Official Una Corda Patron
Chucho Valdés
“Una Corda is a very beautiful idea. As soon as they told me about it, I told them they could count on me. I have only 10 fingers, but if I had 20, they could also count on 20″
“Thank you to all our friends in Ireland. Together, we are helping to train not just tuners, but also mechanics and technicians, specialists in repairs and tuning. It is a tremendous contribution that will secure the future of Cuban music.”
Pianist and Afro-Cuban jazz master Chucho Valdés has been a friend to the Una Corda project since the beginning. He was one of the key contributors to Ellen Cranitch’s documentary, 88 Strings Attached, and when Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs visited the Una Corda workshop in Havana, Chucho very kindly came along to welcome him. (For more on Chucho’s meeting with the Minister, click here)
It was a momentous day for the project, and it was made even more special when Chucho announced that he would be coming to Ireland in the summer of 2009 to play a series of concerts, with all the proceeds going to fund the restoration of the workshop and to further the work of the Una Corda project.
Chucho’s first port of call in Ireland was to the Cork School of Music, where Minister Martin repaid the compliment by welcoming Chucho to Cork and introducing him from the stage. Chucho then played a solo concert in the auditorium of the school that had the capacity audience in raptures. And they weren’t the only ones – when Chucho heard the recording of the performance, made by Lyric FM, he was so pleased that he decided to release it as a solo record. More news about that release when we have it.
Chucho then travelled to Dublin where he met up with the rest of his band at Vicar Street, one of Dublin’s premier music venues. Long before the doors opened, the concert had been sold out, and the thousand or so friends and suporters who crowded into Vicar Street weren’t disappointed. Over nearly two and a half hours of non-stop music, Chucho and the band gave a masterclass in Cuban jazz. It was a night to remember, and the fact that every cent raised on the night was going to save Cuba’s pianos, and to support the education of a new generation of Cuban pianists, just made it all the sweeter.
Read Sunday Tribune Music Columnist Cormac Larkin’s profile of Chucho below
CHUCHO VALDÉS – CUBA’S JAZZ MAESTRO
Appropriately for someone who is regarded as the messiah of Afro-Cuban music, his birth certificate declares him to be Jesus. Like many with that name in Latin America, the pianist, who towers over modern Cuban music, is known to his friends and to fans around the world as Chucho. But in his home town of Havana, they have another name – maestro – and they mean it. In a city that has more than its fair share of musicians, Chucho Valdés is the most revered and the most treasured. Not only is Maestro Valdés the standard bearer for modern Cuban music, but he is one of only a handful of senior Cuban musicians who, despite the lure of international fame and fortune, has stayed in Cuba and supported the revolution.
The Cuba of today and the island Valdés was born into are two very different places. In 1941, Cuba had an almost feudal economy based on the exploitation of the rural peasantry, while Havana was a glittering mercantile centre for the land owners and a playground for rich, corrupt Americans. Chucho’s father, Bebo Valdés, himself a pianist and band-leader, was enormously influential in Havana’s nightclub scene during the forties and fifties, playing classic Cuban dance music in the famous Club Tropicana and accompanying visiting singers like Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan. But Bebo was also down in the barrios of old Havana, where African influences were still very strong checking out the rhythms that were happening there. This heady blend of Cuban Son, American jazz, and African rhythm is the formative musical influence on modern Cuban music, and no-one has distilled its essence more succinctly than Chucho Valdés.
Chucho was a young man of seventeen when Fidel Castro and Che Guevara made their famous entrance into Havana in January 1959. By that time, the young pianist had a classical musical education at the Municipal Conservatory in Havana behind him and was already leading his own jazz trio. The following year, like so many musicians in the coming years, Bebo fled Cuba never to return. But Chucho remained, earning a living playing in hotels and theatres, all the time listening to jazz and developing as a player. In 1967, at a time when musicians in Cuba were under severe pressure from the closure of the nightclubs, he was part of a coterie of Cuban musicians drafted into the Orquestra Cubana de Musica Moderna, which included the saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, both destined for exile and international fame. The name of the group was a coy reference to jazz in a country where American words were now taboo, but ironically, it was this nationalisation of Cuban music which led to the development of the island’s unique brand of jazz.
In 1973, Valdés, D’Rivera and Sandoval left to form their own group and the name which they chose for their new venture – Irakere – was significant. It was a west African word meaning the forest groves where Yoruba percussionists played and signaled a defiant Africanism which gave pride of place to the rhythm section and linked Cuban jazz with the traditional Santeria religions of black Cubans. With Chucho as its principle arranger and musical director, Irakere developed their own unique fusion of jazz and Afro-Cuban music, quite independent of the salsa that was emerging in New York amongst Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles. When the band eventually toured internationally in 1978, it had an immediate impact and, long before the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, won legions of followers for Cuban music around the world, among them influential American jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz.
The group found a particularly congenial home away from home in Ronnie Scott’s famous jazz club in London and in the mid-eighties made a celebrated recording there which captures the excitement and sheer energy of the band live on stage. The Legendary Irakere in London (Jazz House, 1987) finishes with The Duke, Dave Brubeck’s tribute to Duke Ellington and in a jaw-dropping display of sheer invention, Chucho plays his own tribute to Ellington, drawing on influences as diverse as Art Tatum, George Gershwin and Rachmaninov. It is a display of virtuosity which puts Chucho in a very elite group in world jazz.
But jazz is too small a word for what ChuchoValdés does. He is a conduit for all music, a lightning rod for the cultural history of the small but incredibly vibrant nation he proudly represents, channeling music and spirituality from Africa, from Europe and from America. To hear him is to hear a new language emerging which, though entirely spontaneous, immediately resonates with our own experience. What more could we ask of a musician ?
From The Sunday Tribune, 12 July 2009
