Like so much of Cuba, the group´s music invokes an era that peaked decades ago. Although the group´s members are old enough to remember when much of Havana´s now-crumbling architecture sparkled with new paint, their popularity has not waned in recent years.

Perhaps Ry Cooder has the credit for the aging musicians´ continued popularity. The U.S. blues legend and musicologist dedicated the mid-1990s to resuscitating the musical style Cuban son. He started - and ended - with musicians Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Compay Segundo, Eliades Ochoa and others who had performed at the Buenavista Social Club: a members-only music club that had its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. Though the music had long since passed from fashion and the performers were otherwise employed - Ibrahim Ferrer, who died last year, was shining shoes and Compay Segundo rolling cigars before Cooder "discovered" them - numerous aging musicians returned to the recording studio to work together again. Cooder produced an album of the collaboration that was released in 1997. And just like that, the old became new again.

The venture was criticized for being as much a commercial venture as an artistic one, but neither critics nor the public at large seemed to care. The album sold millions of copies, won a Grammy award and sparked a worldwide interest in Cuban music that drew attention to many other Cuban musicians. German director Wim Wenders, though, also deserves a round of applause for bringing the Buena Vista Social Club to center stage. Wenders, who had collaborated with Cooder on a previous film, made a 1999 film documenting Cooder´s efforts to unite and record the group and their subsequent tour in Europe and the United States. The film, an elegiac, impressionistic photomontage of a crumbling Havana and the artists devoted to it, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000. If the Buena Vista Social Club was popular before the film, Wenders´ attention launched the artists to a level of global stardom previously unknown to all of the featured artists.

But the individual group members, too, have played a central role in the Buena Vista Social Club´s eminence. Following the collective´s tours, many of the artists set off to tour the world solo, encouraged by their rediscovered success. Solo tours and albums solidified the group´s ensemble popularity. Cooder continued to work with the artists, helping arrange songs on Ibrahim Ferrer´s solo album "Buenos Hermanos," which was met with positive reviews. And their success defied common-sense, too: At the age of 73, Ferrrer won a Latin Grammy in 2000 for Best New Artist.

The artists themselves had no small part in the venture´s victory. Their success flew in the face of predictions that the musical style son was dead, that the artists´ careers were beyond revival. Clearly, both were not.

Cooder´s involvement in the venture may be a bit of a sacred cow. He meddled with a classic genre of music - an Afro-Cuban tradition with which he had little experience. But thanks to his initiative, Wenders´ public attention and the individual talents of the ensemble cast of the Buena Vista Social Club, Cuba´s classic music had its own renaissance - who, now, doesn´t know the first four chords of "Chan Chan?" Cooder and his subjects created something living out of a music that had been left to vanish in Havana.

Eliades Ochoa, Omara Portuondo, Juan de Marcos González, Barbarito Torres, Cachaito López and Guajiro Mirabal - will play at the capital´s Auditorio Nacional this Wednesday.

julia.cooke@gmail.com