On the face of it, The Mambo Kings Sing Songs Of Love seems more a fitting title for a Spanish Mills & Boon bodice-ripper than for a bestseller by a respected Cuban-American novelist - not that M&B would have taken too kindly to some of the more soaringly lyrical, uninhibitedly joyful expressions of lovemaking that grace the book. Yet when Oscar Hijuelos wrote his way into the big time with his tale of two exiled Cuban brothers, living in New York and trying to make their way by continuing to play the music they loved, he was part of several events that turned the 1990s into a decade in which Cuban music once again received international attention.
Chief among these - aside from the film spawned by the book - were the mid-1990s recording sessions of the Afro-Cuban All-Stars stimulated by guitarist Ry Cooder, long an admirer of the richness and rhythmic diversity of the island's music. Cooder gathered together some of the great veterans of the idiom, including pianist RubΘn Gonzβlez, tresero Eliades Ochoa (the tres is a six-stringed instrument like a guitar) and singers Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo to make an album which was a surprise international hit.
With that and the Buena Vista Social Club, whose birth was sympathetically recorded in Wim Wender's affectionate documentary, the All-Stars and Buena Vista became as much a marketing concept as anything else. Suddenly Cuban music was in fashion. Overnight stardom, relatively speaking, was draped around the septuagenarian shoulders of the likes of Ibrahim Ferrer and RubΘn Gonzβlez, while the All-Stars' tour went from Venezuela and other Latin American countries to such celebrated concert platforms as New York's Carnegie Hall.
Amid the fuss, though, some things were overlooked. As anyone who has read Hijuelos's novel will know, Cuban music is not some kind of fossil; it cross-fertilised with jazz and other forms, and while it has its own classical elements embodied in the great performers of the Buena Vista Social Club, there are other things going on.
Most of all, somehow forgotten - or at least largely overlooked - in the Buena Vista Social Club and Afro-Cuban All-Stars phenomenon, was a key figure. Juan de Marcos Gonzβlez, a tresero and guitarist himself, was the musical brains behind it, acting as producer and midwife to its repertoire and performances. Recognition of his central role came two years ago, when WOMEX, the international trade fair and music festival, gave him and colleague Nick Gold its first WOMEX award for outstanding contributions to world music for Buena Vista Social Club.
With his track record, the award was overdue. Born in Havana in 1954 - his father was a singer who had been with Arsenio Rodriguez, one of the greats of Cuban music - he had already produced and played on the Grammy-winning A Toda Cuba le Gusta, a charming album of orchestral music done in the style of the 1950s for Nick Gold's World Circuit label.
In the late 1970s, while he was still at university studying hydraulic engineering and Russian, he co-founded Sierra Maestra, with tres, trumpet, bass, percussion and vocals. Young and dynamic, the band was aimed at getting Cuba's youth to appreciate the island's musical heritage.
It worked. Sierra Maestra made 14 albums in Cuba, won awards and toured Africa and Europe - they visited Ireland in the mid-1990s. Sierra Maestra's success also coincided with the influence of perhaps the two most significant groups in Cuban music during the past few decades, when Los Van Van and Irakere brought new sounds into the scene.
And thereby hangs a tale. The missionary zeal that led de Marcos to form Sierra Maestra, along with the revivalist sessions he guided with the All-Stars, the Buena Vista Social Club and albums such as A Toda Cuba le Gusta, has contributed to a slightly jaundiced response to his work among sections of the Hispanic cognoscenti. Despite the quality of the Buena Vista Social Club album, it has been called, as the US folk magazine Dirty Linen reported, a pre-revolutionary throwback, a record of Cuban music for those who don't speak Spanish.
In an interview with the magazine, de Marcos agreed with the criticism up to a point, acknowledging that the Buena Vista Social Club was "a disc for non-Castellano speakers". But while he said he has loved and lived son tradicional himself, he claimed that Ry Cooder mixed the album to get a sound that would please Anglo-Saxons.
Yet there's no doubting the excellence of the music. The pungently exuberant performances on Buena Vista Social Club, and the All-Stars' A Toda Cuba le Gusta are gripping. So, too, are the re-issued older sessions, featuring some of the same musicians, on the marvellous Estrellas de Areito double album - recorded in a post-revolutionary Cuba squeezed into isolation by the US - where time after time the subtly contrapuntal rhythms build up an implacable groove for the soloists.
But the overall effect, outside Cuba, has been to give the music a nostalgic gloss not at all reflective of what is happening there today, where timba, a kind of rhumba-based funky rap, is probably the most popular form.
All this hasn't blinded de Marcos to the necessity for change. His new All-Stars line-up is a mixture of old and young performers, epitomised by the band's lead singers, Pedro Calvo Rojas (who was with Los Van Van) and FΘlix Baloy, a veteran of previous All-Stars. As heard at the recent North Sea Jazz Festival, it has a more contemporary sound than its predecessors, with intricate, quite virtuosic horn arrangements over a beefier, highly contrapuntal rhythm section. Essentially, it's a dance band, combining classic son montuno, contemporary timba, big-band guajira, Afro-Cuban jazz, danzon, tribal rhythms, bolero and much else.
Despite this, de Marcos still has his critics. Having modernised the orchestra's sound, he says he finds it much harder to sell the band - "They are accusing me of changing the music". Essentially, he is marrying two things which are generally uncomfortable bedfellows - the need to be aware of the tradition without being imprisoned by it. He summed it up perfectly himself.
"When you live in an isolated country, you always think things are better elsewhere. Because of that, the influence of American music has been very strong. People were trying to play American music before they learnt Cuban music. We have to use what is good from around the world, but first we have to be conscious of the importance of our own music.
"A few years ago, young Cuban musicians didn't care about real Cuban music. Now there are hundreds of bands playing traditional music. Of course, music will change. There will be new dances and styles. But we are going to keep the roots. I am very confident about that."
Juan de Marcos and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars play at the Olympia Theatre tomorrow