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‘Cuba: Music and Revolution: Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1959-90 ’ is a stunning new deluxe 250-page large format hardback book compiled and edited by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz Records) that features many 100s of stunning and unique Cuban record sleeve designs made since the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959. These album covers have rarely been seen (nor heard) outside of Cuba and show a rich previously hidden history of both music and design.

‘Cuba: Music and Revolution’ is the first ever book about Cuban record sleeve design and has been five years in the making, made in full co-operation with the Cuban government. The record sleeve designs reflect both the rich cultural Latin musical legacy of Cuba, as well as the political and aesthetic influence of revolutionary Communism, which manifests itself both in the music created on the island and the artwork of the designs included here.

Cuban music is the source of much Latin music in the 20th century. Salsa, the all-encompassing Latin music that came out of New York in the 1970s, and soon spread across Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, owes all of its success to the Cuban music on which it is fundamentally based.

These record sleeves help document the dramatic change in Cuba’s identity from that of 1950s tourist paradise to socialist state. Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the United States imposed a trade embargo which exists to this day, and as a consequence the many 100s of Cuban records featured here have rarely been seen outside of Cuba.

The book is edited and compiled by Gilles Peterson, BBC broadcaster, record label owner, DJ, record collector, founder of Worldwide FM and Stuart Baker, founder of Soul Jazz Records. Together they have edited two earlier critically-acclaimed music and design books ‘Freedom, Rhythm and Sound – Revolutionary Jazz Cover Art 1965-83’ and ‘Bossa Nova and The Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s’.

In conjunction with the deluxe book, Soul Jazz Records will be releasing an album also compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker, charting the rise of Cuban music in the 1970s and featuring many of the artists who appear in this book.

Originating from the Latin for deity or goddess, the term diva has evolved to become a far more complex – and loaded – term. Delving into the public and private personas of performers from Jenny Lind to Sarah Bernhardt, Nina Simone to Rihanna, this book looks at what it means to be a "diva" and how this has been subverted and embraced over time. Kate Bailey opens the book with an essay on the transformation of the diva from 19th-century opera and stage star to 20th-century silent screen siren. Six thematic chapters then focus on different aspects of diva-dom: ‘Performing the Diva’ looks at how Hollywood Icons Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis cultivated their personas through their approach to costume and attitude, and how this has been taken up by performers such as Cher, Elton John, and Mariah Carey; ‘Voice for Change’ discusses the political activism of artists such as Billie Holiday and Miriam Makeba; ‘Status, Power, and Freedom’ explores the agency and brand acumen shown by artists including Dolly Parton and (...)

The OSTKREUZ agency was founded in the midst of the upheavals that took place in East Berlin in 1990. For Dream on - Berlin, the 90s, nine OSTKREUZ photographers worked together with curators Annette Hauschild (OSTKREUZ) and Boaz Levin (C/O Berlin Foundation) to cast a modern-day eye over their extensive archives as seen from today’s perspective. As documentarists operating at the apogee of photojournalism, they tracked the changes that the city underwent. They observed the shifts in society and the challenges facing a city that had previously been divided by a wall as it grew together, capturing all this in powerful, personal images. The essays reflect this on a variety of levels: Janos Frecot’s examination of the changes in the urban space; Jens Balzer’s description of Berlin’s potential as a centre of creativity and culture; and Anne Rabe’s very personal view, as a young East German writer, of today’s Berlin.

OSTKREUZ is an independent, Berlin-based agency that is run by twenty-four photographers.

348 pp.
250 b/w and color illustrations
thread-sewn hardcover

Leipzig September, 2024
ISBN: 9783959058520

Width: 20 cm
Length: 24 cm

Language(s): English

Editor
Boaz Levin, C/O Berlin Foundation, Annette Hauschild, Kathrin Kohle, OSTKREUZ

Designer
Marc Naroska

Text
Jens Balzer, Janos Frecot, Boaz Levin, Veronika Epple

Photographer
Sibylle Bergemann, Annette Hauschild, Harald Hauswald, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Jordis Antonia Schlösser, Anne Schönharting, Maurice Weiss