Juan Carlos Formell, Floating Heir to Cuba’s Musical Legacy, Dies at 59
Juan Carlos Formell, an acclaimed singer-songwriter who settled in New York after defecting from Cuba and eventually took over as bassist from his famous father, Juan Formell, in Los Van Van, one of the most influential bands of post-revolutionary Cuba, died on Saturday while performing in New York City. He was 59.
His death, from a heart attack he suffered on stage at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx, was confirmed by his romantic and musical partner, Danae Blanco. Mr. Formell, she said, had hypertension and arteriosclerosis.
Since fleeing Cuba for New York City in 1993, Mr. Formell charted his own musical course by releasing five solo albums and one Grammy nomination in 2000 for Best Traditional Tropical Latin American Performance for his debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House.”
When his father died in 2014, Mr. Formell agreed to carry on his legacy as bassist for Los Van Van, the Afro-Cuban dance band co-founded by his father. The band’s current lineup also includes his brother Samuel on drums and his sister Vanessa Formell Medina on vocals.
The band was just a few songs into an energetic set at the Lehman Center when Mr. Formell walked away from his double bass, double-clapping as if to catch his breath, then stumbled to the back of the stage. As the band played, Abdel Rasalps Sotolongo, the Van Van singer known as Lele, and Javier León Peña, a sound engineer, helped him offstage when he collapsed near the curtain.
After a brief announcement that Mr. Formell had a health problem, the band took a break for over half an hour and then returned to finish the set, playing nearly an hour in what appeared to be a tribute to Mr. Formell, a friend, said the musician Ned Sublette, who was in attendance, in a telephone interview.
Mr. Formell was a fourth-generation member of one of Cuba’s most famous musical families. His great-grandfather, Juan Francisco, was a popular bandleader. His grandfather, Francisco Formell, was the conductor of the Havana Philharmonic and the arranger of the Lecuona Cuban Boys, a popular big band that began in the 1930s.
His father, Juan Formell, along with fellow giants of Cuban music, César Pedroso, known as Pupy, and José Luis Quintana, known as Changuito, founded Los Van Van in 1969, combining traditional Afro-Cuban genres such as son cubano with elements of rock, soul and disco.
With the blessing of the Cuban government, the band toured the world for several decades and developed a worldwide following. It won one Grammy Awards in 2000 for best salsa performance for their album “Llego…Van Van/Van Van is here.”)
Despite his family name, Mr. Formell’s road to musical success was not an easy one.
Juan Carlos Formell was born in Havana on February 18, 1964, the eldest of three children of Juan Formell and comedian Natalia Alfonso.
When he was three weeks old, his parents sent him to a suburb of Havana to live with his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, the conductor, had been exiled by the Castro government because he belonged to the old guard. Mr Formell told The Los Angeles Times in 2000 that he had been teased by other children for having holes in his shoes.
Nevertheless, he set his course in the direction of music, studying at the Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán conservatories in Havana, and later at Cuba’s National Art School.
Influenced by Afrocubanismo, the Cuban artistic movement focused on black identity, as well as the Negrista movement in poetry, especially the work of Nicolás Guillén, Mr. Formell was already in his teens and studied bass with Andres Escalona of the Havana Symphony Orchestra. He started playing bass with the jazz pianist Emiliano Salvador.
He was also a talented guitarist and hoped to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter, but felt unable to express himself freely under the restrictions of Cuba’s government-controlled music industry, his ex-wife, Dita Sullivan, said. , in a telephone interview. .
“When I was still in my twenties, at a time when most musicians are full of hope,” he once said, “I resigned myself to a future of marginalization.”
In 1993, while touring with the dance band Rumbavana in Mexico, he crossed over, crossed the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas, and finally settled in New York City. The transition was not easy.
“If you leave Cuba, you no longer exist,” said Mr. Formell in a 2005 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. “You come here, you are invisible. You come here and nobody cares. If you want to defect, you better have a support system.”
Still, he built a career performing solo and with various ensembles at New York jazz clubs such as the Blue Note and Birdland before releasing his Grammy-nominated debut. mr. Formell followed with “Las Calles del Paraíso” (“The Streets of Paradise”) in 2002 and “Cemeteries of Desire”, a 2005 ruminant about the Latin American musical tastes of New Orleans, along with “Son Radical” (2006) and “Johnny’s Dream Club” (2008), which a Village Voice review said was “an unforgettable spell”.
His music, rooted in filin, a romantic, jazz-inspired genre of Cuban popular music, as well as son cubano, a traditional style mixing Spanish and African influences, celebrated the natural beauty of his homeland as well as its complicated history, including that of slavery and revolution.
“While my songs are not specifically about politics,” he said in a 1996 interview, “they reflect the reality of Cuba from my perspective and not the system’s perspective.”
In addition to Samuel and Vanessa, his survivors include his other sisters, Elisa Formell Alfonso and Paloma Formell Delgado, and another brother, Lorenzo Formell González. He and Ms Sullivan separated in 2012 and divorced in 2021.
In a Facebook message Announcing his death, Los Van Van said it would continue its tour of the United States, “paying homage to Juan Carlos in every performance, every note of music, in every Vanvanero choice as Juanca would have wanted.”