El gran fellove biography

Francisco Fellove Valdés (October 7, 1923 – February 15, 2013), also known as El Gran Fellove (The Great Fellove), was a Cuban songwriter and singer.
Francisco Fellove Valdés, also known as El Gran Fellove, was a Cuban songwriter and singer.
In 1955, Fellove travelled to Mexico City where he made his debut at Roberto Morales's Bar Latino with José Antonio Méndez before going to the El Burro club.

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Dir. Matt Dillon. US/Mexico. 2020. 91 mins.

Everyone loves a ‘lost legend’ story, and actor Matt Dillon tells an especially juicy, joyous one in El Gran Fellove, premiering in San Sebastián. The documentary – Dillon’s first, although he previously directed 2002 drama City Of Ghosts - introduces Cuban scat singer Francisco Fellove Valdez, who left his country in the 1950s, started a flourishing career in Mexico, but then was forgotten for years, finally returning to the studio in 1999 at the age of 77. The resulting music will finally emerge as an album next year – and the film should drum up plenty of interest, as well as engaging audiences in its own right.

A briskly enjoyable and highly informative film

This zippy chronicle of exile, reunion and rediscovery is a little head-spinningly crammed with info to fully sustain itself narratively, but otherwise tells a winning tale of musical survival, in a Searching For Sugar Man vein, which will be irresistible to music aficionados and Latin-leaning outlets.

Telling a somewhat different story to Wim Wenders’s Buena

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El Gran Fellové: Part 1 – The Beginning

Before celebrating the 25th anniversary of the recording of Grammy Award nominated album Jane Bunnett: Alma de Santiago, it pays to take a step back and consider this: The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word ‘typical’ thus: adjective, ‘showing all the characteristics that you would usually expect from a particular group of things.’

Although all of the recordings made over the years by Jane Bunnett with her trumpet and flugelhorn-playing husband and co-conspirator, Larry Cramer show “all the characteristics…” there is no such thing as a “typical” Jane Bunnett recording. Never has been and probably never will be. The reason is simple: you will never really know what to “usually expect” from Ms Bunnett.

Of all the musicians who I know, no one approaches her art with a sort of child-like quality of restless creativity that genuinely intrepid artists display. Revisiting this album, Alma de Santiago, in celebration of the 25^th anniversary of its recording I am reminded of the epic evening I first spent with

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Francisco Fellove: Charismatic soul singer

Francisco "el Gran" Fellove, who died in Mexico on 15 February at the age of 89, was a Cuban soul star regarded as one of the pioneers of the genre known as "filin". One of Cuba's most charismatic performers, he was celebrated for his tropical music on songs like "El Jamaiquino" and "Mango Mangue" – which he wrote when he was 16 or 17 and was recorded by Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and the flautist Johnny Pacheco, among others.

The actor Matt Dillon had recently worked with Fellove on a forthcoming documentary on Afro-Caribbean music. He said, "He was a great artist and he left a great musical legacy... It was a privilege for me to be able to work and spend time with him."

Filin was an American-influenced, popular song style which flourished from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The word is derived from "feeling", and was also known as "el feeling". It survived the first few years of the revolution, but didn't fit in with the new mood in the country and it gradually withered, leaving its roots in jazz, romantic song and the bolero.

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