Three greats of Cuban music at the Jazzaldía festival in San Sebastián, Spain

July 25, 2021

The stories of jazz, piano, and Cuban music have intersected on numerous occasions, writing memorable pages in popular music of the twentieth century. Few fusions as natural as that of jazz with Afro-Cuban music, one of the oldest that the genre experienced, with references dating back to the forties, such as Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá or Cándido Camero, who helped lay the foundations of that fusion that today persists in all the different forms of Latin jazz.

On the second day of this year's Jazzaldia, Cuba took over the stage at Plaza de la Trinidad, with full presence of Cuban musicians in two concerts led by two great names in piano: Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Chucho Valdés.

Rubalcaba is one of the most overwhelming pianists of his generation, and in his performances in San Sebastián it was clear that, despite a somewhat irregular recording career in recent years, he remains an extraordinary musician.

Surely for logistical reasons due to the pandemic, he was presenting as a duo with singer Aymee Nuviola, with whom he released last year Viento y tiempo, an album recorded at the Blue Note in Tokyo with a full band. The duo format took the songs to a completely different place than what it would have been with a band, more intimate, though without losing the pulse and Latin force behind them. The versions of classic boleros such as Bésame mucho and Dos gardenias sounded finer than more deliberately festive vehicles, like the Bemba colorá that made Celia Cruz famous, which in Nuviola's hands approached popular celebration.

The singer had great moments, and the difficulty of lifting that music with only piano and voice is no small thing, but there were some parts where the line separating Latin excellence and a summer beach bar concert became blurred. On the other hand, as if they were sounds coming from a parallel concert, Rubalcaba's solo passages were all sensational, with articulate, eloquent, brilliant phrasing. Pure gold.

Chucho Valdés, who was added to the festival lineup at the last minute, following the cancellation of Mulatu Astatke, received the Donostiako Jazzaldia award on the same stage where his father, the great Bebo Valdés, did 18 years before.

Perhaps inspired by the emotion of the moment, and because Chucho, now almost eighty, seems to still be in top musical form, his concert in San Sebastián recalled his best moments; Valdés is a great pianist, but live he has proven capable of the best and the worst, depending on the day, often a victim of the temptation to fall into excess and pyrotechnics that some audiences welcome so readily. At Jazzaldia there was some of this—some solos with many notes and little substance—, but not enough to spoil the concert as a whole, which recovered its pulse each time things seemed about to get out of hand.

The band was also key: composed of three excellent Cuban musicians based in Madrid, bassist Reinier El negrón Elizarde, drummer Georvis Pico and percussionist Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, they accompanied Valdés with true mastery, making the quartet a powerful engine of Latin rhythms.

Valdés and his band went through the guajira, the son, a tribute to Chick Corea in the form of his classic Armando's Rhumba and even a medley of jazz standards in which Valdés chained solo classics such as My Foolish Heart, My Romance, People and Waltz For Debby, before flowing into a But Not For Me that the entire band performed. A true journey through different episodes of Valdés's musical life or, which is almost the same thing, of Latin jazz over the past few decades.