Bebo is from Cuba

October 9, 2018

It cannot be otherwise for someone who played a role of the utmost importance in the crystallization of the orchestral style with which vernacular music reached its most refined expression around the middle of the last century.

Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro is from Cuba. Not even the decades in which he lived far away, first in Sweden and later in Spain, did he cease to be ours nor did he stop promoting Cuban music. A hundred years after his birth on October 9, 1918 in Quivicán, Bebo Valdés is from Cuba.

It cannot be otherwise for someone who played a role of the utmost importance in the crystallization of the orchestral style with which vernacular music reached its most refined expression around the middle of the last century and, at the same time, contributed substantial values to the development of the Cuban descarga, the most imaginative and heartfelt variant of the creolization of jazz.

Between Dámaso Pérez Prado, Chico O' Farrill and Armando Romeu, plus the genius of Benny Moré as a free and unique electron who without academic training molded a band to the measure of his desires, Bebo occupies a place to which one must repeatedly return to find the keys to the heights reached by island music and its continental projection in the 1950s.

Bebo's trademark was the orchestra Sabor de Cuba, with which he worked at the Tropicana cabaret, alternating with Armando Romeu's, between 1949 and 1957 and recorded memorable sessions, as well as accompanying leading Cuban and foreign figures, among them Rita Montaner and Nat King Cole.

In 1952 he created the batanga rhythm, whose innovative approaches were not deciphered by the record and entertainment industry, but whose traces became a reference for much of what has happened since both in the evolution of Cuban jazz and timba. By the way, in the initial recordings of the new rhythm Benny Moré appeared, who had just returned from Mexico and had not yet assembled his extraordinary giant band.

He ended up in Mexico in 1960, where he collaborated for a time with Chilean Lucho Gatica, whom he knew from Havana. Later he settled in Europe. He left his family behind and started another in Sweden. He never understood the changes that took place in his native country. But not even in the days of earning a living in Swedish restaurants and nightclubs did he stop thinking about music in Cuban terms. So much so that at 76 years of age, as someone said, he reinvented himself when they called him to record in New York.

This is the Bebo who begins to ride again, to the airs of Latin jazz, albums like Bebo rides again, and films like Calle 54, his fabulous union with flamenco singer Diego el Cigala and the reunion with his son Chucho Valdés on the album Juntos para siempre.

But I agree with what researcher Rosa Marquetti has expressed: "It would be a capital error to reduce the importance of Bebo Valdés in Cuban music to the international boom that his revival achieved with the album Lágrimas negras. In any case, the worldwide recognition achieved in the last decade of the twentieth century was a most deserved culmination of a career that crosses transversely and successfully throughout an entire century and more in Cuban music.

He has his own and distinguished place among the best orchestra directors, composers and pianists of significance, and ranks among the most creative arrangers in the entire history of our music."

This is the Bebo that on his centennial I would like to be remembered, and who, without a doubt, above the anecdotal, rightfully belongs to us.

Source: Granma