Buena Vista Orchestra

Descended from a Havana accident

The Buena Vista Orchestra exists because of a session that was never meant to happen. Ry Cooder went to Havana for a Malian-Cuban collaboration that fell through, and recorded instead with a group of retired and semi-forgotten Cuban musicians — Compay Segundo, Rubén González, Ibrahim Ferrer among them. The self-titled album that resulted sold eight million copies, became the best-selling world-music recording ever made, won a Grammy, and was turned into a documentary by Wim Wenders.

Jesús "Aguaje" Ramos, born in August 1951, was in that room as trombonist, composer and arranger, and he was on stage for the Carnegie Hall concert that closed the film. Before Buena Vista he had done long stints with Estrellas de Areito and the Afro-Cuban All Stars. He described his role to WLRN in October 2024 as being "the guardian of the art of making music" — keeping intact a Cuban sound he considers to have been stopped in time since 1959.

The orchestra that carries the name is not a reunion band. Ramos began touring it in the mid-2010s with a deliberately different approach: rather than assembling survivors, he brought in younger players and built what he called a twenty-first-century version of the original ensemble.

Ramos's ten-piece, and the years on the road

By 2024 the touring group was a nine- or ten-piece in which Ramos and upright bassist Fabián García were the only originals. Around them were his daughter Lorena Lázara Ramos Díaz on trombone and vocals, singer Geidy Chapman, keyboard player Andy Abad Acosta, percussionist Luis "Betún" Mariano Valiente Marín on congas and bongo, pianist Emilio Senon Morales Ruiz and singer Aldo Isidro Miranda Alvarez.

That year's run was enormous by the standards of the genre — 44 cities, including the Miami Beach Bandshell on 19 October 2024. At Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre in Salt Lake City on 9 September 2024, the eighth of 42 American dates, the programme moved between "Babalú", "Quizás, Quizás", "Bésame Mucho" and two songs from the Grammy-winning album, "El Cuarto de Tula" and "Candela". Ramos and his daughter played "El Trombón Majadero" as a father-and-daughter duet. The staging was instruments and nothing else; the support act was Cody Jasper, who also drove the band's bus, playing four acoustic songs.

Those shows set the template the orchestra still works to: a repertory book from the golden age of Afro-Cuban music, played by a changing cast rather than a fixed line-up.

A new director and a new book

Since 2025 the ensemble has been led by Rolando Morejón Reyes, a Cuban violinist and arranger whose previous work includes the Orquesta de Enrique Jorrín and the bands of Omara Portuondo, Willie Colón, Cachao López and Oscar D'León. By the time the 2026 plans were announced in March, the publicity described him as being in his second year at the head of the group.

The line-up he conducts is larger and brassier than the one Ramos toured. At Colden Auditorium in Flushing, New York, on 3 October 2025 — tickets $42 to $82 — it ran to eleven players: Morejón Reyes on violin and vocals, trumpeters Antonio Perigo and Raúl Rodríguez, trombonist Yosmel Garcerán, pianist Helder Rojas, bassist Reynaldo Fontaine Mastrapa, singers Barbara Zamora Vargas and Julio Rodríguez Delet, and percussionists Miguel Valdés, Pepe Espinosa and Antonio "Pacha" Portuondo. Flautist Kristalis Sotomayor and saxophonist Jason Duarté have since been part of the touring group.

Presenters bill it as a repertory ensemble drawing on players from the Buena Vista Social Club, the Afro-Cuban All Stars and the bands of Celia Cruz, Chucho Valdés and Willie Colón — a description that tells prospective ticket buyers, accurately enough, that the personnel will not be identical twice.

March 2026: the announcement

On 11 March 2026 the orchestra announced a studio album recorded between Philadelphia and Miami, with Omara Portuondo singing on a version of "Chan Chan". No title or release date was attached to the announcement. At the same time the band put out the first physical pressing of En Vivo, a live record taken from the 2025 American tour, on CD and limited-edition vinyl, sold at shows and through the band's own website rather than through the usual retail channels.

The same announcement laid out three festival appearances on three continents — the Seoul Jazz Festival in South Korea on a bill supporting Janelle Monáe, the Middelheim Jazz Festival in Belgium, and BeachLife in Redondo Beach, California, supporting James Taylor — ahead of a North American run of 31 dates. Presales opened on 11 and 12 March, with general sale on 13 March at 10am local time.

Where they stand now

The festival year has already produced one of the group's better nights. At the Festival International de Hammamet in Tunisia on 28 July 2026, with Morejón Reyes directing, the orchestra turned the open-air theatre into a dance floor; the local write-up singled out the improvising and the spread of instruments on stage — tres, piano, brass, congas, maracas, claves, timbales.

As of September 2026 the calendar lists 39 concerts across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The autumn leg opened at the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood on 18 September under the title "Tribute to the Cuban Divas, Episode 2", then runs through Québec and Gatineau on 23 and 24 September, Cleveland on the 27th, Town Hall in Manhattan on 10 October, the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown on the 11th, Toronto's Danforth Music Hall on the 18th, the Vic in Chicago on the 22nd, the Vogue in Vancouver on the 30th, the Warfield in San Francisco on 6 November and the Wiltern in Los Angeles on the 8th. It ends at the Key West Theater on 22 November. A single British date follows: indigo at The O2 in Greenwich on 6 February 2027.

The venues are worth reading closely. This is a band playing 1,000 to 2,000-capacity rooms — restored theatres, House of Blues halls, a casino theatre — rather than the arts-centre circuit that usually absorbs traditional repertoire. That is a commercial position the original album's audience built and this ensemble has kept.

What the reviews find

The most recent detailed notice comes from City Winery Nashville on 10 July 2026, where Vivian Acevedo described a show that opened with a solo from pianist Helder Rojas before the band came in on a theme that recurred through the evening. She noted the choreography — the horn section and singers moving in unison on step-touches between solos — and an instrumental face-off between Sotomayor's flute and Morejón Reyes's violin. Both singers, Zamora Vargas and Rodríguez Delet, were picked out as the night's most memorable element, and the crowd was still asking for more at the end.

The pattern holds across the reviews. In Utah the audience chanted "Uno más!" until the band came back, then "Dos más!" for a second encore, with people dancing in front of the stage for much of the night and band members dancing between their own entries. The staging is consistently minimal — instruments, players, no set — and the persuasion is done by arrangement and by soloists being given room in turn.

What is not on offer is nostalgia sold straight. The material is the standard Cuban book, but the arrangements are Morejón Reyes's, the players are mostly decades younger than the men who made the record, and the group's own marketing leans on that rather than on ghosts.