![]() Music Turning The Tables: 8 Women Who Invented American Popular Music What was there and what remains all contribute to the truism that it is impossible to write about Cruz without some recourse to the divine. The work now and going forward is to listen hard to what Celia Cruz didn't, or couldn't tell us outright, but had been singing all along. Her dance between the various positions she chose and was forced to embody are made too big a distraction from her hard work in the studio, cabaret, stadium. Given the difficult geopolitical contours to her history, many have made an impossible mission to get her record straight. Celia Cruz, famously private, has left behind all the biographical data she wanted to tell. To write about women musicians is to dive into the recorded surface while fighting the demand to reveal everything about them in the time and space allotted. How wonderful to imagine - or better yet, assume - that on any recording there is all kinds of stormy material that might escape the ear. There is an official recording of the performance where we can't hear all these elements. ![]() We kept dancing while she threw lightning bolts back at the sky. ![]() The weather wanted to meet her, match her, counterpoint her song. She battled out hail, wiring, metallic stagecraft and every possible scenario considered dangerous, and kept singing. The mighty Celia, at 76 years old and not feeling at all well, refused to waver. On that late afternoon descended an out-of-nowhere, fire-and-brimstone summer thunderstorm. Over time it became a relied-upon catharsis for her public to recognize their ancient past and to air their damaged present. Cruz would often save her signature "Bemba Colora" as the encore an audience had to deserve. The last time I saw Celia Cruz perform was in Central Park in 2002, one of her final shows, when SummerStage was less managed and thus more exciting.
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