“When I explain to people what kind of music she sings, I say it’s sort of like the Great American Songbook, but the Cuban version." – Lee Carroll, Green Room Exchange
Havana Comes to Lexington
By Walter Tunis
Flowers and perfume. Xiomara Laugart spells it out in simple terms. As the famed Cuban singer will be celebrating a birthday the day following her return performance in Lexington, she is offering a suggested gift list. You know, just in case.
The remark triggers something as integral to Laugart’s personality as the elegant Trova music that sits at the heart of her vocal work — laughter. She laughs a lot — genuine, warm laughter from the heart. It’s the sound of someone at peace with her world, even though her world of the last few decades has taken her far from her homeland in the Guantanamo province of Cuba.
On Sept. 7, Laugart and her son, acclaimed pianist Axel Tosca, make their way back to another home of sorts – — Lexington. She and Tosca have played here twice before. The first was a weekend engagement in the fall of 2018 that piggy-backed a performance for the Festival Latino de Lexington at the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza onto a more intimate set at Tee Dee’s Lounge the next evening. They returned the following May to perform at the then-named Downtown Arts Center.
Xiomara Laugart and Axel Tosca at the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center (Photo by Andrew Brinkhorst)
(Click image for a sampling)
Both outings, along with the return Sept. 7 show at the Mitchell Fine Arts Center of Transylvania University, were spearheaded by Green Room Exchange, the Lexington-rooted organization led by Lee Carroll and wife Connie Milligan. The organization is designed to allow artists from other cultures to share their art, as well as engage personally with local audiences.
“I think Xiomara Laugart is an absolutely amazing artist,” Carroll said. “When I explain to people what kind of music she sings, I say it’s sort of like the Great American Songbook, but the Cuban version. Mostly what she sings are traditional Cuban songs. They’re great songs, but her interpretations are so profound and so deeply emotional. And then Axel is just a freakin’ genius. He is one of the best piano players I’ve ever heard. He’s a complete natural.”
Xiomara Laugart
For Laugart, the effortless and elegant undercurrents of her singing are a matter of communication, an exchange continually fortified each time she has played in what has served as home since 1998, New York City. Roughly six months after her arrival, she set up a performance residency at the Greenwich Village jazz club known as the Zinc Bar that continues to this day. She performed there the night before our conversation.
“Like yesterday at the Zinc Bar, this young girl told me, ‘Oh my God, your voice,’” Laugart said. “‘Where have you been?’ I said to her, ‘Right here. I’ve been here all the time.’
“I remember also playing to some young people from Canada. Very young people — three couples. And they were like, ‘This is the first time I’ve been in a jazz club.’ I went ‘Really?’ They said, ‘I didn’t know it was like this.’ I said, ‘Yes, honey. This is jazz. Come back. Bring your friends.’”
A new home
Curiously, Laugart’s move to New York was not the result of direct emigration from Cuba. Initial college studies were in economics, but a love of singing in the poetic Trova style and eventually the more protest-oriented Nueva Trova led to performances overseas. Everything halted, however, in the mid-'90s when promised work in Italy fell through.
“It was a job that didn’t work out,” she said. “The guy we made the deal with was having problems with drugs. When I arrived in Italy, he wasn’t there. He was in an institution trying to clean up himself. I think in the end he died. Everything finished very tragically.
“So that was it. I was in a park. I was supposed to go back to Cuba the next day, back to Havana. Then this girl found me sitting there. She took me to her house, and found me a job.
“I was cleaning houses, ironing pants and shirts. I made my money like that. After that, I put together a band and began to find agencies, then agencies found me singing jobs. I began to travel and do concerts at parties and all that. Eventually, I had to decide to either stay in Italy or go back to Havana. So, I decided to stay. I stayed for two years. Then this woman said, ‘You want to come with us to the United States for the Massachusetts Festival for the Arts?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ She asked if I had a passport. I had it with me and I gave it to her. Within a week I had a visa and I was here in America.”
Among the first prominent artists Laugart met upon her move to New York was Venezuelan musician/producer Andrés Levin. That alliance eventually sparked work in the Latin fusion band Yerba Buena.
“Yerba Buena came into the picture because I was working in this trio with a friend of mine. She knew Andrés. I was working in New York. Not long after arriving — maybe one month, two months — she said to him, ‘This woman has to sing.’ He said, ‘Okay. Bring her to the studio.’ I went to the studio, and I remember the first job I had was doing a chorus in a song by the singer from the group Mecano (Ana Torroja). She left the group and began to sing by herself. So, I sang on her first solo record (Pasajes de un Sueño in 2000). Andrés Levin was the producer. After that, he began a group himself. He said, ‘We’ll put this band together and after that, when the band is known by everybody, we want to develop careers for each of you. We want to develop your musical personality.’ In Yerba Buena, everybody had their own career, their own projection. But Andrés wanted to do it together first.
