I first interviewed Sarah Willis 14 or 15 years ago. As I recall, the Berlin Philharmonic was about to perform Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Subsequently, Sarah has spoken to me from her home in Berlin a number of times and on a range of different topics. That said, I have never interviewed her outside of Berlin or New York City until now, when I caught her by Zoom in—of all places—Taipei, to talk about her new album Cuban Christmas, which combines classical horn and the sounds of salsa, mambo, bolero and son to create a new spin on festive holiday classics like "White Christmas," "Feliz Navidad" and Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite."
James Baker: What a connection you've made over the years with all those Cuban musicians. Years ago, I produced a series of seasonal radio shorts to the topic of American Christmas songs, and I was not exactly surprised, but rather more amused that most of those songs were not written during the Christmas season at all. In fact, many of them were written in the heat of summer. When did you and members of your Sarahbanda decide that you were going to create a record called Cuban Christmas? Was it in the summertime?
Sarah Willis: More or less, actually, I was asked to put on a concert in Berlin at Christmas time, and we realized we had no repertoire, and I thought, well, I'd love to play with my Cuban musicians in Berlin. It's fantastic, but we can't, you know, we need to offer some sort of holiday cheer. And okay, we love Chan Chan and El Manicero and all these Dos Gardenias and all these beautiful Cuban classics. But we decided we should do something different, and because our project is called Mozart y Mambo, we are known now through the world for mixing classical music with Cuban rhythms, and so we just decided to give a Cuban twist to Christmas. Now, many people have done that before. There are quite a few Cuban flavored Christmas things out there, but ours is different. Because our band is different. It's like, it's a band,the Sarahbanda is a band, but we play acoustically, and which means we don't have any, you know, any, any microphones or help. We don't have anything amplified. Also, we play with dynamics. We've really worked very hard at that so we are able to do Christmas, Cuban, Christmas, but in a chamber music way. And this is something very special. I don't think there's any band that has done that before.
James: Well, knowing you as I have now over the years, I have a feeling that you were the one who first suggested . . .
Sarah: Me? No, of course. I'm the crazy one that has these crazy ideas. But I have an amazing team, my musicians. It's a real team effort. The only two people in this project who come from different countries, are myself, and also one of the other arrangers. Most of the pieces are arranged by our Cuban arrangers, but two of them have been done by Joshua Davis, who's an Australian, so he's been allowed into our Cuban club as well.
James: And now what was once the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, augmented by a handful of musicians who play in a popular style, has emerged The Sarahbanda. How did you manage that transition?
Sarah: It took us all by surprise a bit. I'm very honored that they like to be called the Sarahbanda. And that wasn't my idea, by the way, but it fits well to our project! We'd released our first album a year ago, and we were interested to see how people would like that after the big success of Mozart y Mambo. So of course, we included a couple of classical pieces that had been revamped in the Cuban style. But there was no pure classical music on that album. So it was a new thing for us, a new sound, and it was more dance music. And we say we're a Cuban band with a difference. And the the difference is that there's a French horn. There are no French horns in Cuban music, or there wasn't before Mozart y Mambo and there was, there's no French horns in band there.
And then when this opportunity came up to play a Christmas concert, we just decided that that's what we wanted to do (but) to decide which pieces to do that that was a difficult thing, because there's so many, there's so much good repertoire out there, and we just didn't want to do anything cheesy, like just doing "Feliz Navidad" as people know it, but with a Cuban rhythm. We really tried hard to turn all of our arrangements into something cool, something new, and I hope your listeners are going to enjoy it. Of course, we have a mixture of classical . . . we have a couple of classical pieces in there that we've given the Cuban twist to. And we also have an original Christmas carol from Cuba. And the Cubans don't really support Christmas. They don't really celebrate Christmas that much. Their big celebration is on New Year's Eve. But we did find an old record from the '70s, a really scratchy old record, and it was called Navidad Cubana. And we found all these Christmas carols that my musicians didn't know. They knew the composers, but they didn't know the Christmas carols. So we have one called "Criolla Navidad" by a well known Cuban composer called Kratz and and we rearranged it for our ensemble, and so it's an original work. So we did our homework.
James: Yeah, it's a wonderful program and a wonderfully balanced program. How'd you get Deutsche Grammophon involved in this?
