Yesterday one of our swingiest weeks came to a happy close with the conclusion of our #MusicalDestinations contest. We received more than 3,500 tweets pitching all manner of tunes for our different destinations. It’s been a real treat to see your energy, enthusiasm, and love of good music… not to mention love of winning an Iberostar vaycay!
Some we should’ve seen coming, like “Montego Bay” by Bobby Bloom, but we admit others left us frankly perplexed (really, what does “The Time of My Life” have to do with Cape Verde?) But it’s been a fun ride, and we sincerely thank you all for participating. We wish you all could win! But… only one can, and before you break through the screen and throttle us for dragging out the announcement, here’s the winner of #MusicalDestinations, chosen on Random.org:
The lucky winner is @ErinCBallinger, who has conquered all with Demus’ mega-fun hit “Rum Junkie”. Chaka Demus hails from – where else? – Jamaica, the country Erin identified with the song, which also happens to be an Iberostar destination. Please join us in extending Erin a hearty congratulations, mon!
Didn’t win? Don’t despair: there are more contests to come!
Let’s start out the week with a bang (or at least a song)! Yes, we’re belting out a new travel contest, this time on Twitter, so that for the next seven days you guys can boogy to the beat of our #MusicalDestinations. the first thing you’ll need to do is follow us on Twitter (if you already do so, big thanks, you rock!). Then the idea is to tweet song titles relating to destinations with Iberostar resorts, including the hashtag #MusicalDestinations, the destination – and of course don’t forget to mention us, @iberostarusa.
Every tweet that includes a correct song title and accurate destination along with the hashtag and @iberostarusa mention will be entered in a random drawing on random.org to win a flight and stay for two at one of our resorts.
To give you an even better idea, here’s an example:
#MusicalDestinations @iberostarusa Jamaica “No Woman, No Cry.”
No sweat, right? So get crooning and tweeting – the more you do, the more chances you have to win! Check out the contest rules here.
“Ay, no hay que llorar Que la vida es un carnaval y es más bello vivir cantando…”
In this, one of her signature songs, the late Celia Cruz sang “No need to cry – life is a carnival, and it’s always more beautiful to live singing.” It is this positive philosophy in life that won her millions of fans from all over – earning her the title as the most successful and beloved salsa performer of the 20th century. It is also her infectious music and irresistible rhythms that make it all but impossible to keep your feet from tapping – or your hips from wiggling – when you listen to the Queen of Salsa.
Putting Cuba on the Map
With her explosive voice and equally vivacious personality, Cruz earned 23 gold albums and over 100 recognitions and Grammy awards. It was shewho introduced the world to salsa music, causing a wave of salsa trends to hit shores well beyond the Hispanic world. Billboard magazine once wrote in an article, “Cruz is indisputably the best known and most influential female figure in the history of Cuban music.”
Cruz spent her childhood and youth in Havana, Cuba – the birthplace of salsa. While growing up in the diverse Cuban musical climate of the 1930s, Cruz was influenced by many musicians along the lights of Pablo Quevedo, Paulina Álvarez, Abelardo Barroso, and Arcaño y sus Maravillas. But she quickly developed her own voice and style, creating music that’s distinctive and uniquely hers.
Cuban Legacy
Cruz started singing in cabarets as a teenager and then moved on to performing in a popular program on Havana’s Radio García-Serra. Her shot at fame came when she replaced the lead singer of a well-known Cuban orchestra, Sonora Matancera. She spent the next 15 years with them, gaining fame all over Latin America, during which she developed a trademark shout, greeting her audience with a loud “azúcar!” (sugar) at each show.
Though Cruz left Cuba for the United States in 1959 and spent the rest of her life there, her heart always belonged in Cuba. Throughout her 50-year singing career, she strongly supported educational, health and cultural issues in Cuba, as well as other Hispanic communities. She also founded the Celia Cruz Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds for underprivileged students wishing to study music. Celia left us in 2003, but her legacy will clearly be kept alive for a long time.
