Cubadisco music industry awards coming up May 2021 – with list of nominees

The program of activities and the list of nominees in the different categories of the 24th international festival of the Cuban music industry, Cubadisco 2020-2021, scheduled for May 15 to 23, were announced last week in a virtual conference in Havana

Indira Fajardo, president of the Cuban Institute of Music, said that this year record production has been very diverse, and they wanted to organize an event that reflected that context in the last two years.

The music industry has had to change its dynamics; in our case, the cancellation of face-to-face events has imposed a challenge for music to unite people with the artists from other platforms and alliances, she highlighted.

In this 24th edition, the Cubadisco International Fair will celebrate the Ibero-American Year of Music, and have Spain as a guest country, with new approaches that will have various digital platforms and Cuban TV channel ‘Canal Clave’ leading with a program designed for everyone.
The president of the event, Jorge Gómez, announced that 14 hours of television broadcasts will be broadcast daily on Canal Clave, a practice that could be resumed even under normal conditions, since it enables the content and activities to reach many more people. For example all the documentaries nominated are to be shown on the channel.

René Baños, president of the Cubadisco Award Committee, said that the event is working to establish changes in relation to the awards and their dissemination.

The process of judging has changed. They wanted the vote to be as democratic as possible, in order to have the greatest number of opinions from specialists, including the public, and thanks to a national academic committee being conformed, they can all participate. There will still be a conventional jury but these other evaluative judgments of the different competing works will be added. As the 2020 festival was cancelled due to the pandemic, It has been two years of record creation, and it can be said that it has been the period of greatest record production in Cubadisco’s entire 24 years of existence, and the quality is high, he said.

There are 360 works in total submitted. The categories for this year, he said, have been expanded due to the number of records submitted. Baños said that in some ways all the nominees can be considered winners today more than ever, due to the complexity that COVID-19 added to both record labels and artists.

Cubadisco has divided the nominations into areas most appropriate to the candidates such as: Heritage, Academic, Instrumental, Songwriting, Fusion, Popular-Dance, Urban, and Electronics and Electroacoustics. In addition, categories such as International Collaboration, First Work, Graphic Design, Record and Musicological Notes, Sound Engineering, Musical Documentary, Documentary Series, Making of, and other audiovisuals dedicated to concerts were included.

The special awards such as the Lecuona prize, Habana 500, and Musical Icon, also have exceptional nominees.

Cary Diez, musicologist and member of the Organizing Committee of the event, said the festival’s symposium will take place between May 17 and 21 at 11:00, local time each day, looking at the productive chain between cultural institutions, how Cuban music has thrived on various networks, among other issues.

The press conference confirmed the willingness of all the institutions, including the Ministry off Culture, not only to recognize the artists, but also to give public access to the best of musical creation in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Link to original report in Spanish by CubaDebate

Nominations include Chucho Valdes’s album ‘Jazzbata’, Changüí De Guantánamo’s Este Es Nuestro Changüí’ , El Niño Y La Verdad’s ‘Voces de Hoy’ and many more.

Listen to this track dedicated to the Afro-Cuban goddess Oshun on the album ‘Voces de Hoy’