Arturo Jorge y El Cuarteto Tradicion

Composer, arranger, vocalist, tres and guitar player Arturo Jorge was born in September 1963 in the town of San Rafael, located in the valley of the Rio Cauto, in the middle eastern region of Cuba, the birth place of Cuban traditional music son and son montuno.

Arturo's early years were spent in a simple home made of wood and palm fibres. His father was a farmer with a few cows and pigs and this way they lived a modest self sufficient rural life.

Arturo remembers: "My first toy was a guitar which I made from natural material I could find outside. Of course it didn't last and so I had to make it again and again."

Encouraged by his uncle Agustín Cabrales Mendoza who was a tres player, Arturo learned the first chords on a guitar when he turned 8. His enthusiasm and passion for music led him to perform in school events and at parties where his relatives asked him to play and sing.

Nowadays he plays a double guitar that he calls an octatres, made up of eight strings and a separate three double strings (6 altogether), to achieve greater beauty in timbre and harmony, when it comes to singing his songs. This is a unique instrument that Arturo created himself and he is the only musician to play it.

Since 2007, he is the leader of the group Arturo Jorge y Su Cuarteto Tradiciónal. The group perform at events and parties and every Saturday night perform in a street party in the main street of Bayamo.

His songs and poems portray the simple rural life of Eastern Cuba and reflect his early childhood as a farmer's son. He also touches on local issues reflecting the real matters of an ever changing Cuba and at times this can stir public opinion. His inspiration and musical arrangements can be related to some of the great figures of Cuban Music such as Nico Saquito, Matamoros, Polo Montañez and Compay Segundo.

"I first came across Arturo in 2014 on one of my regular trips to the Eastern part of Cuba. He was playing in a palm roof paladar (a privately owned kind of cafe) next to the main road from Bayamo to Santiago. We stopped to have some lunch and heard him playing in the corner of the paladar. Within seconds I fell in love with his music and there and then we agreed to work together and record his first CD. At first he could not believe me but when I told him that Tumi Music also produced Candido Fabre,Ferverson and Son 14 amongst others, he jumped in the air and hugged me for a few minutes and that was how we established a relationship together. We then went on to choose the songs over a period of a year and put him into the studios of Feverson in Bayamo. Then during 2017, for the film Mambo Man in Bayamo, I decided to write the lyrics of the title song of this CD Finca Santa Elena. I wrote it on the flight to Cuba. In Havana, I sat down with Julio Montoro and we put a melody together which was then recorded by Arturo Jorge for a scene of the film and hence the title of this CD." Mo Fini August 2017