When visiting Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia, one of the many essential things to do is to visit the National Opera House. Standing in the heart of its historic quarter, the opera house is home to the Sofia Opera and Ballet Company, which puts up regular performances throughout the year. While the imposing building doesn’t look too welcoming from the outside, step in and you’ll be surprised to find a lavishly decorated theatre connected with twirling stairways, laid with red carpet, and lit up with shimmering chandeliers. Today, the building stands as a testament to decades of glorious opera history in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Opera has been a big part of the city since the founding of the first Bulgarian opera company in 1890. As the company evolved, so did the opera scene in Bulgaria. But the opera activity was ceased for a while during the 1944 bombing of Sofia and since then, it barely revived.
Boris Christoff, a pioneering figure in the world of opera in Bulgaria, brought it back to life. As a boy, he demonstrated amazing singing talent when he sang at the choir of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia. He continued to achieve success as a chorus soloist and soon attained a government grant to pursue his musical studies in Italy. Although he spent much of his musical career in Italy, he never forgot his hometown – he was ultimately buried at the cathedral where he sang as a boy in Sofia.
Today, Boris is still considered one of the greatest basses of all times and his achievements are still very much celebrated in Sofia. Each year, the Sofia Opera and Ballet Company co-organize the Boris Christoff International Competition for Young Opera Singers in a bid to draw a younger audience and to support upcoming singers. You can also watch regular opera and ballet concerts in the hall – if you’re a music fan, be sure to book your tickets for the program in advance.
Not too many people know much about (or have even heard of) the tiny, 10-island West African country of Cape Verde (home to Iberostar Club Boa Vista, on Boavista island). But even though relatively few actually understood her song lyrics, plenty in Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world certainly knew and loved its most famous native daughter, a soulful singer whom we lost on December 17 at age 70.
Like one of my favorite U.S. jazz icons, Alberta Hunter, Cesária Évora started her career young and at one point left music, only to stage a spectacular comeback, in Évora’s case starting with a hit album in France, La diva aux pieds nus (“The Barefoot Diva”; she always sang barefoot because she said it was more comfortable). She won a Grammy nomination for 1995’s Cesária, and international fame didn’t lag far behind; her album Voz d’Amor (Voice of Love) later won her a world music Grammy in 2004. Évora’s health started declining in 2010, and in September 2011 she finally retired from her beloved music.
But the lady has left behind a gorgeous legacy of more than 20 studio, live, and remixed albums (including Club Sodade, a cool bunch of dance-club remix tracks), that have taught the world about Cape Verde’s distinctive national music, called morna. Like Portugal’s fado, it’s usually sung in a minor key and deals with loss, regret, and longing. As executed by Évora, it’s rich and jazzy, with lush arrangements and hints of blues and bossa nova. The language is crioulo, an Afro-Portuguese sprinkled with local African languages like Wolof and Fulani. Her success – and the video below, one of her better-known songs, “Sodade” (“Longing”)– prove that you don’t need to understand the words to be moved by the music and that evanescent voice. Still, for your delight, here are the simple yet powerful lyrics:
Quem mostra’ bo ess caminho longe? Who will show you that long road?
Quem mostra’ bo ess caminho longe? Who will show you that long road?
Ess caminho pa São Tomé That road to São Tomé
Sodade sodade The longing, the longing
Sodade The longing
Dess nha terra São Nicolau For this land of mine, São Nicolau
Si bo ‘screve me ’m ta ‘screve be If you write to me I’ll write back to you
Si bo ‘squece me ’m ta ‘squece be If you forget me I’ll forget you
Até dia qui bo voltà Until the day you return
Sodade sodade The longing, the longing
Sodade The longing
Dess nha terra São Nicolau For this land of mine, São Nicolau
Muito obrigado (thank you so much), Cesária. Today, December 20th, may be your funeral; but your music will always live in our hearts. Rest in peace.
