Success is never one person, it’s so many people’s contributions,” salsa legend Rubén Blades replies when asked how he felt to be chosen as Lincoln Center’s Visionary Artist for the 2024–25 season. “I’m very grateful that we did something that somebody thinks is worthwhile to present to new audiences.”
Blades is in good company, joining Terence Blanchard, the jazz-film-opera composer who was Lincoln Center’s inaugural Visionary Artist last season. There will be performances of Blades’ music, a display at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and screenings of two films: Blades’ breakthrough role in 1985’s Crossover Dreams (Walter Reade Theater, May 14) and the 2018 documentary portrait Rubén Blades Is Not My Name (November 6).
“This is another chance for us as an institution to honor an artist who’s a living legend,” explains Jordana Leigh, Lincoln Center’s Vice President, Artistic Programming. “These are artists who really connect to the complexity of Lincoln Center, artists who touch on various genres.” And as a winner of nearly two dozen Grammys and Latin Grammys, a member of the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame, an Emmy-nominated star on the TV series Fear the Walking Dead, an actor in films ranging from The Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford, to Cradle Will Rock, where he played artist Diego Rivera, and even a candidate for president of his home country of Panama, Blades is, as Leigh describes him, a true “Renaissance man. He has played all over our campus—and his last Out of Doors performance (in 2013) was one of our most popular shows ever.”
The library display, From Panama to New York: The Musical Journey of Rubén Blades, which runs from October 15 to April 15, includes memorabilia from both Blades’ and the library’s collections, like correspondence between Blades and Lou Reed, who collaborated when Blades was making his first album in English, 1988’s Nothing but the Truth. “I wanted to write with rock and pop musicians I respected, and Lou was one I was specifically interested in,” Blades explains. “When Little Steven did the song ‘Sun City’ and invited me to be part of it, I was in the video with Lou—he was a little scary when I first met him, but then we hit it off. We went to the woods in New Jersey where he had a property. It was a witness protection program kind of place, off the beaten path. We wrote and recorded some songs, with him and his band backing me. What a thrill!”
The series also sees Blades onstage, first at the Rose Theater October 18 and 19 for a performance that’s presented in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center. He will be joined by Boca Livre and Editus Ensemble for songs from his albums Tiempos (1999), Mundo (2002), and last year’s Pasieros, all integrating Brazilian harmony with his signature salsa sound. As Leigh notes, “he made two of these albums a while ago but has rarely played them in the states, and they all show the influence of Brazilian music and its storytelling power.”
Maestra Vida, Blades’ masterly large-scale work from 1980 that could be described as the first salsa opera, will receive its belated U.S. premiere at David Geffen Hall March 30 and 31 by the New York Philharmonic, led by conductor Diego Mathuez and with Blades as lead singer. It’s an intimate glimpse at a close-knit Caribbean family from birth to death, with all the happiness and sadness in between. “My idea was to debunk the notion that salsa was unable to function outside the limits of the dance genre,” Blades says. “I wanted to create a work with a lot of elements that contradictorily would all merge.” Maestra Vida has only been performed live twice: first with the album’s producer Willie Colón and the San Juan Philharmonic in Puerto Rico, then in 2012, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in Caracas, Venezuela, before an estimated 250,000 people. “That the New York Philharmonic is now doing it is an affirmation of the possibilities of salsa music as a cultural phenomenon,” Blades enthuses.
Even though he’s being honored for a brilliant career, Blades continues looking forward. “Every so often I hear about a lifetime achievement award and I think of the Monty Python skit where they come for the guy’s liver and he says, ‘But I’m using it’! As long as I can still sing in key and have the energy to write and do everything I do, I don’t feel like it’s over. The day I get up and can’t do this anymore, I’ll do something else.”
For more information on this season’s Rubén Blades programs, visit here.
Kevin Filipski is Juilliard’s program editor.
