Perhaps it's because there's a close cultural
connection between great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about
jazz knows that its truly legendary improvisers-Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Dizzy
Gillespie-cut their teeth playing in bars so smoky that it's a good thing everybody
was too busy improvising to need sheet music.
Or maybe it's because both cigars and music are contemplative
pleasures. A casual smoker can get a quick tobacco-fix from a cheap cigarette,
just as a casual music listener can enjoy the background hum of pop songs on
the car radio. But to really enjoy a great performance, or a good tobacco,
sitting still and paying attention are necessary.
In any case, music and cigar smoking seem to belong
together, and some of the most famous musicians are (or were) cigar
devotees-just as, it turns out, one of the most famous of cigar devotees is
also a musician. Avo Uvezian, the maker of Avo cigars, is also a respected
classical and jazz pianist, a Julliard graduate, and even the one-time official
pianist of the Shah of Iran. After a successful musical career based first in
his native Middle East, and then in the contiguous United
States, Uvezian moved in the 1980s to Puerto
Rico, where he opened a restaurant and bar and dabbled in
cigarmaking. After customers at his Puerto Rico restaurant told him how much
they enjoyed some cigars he'd had rolled himself, from a blend of tobaccos he
hand-picked, he opened his own Dominican Republic-based cigar factory, working
with noted cigar maker Hendrik Kelner. Now his company makes three million
cigars a year, and Uvezian himself still makes music-his first CD, Legacy, was released in 2004.
For another example, consider the great trumpeter
Arturo Sandoval, who smokes, by his own estimation, four or five cigars a day. Music
allowed the Cuban-born Sandoval to rise to fame in his native Cuba-and to
defect from that country in 1990, during a long stint playing concerts in
Europe (he now lives in Florida). Sandoval has played the horn for Lionel
Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, Gloria Estefan and Johnny Mathis, Michel Legrand
and Frank Sinatra. His technically flawless playing has resulted in his being
the kind of musician whose work is often known by people who couldn't name
him-he is brought in as a session musician by some of the world's finest and
best-known (see above), and he often scores movie soundtracks. As his work with
the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Leningrad Philharmonic prove, he's even
proved able to handle the rigors of classical music as well as jazz-sometimes
doing both in the same concert.
The cigar-music connection is especially strong in Cuba,
known as one of the world's cigar capitals. Both cigars and music are staples
of island life (the cigar remains one of the island's most prominent exports),
and the strength of both in Cuban culture depends partly on the nimble and
intelligent blending of elements from everywhere-wrappers and fillers from
different parts of Latin America, rhythms and melodies from the African coast,
South America, US pop, Western European classical, etc. In other words, Cuban
cigarmaking and Cuban music have both survived, and flourished, by mixing and
melding. For generations, cigar rollers were entertained by the sound of paid
musicians or by music from the radio. (This tradition continues even now in the
Dominican Republic,
where workers at the Arturo Fuente factory, among other places, are treated to
the work of performing musicians.) With this tradition in place, it's no wonder
that some of Cuba's music legends got their start as cigar-factory
entertainers; and since tobacco smoking has been a part of Latin American life
far longer than it has in some other places-Columbus's sailors noted it being
smoked in what is now modern Cuba in the year 1493, so there's many more
centuries of lore to draw on-its psychological and emotional associations are
deeper and richer, providing better material for songwriters to mine. Thus
famous Cuban songwriter Beny More, himself a former entertainer for the
cigar-factory workers, touches on the song in a number of his classic
compositions.
About CigarFox
CigarFox provides you the opportunity to build
your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like
Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha
and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar
products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo
Lighters. For more information, please visit http://www.CigarFox.com.
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