Did you know that 2011 marks the 30th anniversary of MTV? (Sniff, they grow up so fast…!) That means most of us in the “on-the-grid” world have been awash in music videos for nearly a third of a century already. YouTube, on the other hand, has only been around for half-dozen years, and already this undeniably megacool site has already also transformed the world’s music/media landscape. But less coolly, it’s also been responsible for the perpetration and proliferation of homemade music videos of which, well, the less said the better.
With some mindblowing exceptions. Case in point: The other day browsing the ‘Tube I stumbled across a viddy that actually got me chuckling out loud. Called “Dominican Bounce,” it’s lip-synched to the techno-synthpopper “Bounce,” a euro-club hit released several months ago by Scottish singer-songwriter Calvin Harris, featuring U.S. dance diva Kelis. The original’s set in Las Vegas, but as I discovered, this playful tribute bounces all the bouncing over to Punta Cana’s Iberostar Bávaro resort (no, it was never made explicit, but I’d recognize that luscious beach anywhere).
“Dominican Bounce” is the brainchild of 47-year-old Gavin Skidmore (from Bromley, Kent, if you must know – he’s the bloke being pharaonically carried aloft across the strand on a chaise-longue), who spent an apparently quite enjoyable holiday here this past August. It hopscotches across the resort, with a cast of dozens – two-dozen-plus guests young (some very young) and old taking turns synching a line or two. Here’s the beach bar, there’s a room patio, the pool, outdoor showers, the lobby (yo, nice conga line) – and oh yeah, those famous lush palms just back from water’s edge. Three minutes and 35 seconds of original, nonstop action, and certainly fun, but also kind of exhausting (frankly, when I go to an Iberostar resort, I’m more than happy to sit back and let the Star Friends take charge of keeping me entertained).
Anyway, I recently got a chance to quiz the über-creative Gavin just a bit on his Iberostar escapade.
What gave you the idea for this video?
The idea came from a TV news story from a year or so ago where soldiers serving in Afghanistan had made a spoof pop video. Our holiday had 26 family and friends and I thought what a great opportunity to film a video of our own! I had two songs in mind and had downloaded these from iTunes before we left home. One friend brought along his iPod docking station to play which will let each of us in the video sing to the song and to help lip sync the video during editing once we returned from holiday. Once we got to the Iberostar, a few of the teenagers in our party didn’t like the two songs that I had prepared, so we discussed an alternative and it was agreed “Bounce” was the perfect tune.
Wow, 26 all at once?
Well, a few years ago at a party, many of our friends were chatting and although we had holidays in small groups, we had never had one holiday with all our friends. With this, a trial holiday to Egypt was planned, and from the fun and success of that holiday we decided to do it again in two years’ time. Myself and my brother and sister including children decided to go to Iberostar resort in Punta Cana. We had such a great time we thought this is the perfect resort to bring all our friends, too. So this past August, 26 of our family and friends finally made the trip. Although the ages vary from 2 to 51 years, many of the older generation have known each other from school and have remained very close friends throughout the years, so having a holiday with all our extended families was fantastic. And one of the many great things about the resort is that we never had a problem getting a table for dinner for 26!
One thing that especially impressed me was the coordination and choreography. How in the world did you all manage it?
I really have no experience in this kind of thing at all, but my niece Hayley Skidmore is training to be a dancer and she choreographed the whole thing; she appears in many of the scenes (she’s the first girl in the t-shirt, for example, and toward the end leading the group down the beach with her brother Lewis). Each day we did rehearsals while I looked for locations within the resort to do the filming. The staff were amazing, and following one of the shows in the resort theater, they even helped us record a dance routine on stage for an audience of other guests; unfortunately that scene wasn’t quite in focus and I felt it wasn’t sharp enough to sit in with the rest of the video.The opening scene was the first scene I filmed and what you see is the first and only take. Many scenes were shot with one or two takes, but some of the scenes we filmed in the evening did need quite a few takes. But it was still fun!
