• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 11 / 03 / 2010

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By BEN RATLIFF, LARRY ROHTER and BEN SISARIO. Published: November 2, 2010. The loosening of Washington’s restrictions on travel to and from Cuba has recently resulted in much more cultural exchange than in the past, and the jazz world has benefited in particular.

Chucho Valdés performing at the Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Oct. 22. Last month the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra visited Havana, and Chucho Valdés, the renowned Cuban pianist, performed a series of concerts in New York. (The group AfroCubism, which includes Eliades Ochoa of Buena Vista Social Club, plays at Town Hall in Manhattan next Tuesday, and on Dec. 6 and 7 the Cuban dance band Los Van Van will be at the club S.O.B.’s; the Latin Grammys will be held in Las Vegas on Nov. 11.)

This week on Popcast, The New York Times’s weekly music podcast, three writers for The Times, the music critic Ben Ratliff; a cultural reporter and former correspondent in the Caribbean, Larry Rohter; and a music reporter, Ben Sisario, talk about the American-Cuban jazz connection and its history over the past half-century and more. Here are some excerpts; more can be heard on nytimes.com/artsbeat.

BEN SISARIO There’s been a lot of good news about jazz and Cuba this fall. Larry, what’s been going on?

LARRY ROHTER When Obama was a candidate, he gave a speech in Miami that hinted at an opening. It took a while. For me the starting point might have been the Latin Grammys last year, when [the singer] Omara Portuondo came and got an award. That was a sign that things had in fact begun to loosen. Septeto Nacional came right afterward, and we’ve had all sorts of people come from Cuba since then.

The problem is that there are laws in place that you can try to fudge, but you can only go to certain limits. The issue of
spending money in Cuba, and Cuban artists coming to the United States and earning money, they’re really sticklers on that.

That puts a certain natural limit on how much can be done, until there’s legislative reform here, and until there is a loosening of the travel restrictions.

SISARIO Ben, what’s the big story with jazz and Cuba?

BEN RATLIFF It’s a long story. You can talk about it in terms of the first explosion of Afro-Cuban jazz in the late 1940s, with Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá, Machito — Cubans in New York collaborating with jazz improvisers like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. They made a body of work that effectively and eloquently argued for what is Afro-Cuban jazz.

I think you have to go even further and ask what Cuban music and American music have to do with each other, not just jazz.

Because American music is full of Antillean and Afro-Latin elements. It’s so deep in the soil that there’s just tons of stuff that we take for granted.

For example, when I was going through the 1,000 bands that were going to play at CMJ, it seemed as if a third of them were referring to the “Be My Baby” rhythm. And that is a kind of narrowing down of the habanera rhythm.

ROHTER Sometimes this cross-cultural fertilization is subterranean; we’re not necessarily aware of it. But it’s been going on since at least — I think of “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”) — around 1930, even before bebop.

SISARIO But is this arrested development that stopped in 1960? What has been happening to the exchange since then?

RATLIFF It comes and goes. Larry was there in 1979, when a bunch of American journalists and record-business people and musicians came to Havana for the Havana Jam festival, where they all saw Irakere, the band that Chucho Valdés was in.

Everybody was so favorably impressed that CBS Records signed them. It wasn’t easy to sign them; it was a complicated negotiation. That was a moment of: “Oh, here’s Cuba. We forgot about Cuba. They’re doing all this great music there.”

In the second half of the ’90s things opened up quite a bit, and a lot of Cuban musicians came over here. And it seemed as if every other young jazz drummer I would meet in New York had either just been to Cuba to study with some master percussionist, or was making plans to go. The result was that all of a sudden you were hearing a new rhythmic complexity in jazz here.

SISARIO Chucho Valdés recently played in town for the first time since 2003. Ben, what’s it like to see somebody like that come over now?

RATLIFF Whether in Cuban jazz, which is what Chucho is doing, or in a dance band like Pupy y Los Que Son Son, which played a month or two ago in town — when Cubans play in New York there is this moment of, you’re a New Yorker, you’ve seen lots informed by Cuban music, then you hear them and you go, “Oh, this really is different.” There’s a different kind of authority, a different kind of swing. There’s a different depth.

Chucho Valdés is a very special case, because he’s one of the world’s great virtuoso pianists and he’s been in a very privileged position for most of his life musically, having grown up with a father, Bebo Valdés, who was at the center of the mambo in Havana in the 1950s. And now Chucho is the guy to see if you want to talk to somebody about Cuban jazz.

He’s the president of the Havana International Jazz Festival, which is going to happen in December.

ROHTER Going beyond jazz, there’s all this mixing and matching going on in Cuba. I hear recordings coming out of there that you would never think of as jazz. For example, Calle 13, from Puerto Rico, was just there. They bring all kinds of information that the Cuban musicians grab onto. You’re hearing ways of working reggaetón, the whole hip-hop universe, into Cuban music, and getting a new generation of hybrids.

Cubans are finally being exposed to the whole realm of what’s out there. When I was covering Cuba in the mid-’90s, whenever I would go to Havana on Sundays, I would go to the flea markets, looking for recordings from pre-1959. One day I remember buying a bunch of vintage, mint-condition Celia Cruz LPs from that era. I was paying the guy, and he said: “Ah, Celia Cruz, she was wonderful. I wonder whatever happened to her.” That’s how limited the information they had there.

So I told him, “She’s a big star.” It’s just that she’s been removed from your history books, and you can’t get her records anymore. A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/arts/music/03jazz.html