kelvis Ochoa and several others of the latest generations of Cuban composers.

“We are part of a movement, which we can nourish and learn from. Each artist has his own style, his own ideas. Sometimes we get together and interchange ideas.”

Haydée Milanés latest offerings are starting to connect with audiences who often call out for songs such as Tú y yo, Libélula and Tanto amar. This can only happen once a musician begins to produce real and personal songs and to find their own voice;
something that Milanés really achieves with her latest album.

Source: www.jrebelde.cubaweb.cu