g l o r i a

HER LATIN LIGHTNING IS NOW SPICED WITH GOSPEL AND SOUL

Last spring, when Gloria Estefan was lying in traction after four hours of spinal surgery to restore her broken back, her cousin Lazaro came to visit her. Surveying his small, slender cousin suspended helpless in the enormous hospital bed, Laz shook his head and said: “Boy, Gloria, you’ll do anything to win a Grammy, won’t you?”

Gloria, a lithe, dark figure, with an ocean of serpentine jet-black locks, bursts out laughing. “Humor has always been important to my entire family. We have a very dark, sarcastic sense of humor and it can really help you get through difficult situations.”

From the trauma of her near-fatal bus accident last March, to the minor inconveniences of life on the road, humor is how she and her sisters deal with everything, says Gloria. “We grew up in all-girl Catholic schools, which give you an irreverent humor. When you see a lot of examples of things that don’t go exactly with what you’re being taught religiously, it gives you a sarcastic streak. Most people never see that, because all they hear is the music.”

And the music people hear on Gloria’s new solo album is more spontaneous, more relaxed, more soulful than her previous unmistakably Latin recordings. A new determination, and a certain philosophical streak, on Into the Light recast her in a fresh musical mode.

“It’s been an emotional year for me, and I think that became a part of the music,” she says. “The songs are more introspective, more emotional, and less cluttered.”

“The love and support I received from everyone gave me a renewed strength and determination, and a fresh outlook on life,” she says. Particularly on songs like “Seal Our Fate” (“We don’t give a second thought to the chances we take...”) or “Nayib’s Song,” a moving ballad sung to her 10-year-old son, who sustained a broken collarbone in the same bus accident that broke her back, Gloria refers obliquely to her accident and the six months of painstaking, often agonizing, recovery which followed.

Of course, as the biggest star ever to “cross over” from the Latin scene to the pop charts, Estefan hasn’t discarded the Latin beat. “Mama, Yo Can’t Go” and “Live for Loving You” bring the Miami Sound Machine, the band she has sung with for sixteen years, to the forefront. There is also “Desde la Oscuridad,” a Spanish version of “Coming Out of the Dark.”

Gospel music, too, gives the album a less pop, more mature feel. A gospel choir sings on several tracks, notably the album’s first single “Coming Out of the Dark” and “Seal Our Fate.” Gospel pianist Angelo Morris took time off from church duties to play on “Coming Out of the Dark.” The choir and gospel arrangements are the work of Betty Wright, who belted out that 1970s soul classic “Clean-Up Woman.” Today Betty Wright is a Miami minister, musical arranger, and longtime friend of the Estefans.

After months of training and exercise, including strenuous development of her abdominal muscles, Gloria says that during her 1991 “Into the Light” tour, the effects of the accident will be as invisible to the audience as the steel rods in her back. She looks as limber as ever, but she admits that when she runs, she feels a “slight jarring,” a reminder of the hardware she will carry with her the rest of her life. “I didn’t want to go on stage until I could perform just as well as before,” she says.

“Let It Loose” and “Cuts Both Ways,” the previous two hit albums Gloria recorded with her husband Emilio and his band, Miami Sound Machine, sold a combined 12 million albums worldwide, and spawned one hit single after another. While songs like “The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” and “Oye Mi Canto” rock discos all over the world, powerful ballads like “Don’t Wanna Lose You” have become enduring standards everywhere.

The Sound Machine recorded no fewer than seven albums with mostly Spanish lyrics, and were well-known stars in Miami and many points south before “Conga” and “Bad Boys” crossed over, one after another, in rapid succession in 1985 to become top ten pop hits and establish them as U.S. stars.

The eight-man Sound Machine has hardly changed its roster since the band began, a three-man horn section giving it the distinctive Latin sound.

GLORIA ESTEFAN and MIAMI SOUND MACHINE:

A DISCOGRAPHY

PRIMITVE LOVE – Miami Sound Machine’s first album in English spawned top ten hits. “Bad Boys” and “Conga” in 1985.

