“I don’t sing songs or perform them, I am the song.”
TRQ: Bola de Nieve, Born September 11, 1911
Cuban singer, songwriter and pianist Bola de Nieve was born on September 11, 1911 in Guanabacoa, La Havana, Cuba. Born Ignacio Jacinto Villa, he earned his nickname from his round face. His mother, Inez, was a rumba dancer, and he started his musical training at 12 years old.
Villa studied at the Mateu Conservatoire of Havana. However, his black skin prevented him from attending university. Instead, he worked as a chauffeur and a piano player at the silent movie theatre Cinema Carral in Guanabacoa.
In 1930 singer Rita Montaner discovered Villa playing piano at the Biltmore Hotel Seville and asked him to go with her on tour. She gave Villa his nickname. Montaner returned to Cuba after the tour’s end, and Villa met and joined maestro Ernesto Lecuona’s company.
Lecuona and Villa performed on the radio and in theatres around Cuba, Buenos Aires, Paris, Madrid, Caracas, and New York. Villa performed songs in English, French, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian. Wherever he performed, he mixed local music with songs like “Drume Negrita” and “Chivo que Romper Tambó.”
Villa was Black and gay. Even though no Cuban record company would record an album with him, his music allowed him to express anguish and suffering, something he had in common with artists like Felo Bergaza, Orlando de la Rosa and Bobby Collazo. “The song, as a genre, was the vehicle with which a generation of black and gay Cuban pianists really managed to express themselves,” says journalist Rosa Marqueti.
His musical style blended charm, humility and humour and garnered an admiration for his talent that superseded audiences’ potential homophobic reactions. His reputation as an eccentric gave him a cover of privilege in the Castro regime. Villa’s talent helped bring Cuban music like mambo and rumba to the global mainstream.
In 1947 Villa performed in two films shot in Argentina. In September 1948, he performed in Philadelphia to a wildly enthusiastic audience who demanded nine encores.
Pablo Neruda and Andrés Segovia were friends with Villa. His sophisticated social circle suggested a political awareness obscured by his stage performances, but that lives on through the work of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, La Lupe and Chavela Vargas.
Villa was diabetic and asthmatic. In 1970, he was diagnosed with heart disease. On October 2, 1971, Villa died in Mexico City. He was buried in Cuba.
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