Sarah: Have you met me? Well, I have been working for Deutsche Grammophon for a while, not as a musician, but as an interviewer. They asked me to do their podcasts, which I've very much enjoyed, and I like how they work. And of course, the Yellow Label is the Yellow Label. I mean, it's worldwide, but I've never recorded anything for them. So when this idea came to do a Christmas album, I thought maybe that was something that Deutsche Grammophon would be interested in. And they have a very wide reach. You know, I would like to not only reach people within my the audience within my reach, which is maybe a classical music audience, maybe a little bit more Latino, through Mozart y Mambo, but I would love people all over the world who know all these songs... I mean, here in Taipei in the shopping mall, they're playing "Feliz Navidad," unfortunately, not our [recording], but maybe that will change one day. So even over here in Asia, people are singing "Jingle Bells" and "Feliz Navidad" so and the outreach that the Deutsche Grammophon has is, of course, huge. And the most wonderful moment of this whole project, I think, was the moment I told my Cuban musicians that the Deutsche Grammophon were going to release our Christmas album. They could not believe it. And for them, as Cuban musicians, to record for Deutsche Grammophon, it's really for them a dream come true.
James: Sarah, I can only imagine what a logistical nightmare this might have been in anyone's hands but your own. Our listeners should realize that, by my count, there are 20 musicians involved. But even so how did you pull this off?
Sarah: Well, they're all Cuban, but they don't all live in Cuba anymore, and this is something that our project Mozart y Mambo has helped to do with the because it's all a help. How would you say in English, in German, it's called a help project. You call it . . . charity is not the word for it, either, but it supports the Cuban musicians. We've raised money through the project to help them buy new instruments, and also they've had the opportunities to go to Europe, to go to Spain, to America, to study. So many of them now live in Europe. And we only a few of them came from Cuba. We had, I think about nine or 10 of them coming over for the recording. The others came from Germany and Spain and and so that's a help in the organizing. But then we have the Sarahbanda, which are eight musicians. And then on this album, we included a big string section as well. We had that, you counted correctly, there were 20 of us, just for this lush, Christmassy feeling. You know that you that the strings gave us that cushion for the sound, and we had our conductor, of course, Pepe Mendes, and our big superstar, Carlos Calunga, the singer who, who is from Cuba and has an incredibly Cuban voice. I find he's such a fantastic singer.
James: How much advanced rehearsal and that sort of thing did you do before you actually went into the studio? Or did you just go in and work out the arrangements there? What was the process?
Sarah: Good question. We have the arrangements done. And of course, you cannot write a Cuban arrangement down how it's going to be. You can write the bare bones of it, and then when we get together, that's what I love, is the process of creating. We take what we have written, or sometimes we have nothing written. We say, Okay, we want to do "Jingle Bells," or we want to do "Feliz Navidad" and then we put the rhythms to it. Our arranger, Jorge Aragon, is Cuban. He's very good at writing it down, but you can never write the percussion. You can never write the rhythm exactly how it's going to be. So it's important that we are together, and we do, they say “cocinar,” you cook these pieces before we play them. And what we did was I went to Cuba last December, and all my percussionists still live in Cuba, and we got together, and we really went through all the pieces. We set up the percussion, and we did a pre-recording concert in Havana to just try out everything. And it was a great concert. It was in the cathedral, and 20 minutes before the concert started, the lights went out because there are terrible power cuts in Cuba right now. And what happens when the lights go out? When there's no electricity, you have to go home officially, because they don't want you on the streets. And all the audience were standing in front of the cathedral waiting to come in, and we went and spoke to them. We said, look, there's no light. We would like to go out into the courtyard and play the concert for you anyway, but we need your help with your phones to light the music stands. And they all came with us. And this, this, it sounds something simple. They use the lights on their phones, but for Cubans, if there's a power cut, you don't know when the next electricity is coming. So you don't want to use your phone. You don't want to use your battery. They all did. And of we out in the courtyard halfway through the concert, the lights came back, which was a shame, really, because I love the atmosphere of playing in the dark. And that was, that was the first experience we had of trying all this out with with our Nutcracker Suite. We actually worked online together with the percussionist and from Berlin, and then with Joshua in Australia, saying, Okay, what rhythm would go to the Sugar Plum Fairy and what rhythm would fit to the Trepak. And it was a lot of planning that went into it beforehand. But I love that process, you know? I prefer that process to the concerts. It's something the Sarahbanda does really well. We just all get together and we'd send messages to the violins, hey, can you play this rhythm on this and yeah, it was, it was a great process.
James: I recall years ago, like maybe 50 or more, it was really difficult to find Christmas arrangements for brass. And then the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble began coming out with great ten-piece arrangements, while Canadian Brass published Christmas quintets for brass. But never before have I heard arrangements such as you have on Cuban Christmas. They're brassy and sassy, and everything is so danceable. How did you arrive at the tunes that you would include? Were you just nominating tunes and then, you know, brainstorming over them, or who made the ultimate decisions as to what the playlist was going to be?
