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Once again, the Venezuelan talent in the United States is a source of inspiration for the subject of these lines and it is the turn of Venezuelan musician, sound engineer and DJ Eduardo Ron. The artist has kindly taken a few minutes of his time to answer our questions about his career and group, so here are the most important topics of our conversation.

How Eduardo started in music in his native country

Since Eduardo was just a five-year-old boy, he proved to have a very capable hearing at home and already liked music very much, so his parents decided to enroll him in piano lessons, although he confessed that the instrument was not his thing. At school, he became part of bands with which he gradually found his preferred style and genres.

With these groups, he even competed in school band contests in Caracas, which are very common in the city. Over time, the only one of his close friends who ended up devoting himself to music was him, to the point that he became a ‘’one-man band’’ who took care of almost everything in his own musical project.

It was until 20 years ago where he began to include singers, percussionists and other musicians to be part of his group. That is when he changed the name to ‘’Fondo Blanco’‘, taking Eduardo’s last name, which is Ron (rum in Spanish), as inspiration.

What things Eduardo learned besides the piano

From a very young, Eduardo always liked to have contact with the part of the audio and equipment, which led him to study sound engineering at the Taller de Arte Sonoro. In addition to that, although he loves percussion and masters it to some extent, he was a keyboardist and singer for many years. He is no longer doing either at the moment, as he has decided to devote himself entirely to music production, mixing and mastering.

When Eduardo decided to move to the United States

About 14 or 15 years ago, Eduardo decided to move to the city of Miami due to the political and economic situation in Venezuela at that time. For the same reason, he had no choice but to start from scratch with the project in these new lands and return to play, something he had not done for years, but the situation warranted.

The artist describes the Miami music market as complicated, since the competition is fierce. A huge advantage he had was that he studied English since he was very young, so the language issue was not a problem for him, but that did not make the other drawbacks easier to solve. 

One of the first surprises Eduardo got was that, in Miami, he has done no more than 50 events a year, while in Venezuela he had as many as 140 in a year. This is because the market is gigantic and it is difficult to make a big name in it, not to mention that live orchestras do not have as many bookings as before due to cost reductions.

Two years later, he had already got new artists working with him and his situation had stabilized successfully, although the process was not easy. Moreover, even today, he cannot demand exclusivity from those who work with him because he does not have the economic muscle for that, so he has a long list of musicians whom he calls for certain events. One of the first ones he always calls is Army Zerpa, whom he described as one of the best bassists and arrangers he knows, which is why he has become a key person for his project. 

Artists with whom Fondo Blanco has shared the stage 

Fondo Blanco has been fortunate to share the stage with great artists such as Oscar D’ León, Ricky Martin, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Marc Anthony, among others. Of course, the contact with these luminaries taught Eduardo many things and he assures that one of the best shows he offered was during a Santa Rosa concert, where there were more than 12,000 people. He assures that this is one of those days he will never forget.

However, just as he has had very positive experiences as the previous one, obviously not everything is rosy. The Venezuelan told us that one of those not so good days was during a Ricky Martin concert, an event he had to open that day. It turns out that his equipment was damaged two hours before his turn and he had to try to fix it in front of the crowd of 30,000 people who came to see the Puerto Rican superstar, but nothing he did worked and the audience began to hiss.

That same day, Ricky Martin’s keyboardist asked him to borrow his keyboard because his was damaged and, when returning it, it was totally messed up and what Eduardo had there had been deleted.

Today, although he remembers this with humor, the experience was so unpleasant that it led him not to accept other proposals due to fear that the same thing could happen again. However, once these fears were overcome, he continued to play with his band and has managed to adapt to what the Miami market required both locally and internationally, which shows that the goals and targets should not be disregarded no matter however difficult the circumstances become and Eduardo Ron is a great example of that.

Read also: What a pleasure to talk to Pablo Pérez ‘‘El Alcalde de La Salsa’’

Cuba has an extensive list of talented musicians and a great musical and artistic tradition that are truly the envy of many countries, so it is impossible to cover all the exponents of this land of talents. However, in this opportunity, we talked to one who sets the bar very high among them all, the incredible arranger, composer, sound engineer and multi-instrumentalist Kiki Valera, whom we have been able to interview for the March edition.

