• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 11 / 01 / 2010

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By LARRY BLUMENFELD. October 30, 2010. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. When pianist Jesús "Chucho" Valdés returned to Jazz at Lincoln Center's Allen Room stage for an encore on Oct. 23, closing a two-night, four-show run, he brought along his 4-year-old son, Julian. As Mr. Valdés began the Pablo Milanés composition "Los Caminos," Julian sat on his lap, tracing the movements of his long fingers. It was a touching coda to a dazzling performance, hinting at history.

Mr. Valdés, who recently turned 69 and who performs at the Village Vanguard on Monday, was 4 when he sat at the piano with his own father, pianist Ramón "Bebo" Valdés, who was a central figure among the first generation of big-band mambo arrangers in Cuba. During his decadelong tenure as pianist for Havana's famed Tropicana nightclub, Bebo led the island's top players and worked closely with visiting American stars.

"I was a privileged child because Havana was a center for both Cuban music and jazz when I was a boy," Chucho Valdés said earlier this month at his home in Havana's Miramar section, where congas sit alongside the grand piano and photographs of Cuban musical heroes hang next to a 1998 proclamation of "Chucho Valdés Day" in San Francisco. "Cuban music and American jazz, that's what we lived and breathed in my house. And to me they are different sons of the same mother: Africa."

Mr. Valdés's embrace of Cuban music and American jazz is bold, without stylistic prejudice, and always marked by invention.

He's crafted his own towering legacy atop his inheritance. With Irakere, the group he led from 1973 through 2000, he crafted a blend of jazz, rock and Afro-Cuban roots music that was both a subversive response to Cuba's postrevolution rejection of American culture and a seed for the Cuban dance music later known as timba.

The Allen Room performances showcased Mr. Valdes's current septet, The Afro-Cuban Messengers, named after Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. They mostly played songs from Mr. Valdés's brilliant new CD, "Chucho's Steps" (Four Quarters Entertainment), many carrying allusions to American masters.

"Chucho's Steps," the CD's title song, built the signature chord changes of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" into a 50-bar puzzle. "New Orleans" paid tribute to the Marsalis family, with a clever ragtime section and plenty of collective improvisation. Mr. Valdés revels in subtle manipulations of clave, Cuban music's basic rhythmic building block, and in its possible combinations with jazz's swinging beats.

For him, time is also mutable through stylistic combination; when bassist Lázaro Rivero Alarcón moved from acoustic to electric bass, for instance,percussionist Dreiser Durruthy Bambolé picked up a trio of the bata drums associated with Yoruba ritual music. Mr. Bambolé, who sang traditional chants with a wizened voice, is a commanding player with breathtaking skills, as is conga player Yaroldy Abreu Robles.

Trumpeter Reinaldo Melián Alvarez and tenor saxophonist Carlos Manuel Miyares Hernández are distinctive soloists. Mr. Valdés's own stunning facility suggests one of his father's favorite players, Art Tatum. Yet even his most flamboyant displays serve a coherent musical purpose. No less astonishing are the glittering, breakneck horn lines Mr. Valdés composes and the ways in which his montunos, or repeated grooves, calibrate each musician's subtle shifts of mood and tempo. In this sense, the band is his instrument.

Mr. Valdés opens his new CD with "Zawinul's Mambo," an Afro-Cubanized version of "Birdland," the 1977 Weather Report hit composed by pianist Joe Zawinul. Mr. Valdés's current band is an outgrowth of the quartet Mr. Zawinul urged him to form decades ago.

He'll pare down to a quartet Monday night, and rekindle a powerful bond with Village Vanguard owner Lorraine Gordon. Mr. Valdés's first weeklong engagement there, in 1999, resulted in a Grammy-winning recording, "Live at the Village Vanguard" (Blue Note).

His December 2003 Vanguard engagement marked the last time a musician living in Cuba played in the U.S. until last year, when the American government loosened its interpretation of travel restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba.

This reopened door allows American audiences to hear Mr. Valdés in person, and enables the sort of collaboration he prizes.

In the late 1990s, he was a member of trumpeter Roy Hargrove's cross-cultural Crisol band. In 2000, he played duo piano with Herbie Hancock at the annual Havana International Jazz Plaza Festival.

He'll perform with pianist Arturo O'Farrill at that same festival this December,within a residency by Mr. O'Farrill and his New York-based Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. Mr. O'Farrill, the son of Cuban composer Chico O'Farrill, who was a contemporary of Bebo Valdés, has composed a new piece for the occasion. Its title—"Fathers and Sons: From Havana to New York and Back"—suggests lineages and liberties worthy of celebration.—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/118699