Cuban Legend Coming to Beacon

Pedro Luis Ferrer is revered musician
When artist and photographer Alejandro Lopez learned earlier this year that Cuban musician Pedro Luis Ferrer had relocated to Miami during the pandemic, he jumped at the chance to introduce the folk hero's music to a new audience at the Towne Crier in Beacon.
Ferrer and his daughter Lena, who sings and plays handheld percussion, will appear at the club on Dec. 5 and are also performing two shows in New York City and at The Local in Saugerties during a 10-day mini tour booked by Lopez.
"Miami is an art cemetery; I lived there," says Lopez, who moved to Beacon from Washington Heights in 2012 after delivering artwork to the KuBe Art Center and becoming enamored with the area.
Ferrer, 73, a singer, guitarist and tres player who performs with passion and gravitas that is palpable even to non-Spanish speakers, "is a legend in Cuba," says Lopez. A revered artist who resisted the regime of Cuba's late president, Fidel Castro, Ferrer represents "more than entertainment," Lopez added. "He is a real creator, someone who tells it like it is."

The sentiment of "If I Don't Leave Cuba" is subtle: "If I don't leave Cuba do not believe that I'm staying / I travel inside a ditch of hope and fear." The song "Rule of Law" takes a blunter approach: "Come the rule of law to govern on this island / Let it be a state of all the people not of one sect or one leader / Come the rule of law to the economy for the peasant and for the workers with its infinite fantasy."
Ferrer got away with such lyrics for a while, but the Castro regime brought the hammer down in the 1990s. The story, says Lopez, is that after Ferrer told a reporter in Venezuela that he would be willing to sing with Celia Cruz, a stinging Castro critic known as the Queen of Salsa during her exile in New York City, the government banned his music from the airwaves and pulled the plug on his recording career.
He created just three albums in his native land over 35 years, and one of the first discs he released outside the country is titled 100% Cubano.
Ferrer continued to perform, often abroad, and fans circulated live recordings like Grateful Dead bootlegs. He told Mother Jones 20 years ago that "some of my songs have never been heard on the radio or TV, but that does not impede the public from singing along with me at concerts."
Ferrer's original folk-style tunes fit into a broad framework called guaracha, which stretches back more than two centuries in Cuba and adapts well with the stripped-down arrangements he plays with Lena.
His main instrument is the tres ("three" in English), which looks like a compact guitar and consists of six strings. The name derives from its unorthodox tuning, in which three pairs of strings are pitched with the same notes, unlike the standard style used by most guitarists.
Ferrer has played in New York before with a 10-person band, but is now traveling light. "I'm not making any money here," says Lopez. "I'm doing this to give back to someone who tried to help and inspire our country for all those years."
The Towne Crier is located at 379 Main St. in Beacon (townecrier.com). Tickets to the show, which starts at 8 p.m., are $30 ($35 door).