Chucho Valdés via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Chucho Valdés:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Chucho Valdés
- City: Havana
- Country: Cuba
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Winner of six GRAMMY® and three Latin GRAMMY® Awards, the Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Chucho Valdés is the most influential figure in modern Afro-Cuban jazz.
A protean performer, as comfortable offering solo performances as leading small and large ensembles, his most recent project, Jazz Batá 2, is an exceptional work in which he revisits an idea he first explored in 1972: a piano jazz trio featuring batá drums in place of the conventional trap set. The batá are the sacred, hourglass shaped drums used in the ritual music of the Yoruba religion, better known as Santeria. Released on November 16, 2018, Jazz Batá 2 marks Chucho’s debut on Mack Avenue Records.
A few days earlier, on November 13, Chucho received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences™ in a ceremony held during Latin GRAMMY week in Las Vegas. Chucho was also inducted in the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame, and received a DC Jazz Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, his name joining an illustrious list that includes Kenny Barron, James Moody, Ellis Marsalis, George Wein, and Dave Brubeck. Also, Chucho enjoyed another type of honor, personally satisfying as pianist and performer, as he debuted in the historic Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, last March.
Finally, in August, Chucho and pianist, composer and educator Rebeca Mauleón presented “Decoding Afro-Cuban Jazz: The Music of Chucho Valdés & Irakere” (213 pages, Sher Music Co.) This tome includes an overview of Cuban music; biographical information; and a history of Chucho’s Irakere, a band that, with its bold fusion of Afro-Cuban ritual music, popular Afro- Cuban music styles, jazz and rock, marked a before and after in Latin jazz. The book also includes lead sheets of 11 of Chucho´s most notable compositions, including classics such as ”Misa Negra,” “Mambo Influenciado,” and “Bacalao Con Pan,” and a glossary of terms and Afro-Cuban rhythms.
A very active performer, in early 2018 Chucho completed a two-year tour with Trance, a two-piano duo project. Trancerepresented a dramatic change of sound for Chucho, as it followed the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the birth of Irakere, a group that for all intents and purposes, suggested a small big band. The extensive tour was highlighted by a live recording,Tribute to Irakere: Live at Marciac (Jazz Village / Comanche Music), which won a Grammy for the Best Latin Jazz Album in 2016.
Born in a family of musicians in Quivicán, Havana province, Cuba, on October 9, 1941, Dionisio Jesús "Chucho" Valdés Rodríguez, has distilled elements of the Afro-Cuban music tradition, jazz, classical music, rock and more, into an organic, personal style that has both, a distinct style and substance. His first teacher was his father, the great pianist, composer and bandleader Ramón “Bebo” Valdés. By the age of three, Chucho was already playing the melodies he heard on the radio at the piano, using both hands and in any key. He began taking lessons on piano, theory and solfege at the age of five and continued his formal musical education at the Conservatorio Municipal de Música de la Habana, from which he graduated at 14. A year later, he formed his first jazz trio and in 1959 he debuted with the orchestra Sabor de Cuba, directed by his father. Sabor de Cuba is considered one of the great orchestras in modern Cuban music history. As it turns out, Chucho is perhaps best known as the founder, pianist and main composer and arranger of yet another landmark ensemble in Cuban music: Irakere (1973-2005). Not well known outside Cuba, Irakere was discovered by Dizzy Gillespie, who was visiting Havana on a jazz cruise, in 1977. The following year, producer Bruce Lundvall, then president of CBS, went to Cuba on Dizzy´s advice, heard the band live and signed it on the spot.
The same year Irakere debuted, unannounced, as “surprise guests,” at Carnegie Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. Selections from that performance were later included in Irakere (CBS), the band’s debut recording in the United States. The album won a Grammy as Best Latin Recording in 1979. That original band featured future global jazz stars such as Paquito D’Rivera and Arturo Sandoval, but over its rich, long life, Irakere became a rolling university of Afro-Cuban music while also featuring influential musicians such as the late Miguel “Angá” Díaz; Jose Luis Cortés (who would later found NG La Banda) and Germán Velazco.
Chucho stayed with Irakere until 2005.
Through the many changes the band experienced over the years, he remained the one, essential constant. But Irakere’s success had its personal costs, as Chucho’s talent as a pianist was largely obscured by his responsibilities as a leader.
In 1998 — having won his second Grammy the previous year for Habana (Verve), this time as a member of trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s group Crisol — Chucho launched a parallel career as a solo player and small-group leader.
An enormously fruitful period followed, highlighted by albums such as Solo Piano (Blue Note, 1991), Solo: Live in New York (Blue Note, 2001) and New Conceptions (Blue Note, 2003), as well as quartet recordings such as Bele Bele en La Habana (Blue Note, 1998), Briyumba Palo Congo (Blue Note, 1999) and Live at the Village Vanguard(Blue Note, 2000), which won a Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album.
Since, Chucho also won Grammys for Juntos Para Siempre (Calle 54, 2007), the duet recording with his father, Bebo; and for Chucho’s Steps (Comanche, 2010), which introduced his new group, the Afro-Cuban Messengers.
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
INTERNATIONAL MUSIC NETWORK
Worldwide (except for Spain and France)
Tel: 978-283-2883
info@imnworld.com
www.imnworld.com
FRANCE
Claire Hénault
claire.henault@planet-a.fr
T : +33 (0)1 43 73 70 70
C :+33 (0)6 12 44 43 29
SPAIN
Comanche Music S.L.
info@comanchemusic.net
www.comanchemusic.net
Prensa/Press:
info@comanchemusic.net
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: chuchovaldes
- ▶ Instagram: chucho_valdes_oficial
- ▶ Website: http://valdeschucho.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/ChuchoValdesoficial
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UC5wmyjwARfHYFecFEY8iQfw
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/3KqVBTW2XNykZ5r1yRRjo6
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/4lWVDzxHpWQbyUSrR5AyiH
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/5RSAwCSsdJX4UwabnrFZHF
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/1gfILNnSqDPSjHhyydy5vP
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/2qNItLdcFnSId2094fNe3A
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/2S1w7Sc9NukidqKfpylJDX
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
