Ricky Castillo

My Story

The first album by Cuban guitarist Ricky Castillo, "Havana 500", is a homage to one of the most beautiful cities in Cuba, Havana.

"Cuban music has contributed to the formation and development of many musical genres worldwide, it is a privilege for me to have taken my first steps in this city full of music and magic, rhythms such as Latin Jazz, Mambo, Rumba, The Songo, the Cha Cha Cha, the Danzón, the Salsa and many others have taken place thanks to the conglomeration of different cultural currents that have arrived on the island. In a historic city frequented by pirates and corsairs, governed by Spaniards and English, in the city of the columns, as Alejo Carpentier would say, center of interaction between the new world and the old continent, we find ourselves detained in time, surrounded by the sea, and bathed in an infinite panorama of social and visual inspiration that grows every second. When I create music, I am a coral, I am sand, I am the sea that surrounds my island, and like the waves, which serve as a bridge between the ocean and our land, I feel obliged to rescue, and bring afloat, that vast cultural history that our island possesses!

Artists like Leo Brouwer, Ernesto Lecuona, Arturo Sandoval, Luis Marqueti, Isaac Nicola, Miguel Matamoros, Sindo Garay, Chucho Valdes, Juan Formell, César Portillo, Gonzalo Roig, Amadeo Roldán, Barbarito Díez, Cesar Lopez, Arsenio Rodríguez, Antonio María Romeu , Roberto Faz, Tata Guines, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Enrique Jorrín, Dámaso Pérez Prado, Paquito de Rivera, and many others that I could not quote in a day, have been a source of direct inspiration in my formation as a musician.

When I observe the musical tradition that precedes me, magnificently powerful, I can only offer my music with the simple aspiration of contributing a small grain of sand to the vast ocean of Cuban musical culture”.

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