 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
Chucho Valdés at the Levine School of Music Over 50 musicians and scholars attended a workshop on June 18 by Cuban jazz pianist Jesús "Chucho" Valdés at the Levine School of Music in Washington DC. "Chucho" gave an overview of the different styles found within Afro-Cuban music and how they are applied to the piano. Born in Quivicán, Havana, on October 9, 1941, Jesús "Chucho" Valdés is the son of Cuban pianists "Bebo" and Pilar Valdéz. Initiating his formal studies at the age of 9, he was a student at the Municipal Conservatory in Havana. Even before he was 20, he was a prominent piano player, working with different jazz and popular ensembles around Havana. In the 1960's, he led a group that featured the late Armando Borcela "Guapachá" as lead vocalist. Chucho's first noted performance outside Cuba was during the 1970 Polish Jazz Festival, gaining praise from jazz luminaries like Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. Chucho's father, pianist Bebo Valdés, played a major role in the development of the mambo during the pre-Revolution years. The mambo, rooted in the "ritmo nuevo" as popularized by the orchestra of Arcaño y sus Maravillas, served as the ideal stylistic setting for Orestes López to compose his danzón "Mambo" in 1938, combining syncopated son motifs and improvised flute variations. By adapting the mambo and innovative jazz arrangements of the mid-1940's, composers Bebo Valdés and René Hernández managed to free the mambo's syncopated mode from the danzón structure. Chucho was a member of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, from where he later departed to form the band Irakere in 1973. Irakere -named after the Yoruba word for forest or woods, the place where all the greatest percussionists in Africa lived two centuries ago- is credited to being one of the foremost exponents of Afro-Cuban jazz, successfully integrating the Afro-Cuban rhythms and styles with modern jazz elements. As the leader and chief composer of Irakere, Chucho experimented with very intricate rhythms from various African sources (bantú, yoruba, carabalí), while incorporating traditional instruments from Afro-Cuban santería such as the batá drums. In his compositions, Chucho combined the influences of musicians such as Art Tatum, Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner with Afro-Cuban roots and a blazing rhythmic technique. He was the author of most of the band's compositions and arrangements and released dozens of albums, both with Irakere and as a solo performer. Chucho has also been directing the Havana Jazz Festival, held every December in Havana. Musicians of the caliber of jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove, David Sánchez and Steve Coleman, come to Havana to meet and play with some of the top jazz musicians of the world. It was precisely during the 1996 Festival that Roy Hargrove convinced Chucho to revitalize the big-band work done in the 1940's by Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá and Dizzy Gillespie. The end result of this collaboration was the Cuban-American band Crisol, with the addition of bassist John Benítez, saxophonist David Sánchez, percussionists José Luis Quintana "Changuito," Miguel "Angá" Díaz, Horacio "El Negro" Hernández, and other Cuban and American musicians. In January 1997, they all decided to meet in Italy to record the Grammy-nominated album Crisol Habana, in honor of the city where the project was forged. In the last few years, Chucho has been phasing himself out of Irakere, letting his son "Chuchito" to take his place. Instead, Chucho has been working with his own Latin-Jazz and Afro-Cuban quintet. With an instrumentation based on piano, double bass, horn, trumpet, drum set and an Afro-Cuban drum set, with conga, batá, timbales, bongós, tambores arará (a set of four or five drums used in African religious rites from tribal groups in the region of today's countries of Togo and Ghana), tambores abacuá (four corner-shaped drums associated with a religious sect in Central Africa) and tambores yuka (drums of Congolese origin), Chucho is set to explore the roots of Afro-Cuban and of popular traditional music, like danzón, mambo and Latin jazz-the fusion of these influences. "Cuban music is not only for dancing: there is also concert music and Latin Jazz," –Chucho declared in a recent interview. According to Chucho, the true boom in Cuban music is owed to the Cuban son, "which contains the sound that opens and closes this century, being the one that is continually marching forward, more than salsa or timba." Discography Belé Belé en La Habana (Blue Note, 1998). |
|
|
|
||||||