National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

One of Nat Geo Music's favorite artists, Cuban guitarist/composer Juan Carlos Formell, will debut his fifth and latest album, Johmmy's Dream Club this week at the Jazz Standard in New York City on Wednesday, November 11th. The album will be released the same day on the independent Caryatid Music label.

Produced by the Grammy-winning producer/engineer John Fischbach at his New Orleans recording studio, Johnny's Dream Club presents a stellar line-up of Latin jazz masters: Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca, Argentinean bassist Pedro Giraudo, Cuban percussionist Jorge Leyva, and Lewis Kahn, the renowned virtuoso of Latin jazz on trombone and violin. The celebrated New Orleans jazz clarinetist Dr. Michael White is the guest artist on the album.

Named for a legendary Havana jazz cabaret, Johnny's Dream Club represents a place outside time - the vortex of the tumultuous force field between New Orleans and Havana, where the parallel lines of Cuban music and American jazz converge. Formell and his quartet conjure a delirious sequence of juxtapositions: jazz rhapsodies ("Ciudad", "Caliban"), evoking the nightmare of a destroyed city, flow into songs about being lost at sea ("Las islas son malvadas", "Cuando hable de la noche"); the bloody history of the Caribbean ("Yanbando") is set against layered, allusive jazz ballads ("Sotavento", "Ciego Amor") inspired by Havana's "Feeling" movement.

Feeling was also the starting point of Juan-Carlos Fomell's musical biography. Born in Havana in 1964, a fourth generation musician, Juan-Carlos Formell learned the technique of the Feeling guitar in childhood from the masters of the genre: Mendez, Froilan, Guyun. Juan-Carlos began composing in his teens, and studied bass with Andres Escalona, the first bassist of the Havana Symphony Orchestra. He went on to play acoustic bass for the jazz pianist Emiliano Salvador. But when he tried to develop a career as a composer and guitarist, he found that the restrictions of the government-controlled music industry in his homeland made it difficult for him to express his new ideas. "While still in my twenties, at a time when most musicians are full of hope, I was resigned to a future of marginalization," Juan-Carlos recalls.

He fled to the United States in 1993, to make his own music, his way. He settled in New York City, where he was soon joined many other exceptional Cuban musicians of his generation -- but soon encountered a different obstacle. "When we came to New York we found that we had to keep seceding from what we call 'oficialismo' -- the official definition of jazz, the terrible and imbecilic idea of what Latin music is 'supposed' to be -- a loud dance party. We had to make our own rules." His years of struggle in exile were vindicated when his debut album, songs from a little blue house was nominated for a Grammy in 2000.

Juan-Carlos describes his new project as "a reflection of our culture today -- in the post-modern landscape, we are all refugees from the broken city, haunted, adrift at sea, in danger of losing our true reference points and losing our way forever. I keep returning to New Orleans for inspiration because I believe that there, at the crossroads of the Caribbean, it's possible to create music that embraces the past while gazing at the future -- a new music without genres and categories."