Matt Dillon Interview
I was waiting a while for Matt Dillon's movie about El Gran Fellove, the first in-depth portait of the unique Cuban singer that is also about the Cuban jazz scene in the 1950s (one of my favorite subjects), and, most enlightening for me, the story of Afro-Cuban musicians who emigrated to Mexico City in that era.
Much admiration for Matt for sticking with this project for over two decades, for the simple reason that the music is important to him.
I wrote about it for Billboard.
Matt Dillon’s new documentary, El Gran Fellove, spotlights the untold story of the pioneering Cuban scat singer, songwriter and tropical soul man Francisco Fellove. Dillon describes the charismatic showman’s sound as “sheer exuberance and joy,” adjectives that could well describe the expected reaction by audience members to the music-filled film, which has its world premiere tomorrow (Sept. 22) at the San Sebastian festival in Spain.
“Fellove had a larger-than-life quality when he was singing,” Dillon says during a phone interview from Rome. “He was not about to let anything stop him from letting that joy and that music out.”
El Gran Fellove was two decades in the making. Dillon first started filming Fellove in action in a Mexico City studio in 1999, where Los Angeles-based musician and producer Joey Altruda was recording an album with the then 77-year-old singer, who had not made a record in twenty years. As time went on, Dillon continued to research the life and times of the Cuban artist through numerous interviews and archival footage, tracing his journey from his rumba roots in Havana’s Afro-Cuban Colon neighborhood to his place at the center of Cuban jazz jams in the late ´40s and ´50s.
“He was a real innovator early on,” Dillon says. “his style of performing was very modern, influenced by jazz. The music was very Cuban, very playful, and yet it was very, very jazzy.”
As reflected in the film, Fellove was among the many Afro-Cuban musicians who, by the mid-Fifties, had left the island to ignite their careers in Mexican nightclubs and movies, at a time when, as one artist told Dillon, if you were working in television in Cuba and you were Black, you were more likely to be sweeping the floors than to be performing in front of the camera.
Fellove was at the top of his game in Mexico in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Then the tide turned.
“When rock-n-roll starts to come in, all of the people playing the kind of music that he was doing, orchestras and Afro-Cuban music, they call it tropical music in Mexico, they all were being challenged,” Dillon explains. “It was rock and The Beatles that changed everything.” The innately groovy Fellove kept his career up by reprising his old material on television variety shows.
Dillon’s second outing as a director (after the 2002 feature City of Ghosts), El Gran Fellove is a testimony to his own deep connection to Cuban music and musicians, and what he calls his “archeological” interest in the music’s history and context.
“Once I started to listen to Afro-Cuban music, there wasn’t anything else I was interested in for a long time,” he says. “And I say Afro-Cuban music, but it started with New York Puerto Rican records like Joe Cuba and Charlie Palmieri. And then it’s such a broad spectrum, there’s so much great music. And that’s how I got here.”
The actor skirted giving himself a starring role in the film, but he does narrate it. And in the opening scenes, he briefly appears playing congas, and reveals the extensive record collection housed in his New York apartment. It features many rare titles he got on trips to Cuba, which he first visited in 1993, before the success of Buena Vista Social Club and, later, Obama-era policies, brought vinyl-hunting DJs down to the island en masse.
“I’d just go through the bins and these records were in terrible shape,” he says, recalling his visits to a Havana record stall in the country’s post-Soviet years. “And I would look on the label, and if it said son montuno or mambo, then I would jump on it.”
Tipped off to Fellove’s music, he listened to his best-known composition “Mango Mangue,” which was covered by Machito and Celia Cruz, among others, and his signature song “El Jamaiquino,”by the avant-garde tres player Niño Rivera.
“I just loved it, I didn’t question it, it’s a feeling you have right away,” Dillon says. “It was that voice, he had this incredible voice. He immediately went right into the top-tier category of all the music I love, like Arsenio Rodríguez and Beny More and René Alvarez; he was right up there at the top. This guy was great, and I needed to know more about him and what he was doing.”
He shared Fellove’s songs with Altruda, a friend with whom he often swapped mixtapes of latest finds. Altruda, who can be seen swinging and playing upright bass in the movie alongside Fellove, and who is a co-producer of the film, has recorded with international greats including Mongo Santamaría and Ernest Ranglin. When Dillon discovered through a DJ that Fellove was alive and living in Mexico City, Altruda contacted him about making an album.
El Gran Fellove is full of feel-good moments. It would be hard not to smile watching Fellove, who was as much of an entertainer on the streets as he was on the stage. When, in the movie, recording starts in the studio, he has no idea who Matt Dillon is. But he is soon riffing about his new friend, at one point christening him “El Gran Mateo.”
Dillon builds an emotional connection to Fellove that deepens as we see him struggling to muster his former mojo in the studio. It’s later revealed, sadly, that the finished album was never released in his lifetime. (Altruda tells Billboard that the record was orphaned at the time when his contract with a label expired; he now plans to release it in 2021 and is currently shopping for a record deal.)
Fellove passed away in Mexico City in 2013.
“I knew it was amazing to capture someone like him, someone who’s really something special when he walks in the room,” Dillon says. “[At first] I didn’t know what it was as far as a story. But as the years went on, I never gave up on the project.”