Omara Portuondo

Buena Vista Social Club graduate and one of Havana’s first ladies of the song, Omara Portuondo releases Flor de Amor, a beautiful record that showcases why Cuba fell in love with her in the first place, and why the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do. Imagine a record that combines Cuba’s smoothest rhythms with the vocal styling of classic American jazz standards. This style of music is called "Filin,” derived from the English word "feeling,” the style which she helped popularise at the historical Tropicana club in the late ’40s. Omara Portuondo has an incredible vocal range that can take you to the depths of the Caribbean Sea or the peaks of the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Flor de Amor captures Omara’s many years in Cuba’s music scene and all its changes. From the "Filin” style she developed in the 1940s and 1950s, to the "Nueva Trova” style of the 1960s and ’70s and even the old "Vieja Trova” of the 1920s and ’30s. The entire album is a bittersweet collection of romantic standards and heart warming Cuban anthems that takes you to a simpler time when music was the only thing that people were allowed to harvest.