Sarah: Well, we do it together. And the arrangers, I say, of course, we had to include Felice Navidad, but it had to be a really good, cool new arrangement. And I knew Jorge Aragon could deliver that "White Christmas" I really wanted to do, because I wanted to feature our saxophone player Yuniet Lombida, and he has such a beautiful saxophone sound, I knew that would be the right piece for him. "The Christmas Song," I thought would be very interesting to hear. I found an old recording of it in in Spanish, and the Christmas Song was, everybody knows Mel Torme's version, and I thought maybe in Spanish it would sound really interesting. And I actually found one in Spanish, and then asked Carlos Calunga if he would sing it for us. He didn't want to sing it in English, so he did a beautiful job in Spanish. "Silent Night," I asked Jorge, what piece could feature the horn, and he suggested "Silent Night," which I was fine with. Jingle Bells. You've got to do "Jingle Bells" and "We
When our conga player Adel Gonzalez plays a solo, he's a star, and when Yuniet Lombida plays a solo, everybody shines... but we're still the band!
Wish You a Merry Christmas." We'd found in a version online with Hilario Duran, and I thought that we actually asked his permission. We've taken that directly from him. We've rejigged it for our band, but I wrote and asked him if we could use it, and he was very honored. So it's a big collaboration. But the two classical music pieces, of course, I decided those are the ones I wanted, because a Nutcracker Suite is a much loved Christmas staple and the Brandenburg Concerto. I'd been playing with this idea to do some Bach after the Mozart y Mambo project, and also because we're called the Sarahbanda. So I thought we could maybe do a sarabande or something. But Christmas is often trumpets and a lot of dancing strings, and the Bach Brandenburg Concerto Number Three. I woke up one night, I remember, I couldn't sleep, and I had the Brandenburg going through my head. I must have heard it on the radio or something. And then I thought, I wonder if that would work with a Cuban rhythm. But I thought a whole Brandenburg Concerto might be a little bit too cheesy. So what we've done is we've done it as a duel. So it's the classical against the salsa band, and the salsa band interrupts the classical, the classical Bach. So what you hear on the strings is really original Bach. And I'm very proud to say that somebody actually asked me, an interviewer asked me, which recording did you use for the classical part? Did you use St. Martin in the Fields? I was like, "Those are my my musicians. Those are my Cuban string players!" And they play so well that somebody thought it was a professional recording from somewhere else. So they did a great job on that. And then they're interrupted by the Sarahbanda who say, “No, you can do it like this.” And it's, it's something you can really enjoy when you listen to it, but also when we play it live in a concert (I'll have to film it one day and show it to everyone) because the conductor gets really upset with the string players because they start to dance, and in the end, the bass comes over to our side, and the trumpet player comes over to our side, but we finish in the classical manner, so who wins in the end? Bach.
James: Sarah, I love the humor and the juxtaposition of handing the Baroque trumpet part to the Cuban trumpeter more accustomed to playing a salsa style, and you the classical horn player from the Berlin Philharmonic, no less, taking the part of the improvising Cuban band. What fun.
Sarah: I'm so glad you enjoyed that surprise, because that always made me giggle, the fact that the piccolo trumpet player and that's Harold Madrigal Frias, he learned the piccolo, especially for this, because in Cuba you don't learn piccolo trumpet, you play in salsa bands. So not only has Harold learned to play in our orchestra, as orchestral trumpet playing, he learned for this to play the piccolo. And it's not just about learning an instrument, it's about learning the style which Bach uses. And he really studied that before this recording and I appreciate that so much that we put him the salsa player as the classical part, and me the classical horn player in the Cuban part. So we both had big challenges, I must say, to learn that Brandenburg, in a Cuban rhythm style was a big challenge for me.
James: And how about your improvisations in "Jingle Bells?" I have a feeling that most of that is written out, or maybe you indeed are comfortable enough doing it that you can now improvise on the spot, whatever it is, I really appreciate the spirit of your improvisations. It's really impressive.
Sarah: I'm not comfortable doing improvisations on my own. I'm trying when we do live concerts, I do sometimes really just try and do what I feel on the French horn. For some reason, it really doesn't work very well, at least for me, so but with, for example, the in Jingle Bells, we all have solos, and my solo was actually . . . Yuniet Lombida And Joshua Davis said to me, go away and create something and sing it. And I created that solo myself with singing it. And then they wrote it down for me, but I made I made it up myself. So it is an improvisation!
James: Beyond the great musical and technical elements in Cuban Christmas, another thing which impresses me is the structure of the album, the sequencing of the music. I know that not everyone these days will start track one and listen all the way to track 14 in consecutive order, but I find the thought which went into this on the part of you and your colleagues, and I think that also includes the technical producers, makes for a great listen.
