Video spotlights Cuba's underground music scene

By Ayala Ben-Yehuda

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Australian music entrepreneur Chris Murphy, who managed INXS for 15 years and started world music label Petrol Records, went to Cuba in 2002 on a mission: to raise the profile of the country's hidden urban music scene.

He has since received a Grammy Award nomination for "Liberacion: The Songs of the New Cuban Underground." The 57-minute DVD layers shots of street parties in the city of Santiago de Cuba, home to a dancehall- and reggaeton-influenced rap scene and where the 1959 revolution began, with video of the city's budding artists recording in a makeshift studio.

"There are very few places on the planet where there are all these (musical) gems left, because they've all been mined," says Murphy, who had previously licensed traditional son and bolero from Cuban government libraries. When recording began, word spread quickly among the city's aspiring artists -- and the Cuban government, which, Murphy says, began trailing his crew.

"We started getting word ... that 'you shouldn't be working with artists directly, that you should be working with us,"' Murphy recalls. "I was recording mechanics, doctors, kids who were waiting to go into the army. So I was upsetting the apple cart."

Murphy hopes the DVD will give Santiago de Cuba's music an outlet beyond the town's streets.

"It bodes really well for the commercial viability of international hip-hop and the creativity that's out there," Virgin Megastores Latin and world music buyer Rick Banales says of "Liberacion."

Virgin Megastores will do an online promotion of the DVD.

Reuters/Billboard