From time to time a movie comes along that does more to promote a destination than a glossy brochure or TV ad could ever manage. The Greek Islands were already renowned for their natural beauty, but thanks to a bunch of actors who were clearly having the time of their lives belting out a sequence of feel-good songs, the image of Greece that many of us have will never be the same again.
Mamma Mia – The Movie
Rarely has a movie with such a flimsy plot become such a smash hit. While the musical Mamma Mia relied on instantly recognizable ABBA songs that had the audience first humming the songs and before long dancing in the aisles, the movie has a bigger ace up its sleeve. Not only do we get to sing along to ABBA with Meryl Streep and Colin Firth but we can also sit back and enjoy the gorgeous Greek island scenery that serves as a backdrop to the movie.
The scenes flit between impossibly pretty harbours, crystal clear waters and quaint white-washed cottages before the grand finale inside a delightful little church and a picture-perfect hilltop location. Rarely has a place been shown in a better light; the Greek tourist board must have been delighted with Mamma Mia!
Filming on the Greek Islands
Mamma Mia is filmed in three locations in Greece. Most of the scenes take place on the island of Skopelos, a relatively undeveloped island that is popular with those looking to taste a little of the ‘real’ Greece. Nearby Skiathos was also used for a few scenes while the harbor that features in several scenes was actually on the Greek mainland in the tiny village of Damouchari.
In truth the producers of Mamma Mia were spoilt for choice when choosing which Greek island to use as a location for the movie, with countless pretty harbors and secluded coves to choose from. The Greek islands are quite rightly considered one of the world’s most scenic holiday spots and wherever you decide to go you won’t be far from your own Mamma Mia moment. All you need is that ability to sing the Mamma Mia music without warning as you’re enjoying the spectacular views!
Croatia: a land of more than a thousand islands, splattered off the beautiful Adriatic coastline in Eastern Europe. Located at the crossroads of the Balkans and the Mediterranean, this European country is chock-full of intriguing history, Mediterranean cuisine and Slavic cultural heritage.
On a recent visit to the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, I decided to delve deeper into an unconventional side of the country. I ditched the crowds on the beach, left the tourist trail behind me and headed deep into the world of music.
Journey into Dalmatian Folk Music
Stretching from the island of Rab to the Bay of Kotor, Dalmatia occupies the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. Folk music in this region is strongly influenced by the Mediterranean and often resembles the music in Italy, Spain and Portugal. It is usually characterized by slow, free rhythm and soothing beats that remind us of the ocean. Dalmatian folk music has inspired many new forms of music and numerous modern artists have incorporated elements of it into their pop songs.
One good example is Oliver Dragojević, an extremely popular singer in Croatia, whose music is strongly influenced by Dalmatian folklore. He first emerged into the music scene in the 1970s during the Split Festival, an annual music event that is still held in Croatia today. He then released many popular hits that featured elements of folk, including ‘Galeb I ja’, a popular Dalmatian anthem. But today, there is much less presence of domestic folk music in Dalmatia due to globalization.
Folk Music Festival
With the aim of conserving traditions, a special annual festival of Dalmatian singing is held in Omiš each year. The Festival of the Dalmatian Klapas has now grown into a cultural institution of importance and Croats from all over the country gather here for the event. It is held from the end of May to the end of July each year. Omiš is a town located just 16 miles from Split, Croatia’s second largest city. The Riviera here is stunning especially at night, stretching for miles along pebbled beaches, bays and steep cliffs. If you get the chance to travel to Croatia during this time of the year, be sure to pay homage to the folk music festival in Omiš.
It all started as a bit of an accident. A big fan of Cuban music, American guitarist Ry Cooder had been invited to Cuba to work on a collaboration with local musicians and two well-known musical stars from Mali. When the Africans were denied entry visas to Cuba, Cooder set about creating his Plan B: A recording of Cuban son music with local musicians.