Sarah: Thank you. I'm so honored that you appreciated that, because it does a lot of work goes into that, not only what order, but how many seconds between the tracks, and we always listen to the beginnings and the ends of tracks to see, can they also in a harmonic way? Did the key? Does that work? Because either you don't want to jolt the listener, at least I don't. I want them to have a nice Christmas experience. So So I appreciate that, that you you, you appreciated that.
James: Let's talk a little bit about your role, because unlike Mozart y Mambo, where the horn was the star, pretty much throughout here you're playing within the ensemble a lot more than as a soloist. Are you enjoying doing that with the Sarahbanda?
Sarah: I'm loving doing that. I'm loving being part of the Sarahbanda, because Mozart y Mambo was a big horn feature, and it was wonderful for for home players around the world to have all this new repertoire to play. What we're doing now is really featuring, we're a band, and for me we have stars, everyone's a star. When our conga player Adel Gonzalez plays a solo, he's a star and and when Yuniet Lombida plays a solo Harold, everybody shines, but we're still the band. And in my orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, I'm tutti player. I'm not the solo horn. I'm the low horn player. So I play in the section. I've always been more of a team player, and I'm loving being part of the band, and I don't feel like I'm the boss of the band. I'm the one that gets them all to the places on time. But, and of course, I organize it . . . my name is on it, and I do the interviews, but, but horn speaking there, of course, is a beautiful feature "Silent Night" is a beautiful horn feature. And of course, there's horn solos everywhere. But as you say, it's definitely a team effort.
It's a Jorge Aragon classic. He does have the Bolero happening in the background of "Silent Night" it's just beautiful to play and, and my memory of playing that in the in the garden of the cathedral in Havana, only by the light of these cell phones, that was something I will just never, ever forget. And what we did in Berlin in the concert was we . . . . Cuba is going through really hard times right now, and there's nothing to eat, there's no electricity, there's water, there's garbage all over the street. Something has to happen there, because the people are really, really suffering . . . and in Berlin, in the concert, we mentioned this because my musicians, who have moved to Europe, they are spending Christmas away from their families and and that's hard for them. So we dedicate "Silent Night" to our families, to our loved ones, the ones that are still living in Cuba, and we dim the lights, and we do the old Coldplay trick of getting everyone to light the hall with people's cell phones, and it's a beautiful moment. And it's always difficult for me to play that I always get a lump in my throat, which, as you know, is fatal for a horn player. But it's always a very emotional moment, because we do dedicate to our friends and families who are still in Cuba and are really having, really suffering.
James: Speaking to the comment that you mentioned a little bit earlier of someone asking you, what recording did you use for the classical part of the Bach I expect there are still listeners who will be amazed at the work you've done with these Cuban musicians. I mean, I've followed the evolution of so many of these players as you've coached them and allowed them to really show what they could do with Mozart y Mambo, and I think the last time we spoke, we both commented that each recording seemed to show a little more polish, a little more finesse. Now with Cuban Christmas, I've come away more amazed than ever at the caliber of the playing that you're getting from these musicians. They should be very proud of themselves as you are proud of them, I'm sure . . .
Sarah: You're gonna make me cry here, because I do feel so much pride for what they've accomplished. Really, when I met them, they were playing in more or less a youth orchestra in Havana and on very bad instruments. And I just, I just felt this need to help. And of course, people say, “Oh, isn't it great what Sarah's done for the Cuban musicians,” but they've done so much for me as well. You've heard me play on this album. I'm a different horn player than I was five years ago. I feel so free. I feel my rhythm is better, my articulation is better. I can I don't feel nervous to stand in the middle of a band without my music. We play by heart most of these things, and it's been amazing what we've learned from each other. And thanks to the project Mozart y Mambo and the generous people who've donated to it, and also donated instruments that they don't need, that they don't use anymore, everyone is playing on instruments, everyone in this recording playing on instruments, or a bow for a violinist, or strings or a trumpet. All these things have been made possible by the Mozart y Mambo project. So I'm not only proud of my musicians, I'm proud of the fact that we've we've been doing this project, and there's been so much interest to it. And I'm very grateful to people like you for getting the word out there and to all your listeners, and I hope that this album is going to get people up and dancing around the Christmas tree.
James: I've been speaking to Sarah Willis as we have sampled the new album Cuban Christmas with Sarah and the Sarahbanda. Sarah, thank you so much for the conversation and the fantastic music you and your colleagues have made. Best of luck and Feliz Navidad.
Sarah: It's been an absolute pleasure, and it's so fantastic to imagine that my Cuban Christmas album is going to spread out all over Texas, and that I would love to hear from your listeners, and maybe they could send us videos of them dancing in their homes to Cuban Christmas. That would be amazing. Yeah.