LET IT LOOSE – “Anything for You” made it to No. 1, “The Rhythm is Gonna Get You” to No. 5, and “Can’t Stay Away From You” to No. 6.

CUTS BOTH WAYS – The band’s 1989 album includes hits “Here We Are” and “Don’t Wanna Lose You.”

INTO THE LIGHT – Estefan’s first solo album, released in February, put “Coming Out of the Dark” right on the charts.

gloria was born in Cuba in 1958. Just over a year later, she and her parents were en route to the U.S. as Fidel Castro’s Communist guerillas took Havana. Her father participated in the CIA-led 1961 Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Castro, and served two years in a Cuban jail before rejoining his family in Miami. Gloria’s husband, Emilio Estefan, 37, was also born in Cuba and raised in Miami. A self-taught musician, Emilio left Cuba for Miami in 1968, where he started a band, the Miami Latin Boys, playing nightclubs, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. In 1975 Gloria joined as singer, and the band changed its name to Miami Sound Machine. For another couple of years, Gloria sang at her share of weddings and bar mitzvahs. Then the band got a contract with CBS Discos, the Latin music division of CBS Records. In 1978, Gloria and Emilio were married. He was Gloria’s first boyfriend. “We married before we had any musical success. We have very similar values and goals, we’re just lucky that we found each other.”

Despite her family history, in her lyrics Gloria normally steers clear of political or social issues – “they’re personal matters, they don’t cross over the way music does.” There’s one exception on the new album, a song called “Sex In the 90s.” It’s a tongue-in-cheek comment on how the AIDS epidemic has forged a new morality for young people today, diametrically opposite to the ethos of sexual liberation of the 1970s: “Spontaneity is dead, we should accept our own fate/Or make a serious commitment to 976-DATE.”

“It’s a message I know I’d like my son to hear, but I wouldn’t want to do it in a very heavy-handed way, and this gets it across on a lighter note,” she explains.

Fans’ reaction to her injury was a heartwarming outpouring of support, ranging from the thousands of cards, letters, and flowers she received, to Spanish superstar and friend Julio Iglesias’s loan of his private plane to take Gloria home from the hospital.

The “Into the Light” tour has been deliberately scheduled at a moderate pace to avoid overtaxing her. Every third day is a rest day and there are breaks between each of the tour’s three legs. The bus accident in March last year, which came within a whisker of leaving her paralyzed, seems not to have left her psychologically scarred: this time, they will again travel by tour bus in the U.S. “It’s still the best and most comfortable form of transportation for us, you can watch movies, or sleep – though I don’t think I’ll be taking naps for a while!” (The accident happened on the I-80 outside Scranton, Pennsylvania last March when, en route to Syracuse in a snowstorm, the tour bus was sandwiched between two tractor-trailers.) To reduce the risk of bad weather, the northeast dates have been scheduled for summer

‘THE SONGS ARE
MORE INTROSPECTIVE,
MORE EMOTIONAL,
AND LESS
CLUTTERED.’

The world tour started in early March with four dates in Miami, before the Sound Machine flew to Japan for a month of dates there. Next will be Europe, with the U.S. scheduled for the summer. This is the Sound Machine’s biggest tour yet, with four backing vocalists and four dancers accompanying the band. Undaunted by the two eight-inch-long stainless steel rods the surgeons put in her back, Gloria will be dancing and singing two hours a night for six months. She will take a special pride in reaching the cities of the U.S. northeast, where she had to cancel all the dates after the accident. “I got thousands of cards and letters from places like Syracuse, and they all said take your time, get better, we’ll wait for you however long it takes. Now I want to go there and thank them.”

Right now, Gloria says she is happy as ever to be on the road. Nayib is accompanying his parents on the current tour. Nayib, says Gloria, seems to have inherited an interest in music, acting, and performing. She adds, “Right now, he’s a magician, and you can’t get away from it. We’ll be sitting at the dinner table and he’ll be doing the floating-fork-behind-the-napkin trick.”

“He’s getting quite good at it. Sometimes he really amazes us.”

© All rights reserved by Trump’s 1991

A very special thank you to Amanda Warnock. You are always so lovely to me!!! You are a very great person and I am glad that I know you!!!

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