Abriendo Puertas

Abriendo Puertas is the second release of the Cuban Notes project, a recording series co-produced by Johanan “Jo” Bickhardt, founder of Dot Time Records, and guitarist Roni Ben-Hur. Recorded in Havana, collaborating with Cuban musicians, it approaches Cuban music as a way of thinking and of inhabiting the world.

The title suggests an invitation, but also something more intimate: a willingness to enter. Not to arrive loudly, not to claim a place too quickly, but to cross a threshold with attention. That quality has long defined Roni Ben-Hur’s playing. His guitar doesn’t force itself into a room. It listens first. It looks for the human temperature of a phrase, the small turn of feeling inside a melody, the place where rhythm and breath begin to recognize each other.

Ben-Hur arrives here with a musical life already full of crossings. Born in Dimona, Israel, and formed over more than four decades in New York’s jazz world, he has built a language unmistakably rooted in bebop and swing, but never confined by them. Other currents run through his sound: the melodic turns of Mediterranean song, traces of North African and Jewish Arabic music, the intimacy of Brazilian guitar, the rhythmic pull of Afro-Latin traditions, the singing clarity of a player who has always understood melody as something close to speech. None of these elements appears in quotation marks. They live inside the way he phrases. That’s why this album feels so natural.

Across the album, one hears a musician with nothing to prove. That may be why the record feels open. Ben-Hur lets his own musical history enter into conversation with another, and that conversation is not abstract; it lives in timing, in touch, in the way the ensemble breathes as one. The guitar is a particularly fitting instrument for this kind of crossing: portable, intimate, historically restless, percussive or lyrical, solitary or social. Here it stands at the threshold: entering, listening, answering, leaving traces of itself without ever closing the space behind it. Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of Abriendo Puertas. The door does not open once and stay open. It keeps opening, phrase by phrase, breath by breath, idea by idea — each musician holding it for the next.

Personnel
Roni Ben-Hur - guitar, Alejandro Falcón - piano, Pedro Pablo Gutiérrez - acoustic bass, Ruy López-Nussa - drums, Octavio Rodríguez Rivera - percussion, Emir Santa Cruz - tenor saxophone (tracks 1, 4, 5, 7), Osdalgia Lesmes - vocals (tracks 3, 5)

Track List

1. Abriendo puertas (Alejandro Falcón) 8:08
2. Mi mejor canción (José Antonio Méndez) 6:31
3. Dos gardenias (Isolina Carrillo) 5:19
4. Gua’ One Blues Pal Bobby (Alejandro Falcón) 9:21
5. Esta tarde vi llover (Armando Manzanero) 5:53
6. Lo que es del César (Alejandro Falcón) 6:15
7. El Teide (Alejandro Falcón) 7:46

DOT9192