“In the end, it didn’t work. It went to hell, but it was fun.”
From Cruz to Zinc
Upon the folding of Yerba Buena, Laugart found herself off-Broadway in 2007 honoring one of the most heralded Latin artists of the last century, Celia Cruz, in the musical Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz. The production would eventually take to the road and tour well into the following year.
There was only one problem. Laugart wasn’t terribly familiar with Cruz’s music when she landed the role.
“I met this lady who had come to see one of my performances with Yerba Buena. Her company would find work for Latinos on Broadway or in the movies in L.A. She called and said, ‘Go to this address on Broadway and audition.’ I went to the audition, but I didn’t know any songs by Celia. They told me to sing, so I sang. They loved my voice. They gave me a lot of recordings and I began to learn all these songs. They said, ‘We have everything by Celia Cruz. The recordings. The books. Everything Celia.’ After that came the table work where you read and discuss the play. And sing.”
Xiomara Laugart performing as Celia Cruz
But through all her performance adventures, Laugart’s true New York home away from Cuba remains the Zinc Bar. The residency is also very personal as it allows the opportunity to perform alongside son Axel on a regular basis. In fact, current gigs listed on the Zinc Bar website are advertised as Axel Tosca’s Cuban Jam featuring Diva Xiomara Laugart.
Laugart is more than content with the billing — not the Diva part, necessarily, but the acknowledgment of her son as the leader.
“He’s amazing,” she said “My son is incredible. I consider him a genius. I have a lot of respect for the way he plays. He really is a musical genius.”
The singer is not alone in that estimation. Ahead of an August 2017 performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola with Laugart, Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times wrote, “As rugged as he is lithe, this pianist fuses the percussive piano stylings of Afro-Cuban montuno with the full-fisted attack of a postbopper, as well as Western classical precision and the theatricality of funk.”
Though not recorded at the Zinc Bar, a March 2022 performance featuring the immense complimentary onstage communication between Laugart and Tosca is viewable online. It was posted by the show’s presenters, the Jazz Foundation of America.
“I’m lucky, right?” Laugart said, motioning to Tosca and his trio halfway through the set. “They’re the best.”
Cuba in the Bluegrass
Carroll was introduced to Laugart and Tosca while living and working in Pennsylvania, through a 2008 concert in nearby Harrisburg. But it wasn’t until years later, after initiating Green Room Exchange, that the possibility hit of bringing them to Lexington. His original plan to present musicians directly from Cuba was stymied after reported cases of the often-termed Havana Syndrome that began in 2016 halted travel to and from the country.
“They shut the embassy down and nobody could get out of Cuba,” Carroll recalled. “Then I remembered Xiomara and Axel, who lived in New York. I reached out to my buddy Jonathan Ragonese, who knew them. I said, ‘Do you know how to reach them?’ He said, ‘They’re working with me. I’ve been arranging all this music for them. So, I said, ‘Bring them down here. Let’s do it.’ That’s when we did the first show at Tee Dee’s.
Lee Carroll and Connie Mulligan (Photo by Andrew Brinkhorst)
“Connie and I have been very lucky in that we’ve been able to travel. We realized that many of our friends just don’t have the resources to go to Africa or Cuba and travel like that to experience these things. We wanted to, in some way, share some of those experiences with our friends and the people of Lexington. It seemed like the easiest way to do that was to bring the artists here.
“We explain to the artists coming here that this is not just a gig. ‘You’re not going to come in, play a night and just go. You come here, you stay in our home or in the homes of our friends.’ We socialize and find an opportunity for them to get to know people beyond them just being onstage. That’s been the real payoff for us.
“This time, Xiomara’s birthday will be the day after she performs here. We’re going to have a birthday party for her, so it’s really more than just a concert. There is, hopefully, a cultural exchange.”
“Lee and Connie told me, ‘You have to come and play and sing,’” Laugart said. “But the timing was my son’s idea. He said, ‘Mom, why don’t you go for your birthday? You always work on your birthday.’ I said, ‘Okay. Let’s do it then.’ So, the concert is on Saturday, my birthday is Sunday and then we come back home.
“And I say it again: flowers and perfume. It can be cheap for one thing, but very expensive for another. I like good perfume.”
Xiomara Laugart and Axel Tosca perform at 7 p.m. Sept. 7 at the Carrick Theater of the Mitchell Fine Arts Center at Transylvania University, 350 N. Broadway. Tickets are $25 and $30 at transy.edu/calendar/tickets.
For more Walter Tunis reviews, visit The Musical Box.
Listen to Tom Martin's conversation with Xiomara Laugart on WEKU's Eastern Standard