Dancing popular music orchestra.
The Havana Casino Orchestra was founded late in the 1990s in the Cuban capital. This orchestra inherited its name from the "Casino de La Habana" orchestra led by Don Azpiazu who, in 1930, entered the musical world with his Cuban dancing rhythms which were already classic pieces in the island due to their deep tropical flavor.
Havana Casino, under the musical leadership of Juan Angel Toranzo, is not only associated with those meaningful musical forms acknowledged by the world at large for their Cuban native rhythms, but also with the essential change experienced by son-performing septets as a result of the introduction of the piano, the tumbadora and the use of two or three trumpets, that is, the emergence of the ensembles.
Its repertoire did not limit itself to a specific period, as can be seen in pieces like "Me tenían amarrao con p", popularized by Ñico Saquito and his Guaracheros de Oriente at the end of the 1940s; "
Fuego en el 23" by the Arsenio Rodríguez ensemble during the 1950s; and "Será que se acabó" by Los Van Van during the 1980s. This group attempted to recover the golden age initiated by Arsenio Rodríguez with his ensemble in 1938 and then consolidated by the Conjunto Casino, La Sonora Matancera, Chappotín and his Estrellas and the Roberto Faz ensemble, among many others.
The rescue of this sonority does not mean that reference can be made to one or another ensemble at that time, since Havana Casino made great efforts to achieve a synthesis in the expression of this kind of group, without leaving aside the required updating work demanded by every work aimed at the audience as a whole.
Likewise, Havana Casino, as an active participant in the current musical debate held between those who favor arduous emotions and those who prefer more peaceful habits, constitutes an offer which, without necessarily denying both trends, is projected within the most balanced stylistic unit for young and excellent performers.
