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Cigars And Music: A Natural Combination

by chiron99

Perhaps it's because there's a close cultural connection between
great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about jazz
knows that its truly legendary improvisers - Coltrane, Bird,
Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie - cut their teeth playing in bars so
smoky that it's a good thing everybody was too busy improvising
to need sheet music.

Or maybe it's because both cigars and music are contemplative
pleasures. A casual smoker can get a quick tobacco-fix from a
cheap cigarette, just as a casual music listener can enjoy the
background hum of pop songs on the car radio. But to really enjoy
a great performance, or a good tobacco, sitting still and paying
attention are necessary.

In any case, music and cigar smoking seem to belong together,
and some of the most famous musicians are (or were) cigar
devotees - just as, it turns out, one of the most famous of cigar
devotees is also a musician. Avo Uvezian, the maker of Avo
cigars, is also a respected classical and jazz pianist, a
Julliard graduate, and even the one-time official pianist of the
Shah of Iran. After a successful musical career based first in
his native Middle East, and then in the contiguous United States,
Uvezian moved in the 1980s to Puerto Rico, where he opened a
restaurant and bar and dabbled in cigarmaking. After customers at
his Puerto Rico restaurant told him how much they enjoyed some
cigars he'd had rolled himself, from a blend of tobaccos he
hand-picked, he opened his own Dominican Republic-based cigar
factory, working with noted cigar maker Hendrik Kelner. Now his
company makes three million cigars a year, and Uvezian himself
still makes music - his first CD, Legacy, was released in 2004.

For another example, consider the great trumpeter Arturo
Sandoval, who smokes, by his own estimation, four or five cigars
a day. Music allowed the Cuban-born Sandoval to rise to fame in
his native Cuba - and to defect from that country in 1990, during
a long stint playing concerts in Europe (he now lives in
Florida). Sandoval has played the horn for Lionel Hampton and
Dizzy Gillespie, Gloria Estefan and Johnny Mathis, Michel Legrand
and Frank Sinatra. His technically flawless playing has resulted
in his being the kind of musician whose work is often known by
people who couldn't name him - he is brought in as a session
musician by some of the world's finest and best-known (see
above), and he often scores movie soundtracks. As his work with
the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Leningrad Philharmonic prove,
he's even proved able to handle the rigors of classical music as
well as jazz - sometimes doing both in the same concert.

The cigar-music connection is especially strong in Cuba, known
as one of the world's cigar capitals. Both cigars and music are
staples of island life (the cigar remains one of the island's
most prominent exports), and the strength of both in Cuban
culture depends partly on the nimble and intelligent blending of
elements from everywhere - wrappers and fillers from different
parts of Latin America, rhythms and melodies from the African
coast, South America, US pop, Western European classical, etc. In
other words, Cuban cigarmaking and Cuban music have both
survived, and flourished, by mixing and melding.

For generations, cigar rollers were entertained by the sound of
paid musicians or by music from the radio. (This tradition
continues even now in the Dominican Republic, where workers at
the Arturo Fuente factory, among other places, are treated to the
work of performing musicians.) With this tradition in place, it's
no wonder that some of Cuba's music legends got their start as
cigar-factory entertainers; and since tobacco smoking has been a
part of Latin American life far longer than it has in some other
places - Columbus's sailors noted it being smoked in what is now
modern Cuba in the year 1493, so there's many more centuries of
lore to draw on its psychological and emotional associations are
deeper and richer, providing better material for songwriters to
mine. Thus famous Cuban songwriter Beny More, himself a former
entertainer for the cigar-factory workers, touches on the song in
a number of his classic compositions.

<a href="http://www.cigarfox.com">CigarFox</a> provides you the
opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that
include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann,
Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from
more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include
cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo
Lighters.

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