Jesus (Chucho) Valdes continues being today an extra class musician inside the jazz’s world and, in spite of its long and successful career, he always has an ace up one’ sleeve to surprise those who think that they know him completely.
His best inventions can beat them with a genius that leaves speechless to the most demanding fans in the genre.
The fact is that, besides virtuous, Cuban’s pianist, organist, composer and instrumentalist is able to dazzle with very aloof attitudes of the paraphernalia that surrounds the current events in the great scenes.
Inexhaustible source of creation, the artist, in capital letter, is a universe itself who result from years of ceaseless search, able to paints the horizon toward which to head his road.
This way showed credentials the multi Grammy prize-wining in the second night of the 33 International Festival Jazz Plaza, before a packed hall of a Havanan theater which held one’s breath for not to lose till the slightest details of the pianist's performance, accompanied this time just for a bassist and two percussionists.
The choice was not fortuitous, the founder of the Irakere orchestra explores in each opportunity the possibilities of each instrumental movement, readjusts sounds and bring the limit up to whom share the stage with him.
He doesn't believe in preset scripts, if before go up on stage he had thought a central strand for the concert once before the 88 keys he gets carried away for that creative spirit of the jazz which has devoted him as one of the greatest of this musical genre born at the end of the XIX century in the United States.
Without beat about the bush, Valdes is the Latin jazz, a jazzman; he is the piano and all the pianos, his roots are in his movements: Manuel Saumell, Ignacio Cervantes, Ernesto Lecuona, Lily Martínez and, of course, Bebo, his father; the classics Chopin and Lizt, and the revolutionaries Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk.
Dynamic and electrifying elapsed the pieces of the concert, as The Rumbon or the Scherezade by Rimski-Korsakov, from which he appropriated to return them as a sense blues able to shake the remarkable Russian composer.
The master also knows how to give space to his musicians who shone exceedingly, magnificent Rodney Barreto in the battery, well-versed Yaroldi Abreu in the congas, and a tireless Yelsy Heredia in the double bass.
Likewise, invites and with intelligence and good taste shared the stage with the American saxophonist Joe Lovano who in close-up dialogued with the formation in a flowing, impeccable way.
Jazz night for those who recognize in that music its liberating sounds from the hand of one of its biggest exponents, a Cuban born in October 9 1941 in Quivicán, Mayabeque province.
Chucho has a guaranteed relief, because he was preceded in the stage by the project Valdes Brothers, a solid proposal leaded by his children Leyanis and Jessie.
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