How Kiki fell in love with music

The first thing to point out about Kiki is that he was born into a very musical family in the easternmost part of the island of Cuba, specifically in Santiago de Cuba, which is an area well known for the presence of the now world famous Cuban son. In addition to that, his father, Don Felix Valera, inherited from his family and ancestors those musical genes that came from his grandparents, great-grandparents and further back.

So much so that Don Felix was a music teacher in the small town of San Luis, which was 30 kilometers from Santiago de Cuba, while his mother was a dance teacher. Both were recent graduates of the first national school of art instructors that was founded in the country in the early 1960s, while Kiki was just being born. 

Growing up surrounded by all this environment, music was the first thing he heard and lived, not to mention that the artist already had the necessary conditions and abilities to dedicate himself to this world professionally. When he was six years old, his father gave him a Cuban tres, one of the most iconic instruments of the son, and taught him his first songs, melodic motifs, tumbaos, among other things.

One thing to mention is that the Valera Miranda family does not consist of professional musicians as such, but rather empiric musicians who frequently get together at family events such as birthdays, Christmas, New Year holidays and vacations to play the tres, the bongo, the maracas, the guitar, among many other instruments. 

As a child, this was all very normal for him until he realized that his interest in music was genuine and he entered the Conservatorio Esteban Salas in Santiago de Cuba to study classical guitar. It was thanks to his studies that he realized that his family’s thing with music was something really authentic that had been developing a very long time ago, more precisely since the 19th century.

It turns out that a now deceased musicologist named Danilo Orozco was conducting a sociological survey in the eastern part of the country and happened to be a good friend of his father. In one of their many talks, Don Felix told him much about the family history with music for several generations, which caused Orozco’s curiosity and he got to the rural area where the family had lived. These visits determined that the oldest ancestors were true carriers of the roots of son in the eastern region, to the point that this researcher even made a documentary and the Valeras of that time recorded two albums with a didactic approach to show the cultural phenomenon that happened in that family nucleus.

After all this, Kiki felt even more destined to continue the legacy of his ancestors in music, but with a little more academic training and more modern touches in keeping with the times. That was more than 40 years ago.

Fashion artists paying homage to old genres

There is a whole resurgence of genres, already thought forgotten, by the passage of time, but thanks to tributes by certain fashion artists, they have risen from the ashes to occupy the place that should never have been taken away from them. We have the example of Bad Bunny with his album ”DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS”, which focuses on the cultural and musical heritage of Puerto Rico and makes use of salsa, plena, and boleros to show the musical richness of the Island of Enchantment. We can also mention Desorden Público’s upcoming album ”Salsa All-Ska” which pays homage to salsa as part of the celebration of its 40 years of musical trajectory. Not to mention the 2024 Latin Grammy Awards which paid tribute to salsa and counted with the presence of Oscar D’ Léon, Tito Nieves, Marc Anthony and La India among its guests.

On this phenomenon, Kiki considers that artists in general are the reflection of their time and the manifestation of the environment in which they develop. For the same reason, he believes it is inevitable wanting to look back to understand where we come from, no matter how many years pass. ”After you study a genre such as reggaeton, you can tell that it has been nourished by other musical manifestations that preceded it. Moreover, when musicians are given the task of acquiring technical and theoretical knowledge of music, they always try to innovate by recreating the foundations of the genres in which they work” said Kiki on this interesting and important subject. 

”There is a saying that if we don’t know where we come from, it’s hard for us to know where we are going and this is the case. Contemporary musicians generally provide their vision of music and create new concepts, fusions and rhythmic patterns, but all this always comes from the past to a certain extent. To build something new, you need a base” he continued.

When Kiki decides to settle in the United States

Changing the subject radically, we wanted to know when Kiki decided to leave his country to settle in the United States, specifically in Seattle, to which he replied that he arrived here on April 2, 2013. The main reason why he left was due to his partner Naomi Bierman, who convinced him to move to start a life together in another place. 

With that decision, the musician had to make a total shift in mindset, since he had lived in Cuba all his life and came from a very close-knit family. He had to give up the closeness he had with his loved ones, culture, values and climate to adapt to a completely different way of life in a territory that was nothing like his own.

Read also: His father’s love for music rocketed him to stardom