Records that at some point become bourgeois staples — “dinner party” or “artisan coffee shop” music — can come with an assumption in the popular imagination that they are bland. Very often this is unfair, and never more so than for the Buena Vista Social Club recordings, put together by Ry Cooder with a supergroup of aged Cuban musicians in the late 90s. Put any of their records on now, and really listen: behind the familiarity there is so much depth, power and history they can bowl you over. The contrast between the immediate palatability and this depth is most extreme on Omara Portuondo’s albums. The singer, who was 70 when this album came out in 2000, leans heavily to the sentimental balladry side of Cuban music: she is above all a popular entertainer and was one of the country’s biggest mainstream stars through its years of greatest isolation. And when Cubans lean into sentimentality, they lean HARD. On certain levels, this is music so sweetly dreamy it’s not a universe away from Dean Martin or Doris Day. But with names like Rubén González, Guajiro Mirabal, Ibrahim Ferrer and Compay Segundo involved, the musicianship is truly out of this world, and as ever in Cuban music, even the most middle-of-the-road song is only ever one step removed (if that) from the Afro-Latin rituals of Santeria, encoded into the songs’ rhythms, and combined with the elegiac quality of these aged musicians reviving the styles of their youth, you can suddenly find the lightest of melodies hitting like a cannonball to the heart. At the time of writing Portuondo is 91 and still performing, so the living spirit in this music is clearly pretty potent.

– Joe Muggs