Star power, sensuality and sonic exploration: The future of Afro-Cuban funk.
Combining an enormous stage presence and endless curiosity in the studio, Cimafunk has become a force in Cuban music. With a name and image pays tribute to the Cimarrons – Cubans of African descent that resisted slavery, his showmanship re-embodies funk legends from the last century. He has been called “the Cuban James Brown”, but Cimafunk is also crafting the sonic future of the island. It is a celebration of blackness across borders, oceans and languages – Caribbean music, Detroit funk, New Orleans bass, horns and street-corner vibes, nostalgia and futurism.
The 2024 album Pa’ Tu Cuerpa is his most mature production to date, a deep exploration of funk and the sounds from the African continent, with a simply extraordinary cast of collaborators, ranging from bona fide P-funk legend George Clinton to the Afro-Cuban piano virtuoso Gonzalo Rubalcaba. The result is a sonic experience as innovative as it is impossible to label; most of all, it is deeply enjoyable, filled to the brim with floorfillers and sensuality. It is music born on stages all over the planet, based on Cimafunks meeting with different audiences. "It was the conscious discovery of what it provoked in people when I went on stage. Seeing it in a bunch of Japanese people who didn't understand the text but were feeling it, was crazy."
This fall, Oslo awaits the greatest new artist in the avant-garde of the Afro-Cuban musical diaspora – and an emerging star on the global stage.
