Conventional wisdom in the pop-music biz says that if you`ve got ”The Package,” then you`ve got a lock on success. The Package is looks, personality and talent.
Meet Jon Secada. He`s a darkly handsome Cuban-American with a suave way about him and a mat of dark curls on top of his head. So much for looks.
He`s soft-spoken, seems like a thoughtful, reflective kind of guy, yet can do a convincing aw-shucks when the subject of his looks is broached. That covers personality.
And as for talent? Well, there is the little matter of the bracing baritone-tenor that rides shotgun over the top of ”Just Another Day,” the frothy hit from his debut album, called Jon Secada, that has catapulted him from relative obscurity into the hot white light of Top 5 success.
Score one for conventional wisdom.
Secada`s album-release party took place a few months ago at a private affair in south Miami Beach. His manager, Emilio Estefan, worked the room with the smooth cool of a presidential candidate, Miami Heat center Rony Seikaly towered above the crowd, local radio deejays mixed and mingled. Various other movers and shakers stood around moving and shaking while Secada`s video image performed on a phalanx of screens.
The man himself seemed at times almost lost in the crush. They pumped his hand, posed for pictures with him, extolled his praises lavishly. Secada took it all politely, gratefully, humbly, all the while wearing the mildly awed, slightly off-kilter expression of a surprise-party victim who can`t believe someone`s making all this fuss.
Several months later, sitting on a couch in a lavish inner sanctum at Estefan Enterprises, his song a runaway success, Secada, 28, still can`t believe it. Words like ”flattered” and ”amazed” spring to his lips with regularity. It`s not hard to understand the way he feels: Secada has come a long way in a relatively short time. As is so often the case in south Florida, the journey began in Cuba.
”I don`t remember much about Cuba except leaving,” says Secada, who arrived in Miami when he was 8. ”I`m an only child, but apart from that, I have a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins that still live there. It was tough. Like most Cubans at that time, it was a two- or three-year process. You applied to leave and (they gave you) all this paperwork and eventually let you go. You needed a whole bunch of money.”
Instead of working in bands, Secada spent his wonder years and beyond working in diners. ”Eventually, my dad got a loan to open up a little Cuban coffee shop,” he says. ”From then on, he was independently employed in small places-stuff that he and my mother could run. I started working for him as a kid.”
One day in school, there was an audition for a musical, and the young coffeemaker discovered his true calling. ”Once I got into music, it was like, `OK.` People started to notice me, I was more popular in school. It felt great. I was the only child, so I was in need of friends, in need of companionship. Once I got into music, everything changed.”
Secada followed his muse to the music school at the University of Miami and from there to a liaison five years ago with Emilio Estefan, who heard his demo tape through friends who played for Emilio`s famous wife, Gloria.
”He was really cool,” says Secada. ”Explained the whole scene to me. First he said he wanted to get to know me as a person before signing me as an artist. . . . I started out songwriting, doing things for a bunch of people-a lot of Spanish artists, Japanese artists. The opportunity to write for Gloria came about three years ago-one song on the ”Cuts Both Ways” album and six on the last one.” One of the six, on which Secada shares composing credits, was Estefan`s huge hit ”Coming Out of the Dark.” Secada also sang support vocals on her recent world tour.
He says he never thought of entertaining as a career, even when he was a university student. ”Not until I graduated, almost until I met Emilio, did I ever think of being a pop recording artist, even though I was writing tunes and stuff,” he says. ”I just told myself, `If I can make a living in a little bit of teaching, a little bit of studio work, as long as I`m working in music, I`ll be happy.` ”