A Star is Born
The resulting album, recorded in only six days, included the title track Buena Vista Social Club and was released to critical acclaim in 1997. International demand for the Cubans to perform the songs live on stage soon followed and the Buena Vista Social Club name became known worldwide in 1999 when a documentary movie was released (catch the trailer below). The film told of the reforming of the band and the individual tales of the elderly musicians. Millions of movie and music fans around the world were eager to learn about and embrace Latin music. But what about the original pre-revolution Buena Vista Social Club?
The Original Cuban Music Clubs
Social clubs were a common phenomenon in 1930s and 1940s Cuba. Run very much along racial lines, there were hundreds of clubs covering every ethnic group and catering to a wide range of interests. The Buena Vista Social Club was a place where local musicians would perform different styles of music that reflected the tastes of the time: Latin jazz, cha-cha-cha, rumba and mambo took their turns here.
Perhaps the myth of the club is greater than its reality ever was, as when the film crew were researching the history of the club the old folks of Havana couldn’t even agree on where it had stood. The Buena Vista Social Club shut its doors soon after the revolution, but Cuban music continued to develop in the bars and clubs of Cuba.
Cuban Son Music
The greatest single influence on Cuban music, indeed Latin music in general, is considered to be ‘son’. Described by many as the foundation of all Latin music it is easy to identify son as the root of many of the modern Latin musical genres. It is son that is the focus of the current incarnation of Buena Vista Social Club (many of the original oldtimers have passed away) as they continue to perform around the world.
Visit Cuba today* and you’ll hear a rich diversity of music in the clubs and bars. Be warned, however, that if you hear an old tune that you think you recognize from the Buena Vista Social Club, it’s probably being played for the benefit of the tourists. For the people of Cuba the music has long moved on.
*Citizens, residents, or anyone subject to the jurisdiction of the United States may only travel to Cuba on special licenses with U.S. government permission.
“Tê tê te, Tetetê tetê! Samba de Bahia, Samba de Bahia…”
You don’t have to be a samba lover to know this song. The catchy tune of “Maria Caipirinha” (see below) has won the world over with its infectious samba beats and Bahia feel. The creator of this and many other Bahia-inspired tunes is none other than Carlinhos Brown, a six-time Grammy Award winner and a native of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.
Carlinhos Brown’s Love for Salvador
Born and raised in Candeal Pequenho, a small neighborhood in Salvador da Bahia, Carlinhos learned the traditions of Brazilian folklore and percussion from the Master of Bongo himself. He started fusing percussions and rhythms from the Bahia area with electronic beats and psychodelic strings, but always keeping a touch of Brazil in his music. Despite his worldwide success, Carlinhos continues to dedicate his life to his hometown, where he founded the Pracatum Music School as a non-profit organization to help educate and develop cultural programs in the city.
Salvador da Bahia: Music Capital of Brazil
As the birthplace of Carlinhos Brown and other musicians like Tom Zé, Salvador da Bahia is famed for its music, countless outdoor parties and street carnivals. Dubbed as the Brazil capital of happiness, it’s here where you go to soak up the undercurrents of the country’s music scene and learn how to samba. In Salvador da Bahia, it’s easy to let your hair down and immerse yourself in the atmosphere.
But Salvador da Bahia has a lot more to offer than just music. As the first capital of Brazil, it is considered the oldest city in the New World and therefore plays host to a myriad of historical buildings and sights. The historical centre of the city, known as Pelourinho, has a beautiful collection of Portuguese colonial architecture on display, along with monuments dating back as far as the 17th century.
With pleasant year-round temperatures, it’s also the best place to soak up some sun and let the sea breeze sweep you off your feet. The beach is just a hop away from the Old Town and the coastline offers plenty of entertainment for you if you’re looking to just kick back and relax.
David
Nellie
Andy
Zippy
