NY Times
August 26, 1999

The Pop Life: The Three Faces of Ruben Blades
By NEIL STRAUSS

LOS ANGELES -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that the Panamanian musician Ruben Blades was the most popular unknown he had ever met. What he meant was probably not that Blades was an obscure figure, but that all the work that Blades had done was not necessarily synthesized in his image or reputation.

It often seems as if there are three very busy and separate incarnations of Blades: the politician who started his own party and ran for president in Panama in 1994 (he placed a respectable third), the actor who appears regularly in Hollywood films, and the musician who constantly challenges his audience with his artistic twists and turns.

Though Blades (pronounced blades) is responsible for one of Latin music's most popular albums, "Siembra," recorded with Willie Colon in 1978, his legacy of imbuing infectious salsa with social and political commentary has not exactly been handed down to the Latin performers whose more carnally minded songs are crossing over in America today. Yet Blades, who has roles in forthcoming movies by Tim Robbins and Billy Bob Thornton, tries not to disparage them. "I don't knock it," he said of popular contemporary Latin music. "These approaches have brought into the fold of Latin music a generation that had been lost."

Instead of capitalizing on the trend himself, Blades, in a manner that has become his trademark, looks in the exact opposite direction on his new album, "Tiempos" (Sony Tropical), his first recording in three years. While the music crossing over in America tries to fill Top 40 pop with a molten Latin core, Blades collaborates with the Costa Rican group Editus on pan-Latin music with a core that has been hollowed out and filled with European classical music.

After a tour that takes Blades to Manhattan in early October (as well as to television with an hourlong broadcast of the show "Sessions at West 54th" on PBS on Oct. 2), he said he planned to expand his work with Editus, looking further beyond Latin music's African roots with a follow-up album exploring the Celtic, Arabic and Hindu influences on the music.

"If you listen to Hindu music, you're going to find the patterns there," Blades said. "It's a very romantic music, and a lot of Hindu songs have a clave buried under them. The Celts were also in that area: they were all over the place. The thing is, this hasn't really been explored. The way the industry is being run, what you're listening to is pretty much formula on the Latin side. And I'm not interested in that so I have to create my own direction to keep myself in the business. Otherwise I'll just quit."

The new album, Blades writes in the liner notes, was not so much written as it was born like a child.

"When I was writing it I was at one point going through my divorce, which was very difficult emotionally, especially because there was real love and affection involved," Blades said. "And then, politically, in Panama the internal fighting led to the loss of the image that we had, which was very difficult to deal with."

It also proved difficult to glue together all that he had recorded into a strong musical arc.

What resulted is a record with an evocative world-embracing sweep often reminiscent of film music. Blades said he was trying to create songs that would tap into an ancestral memory he believed people had but didn't always recognize. Lyrically, the record captures the same grandiosity and inevitability: It begins with a song of birth, reflecting on the lack of choice we have over the conditions and environment into which we are born, and ends with a song of death, reflecting on the powerlessness we have about when we go and what we can take with us.

"You take what you know at the end," Blades said. "You don't take your BMW and they don't bury you in your house. If your knowledge is one that makes you feel sorry that you wasted your life, then that's hell. You want to be sure that in those three seconds of lucidity before you go that you can crack a smile and say, 'I did the best I could."'

Is Blades sure he could say that? "Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah," he replied, repeating the words more quietly and convincingly each time.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company