As many as 35 jazz, rock and country artists, ranging from Jimmy Buffett to Joan Osborne and the Indigo Girls, will work for a week to compose new songs in collaboration with Cuban artists.
U.S. performers have toured Cuba before, but under the 40-year-old U.S. trade embargo they could not collaborate on new works, said attorney Bill Martinez, who sought U.S. permission for the cultural exchange. The license was granted last week.
``One of the sticking points was that, under the embargo ... you could not create new works, new material here,'' he said in a telephone interview Monday from Havana. ``This is historic.''
The project, dubbed ``Music Bridges ... Over Troubled Waters,'' will culminate with a free concert on March 28, planned for Havana's 5,000-seat Karl Marx theater.
The event follows a thaw between the two countries in recent years and the Clinton administration's January decision to ease some cultural exchange restrictions of the embargo.
The event is the latest cultural effort by Alan Roy Scott, a San Fernando Valley songwriter and music producer whose nonprofit Music Bridges has masterminded similar projects in the former Soviet Union, Indonesia, Romania and Ireland.
Scott also was in Havana Monday, busily arranging the details and trying to avoid the inevitable politics surrounding relations with the communist island nation.
``I have no goal other than the fact that we're here, we do this, and the world can judge for itself what it means,'' he said. ``I only know when songs get written by people that are on the same wavelength, it transcends all those subjects.''
Music Bridges is working with the Cuban Music Institute to organize the event. Among the Cuban artists scheduled to take part are Chucho Valdes, a jazz pianist who heads the group Irakere and members of the popular groups Los Van, Maraca and Sierra Maestra.
Martinez said he had to assuage concerns from both governments. U.S. officials wanted to make sure that the project wouldn't violate the embargo by giving the Cuban government a financial benefit, such as payments to the artists, while ``the Cubans had to know that this is a legitimate exchange where they weren't going to be exploited.''
None of the American or Cuban performers will be paid, Martinez said.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press