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From left to right, Chucho Valdés, Joe Lovano, sax, John Patitucci,bass, Marcus Gilmore, drums and Roberto Jr. Vizcaino, percussion, at the Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami, Saturday. Photo by Taylor Brown, courtesy of the Adrienne Arsht Center.
Leading a superb hand-picked quintet, Cuban pianist Jesús “Chucho” Valdés celebrated his upcoming 85th birthday with a concert at the Arsht Center in Miami on Saturday that took him back to the beginnings of his career. It played out as a love letter to standards – the basic texts in the liturgy of jazz – and the art of improvisation.
In his brief introduction, casually sitting at the piano by himself, Valdés set the evening’s tone: intimate, inviting, and no-nonsense. These were some of the pieces he learned as a teenager, and he would play them with a group of musicians he admired and who had influenced him. But before that, “we’ll start from the end,” he announced as he introduced a new piece from a solo piano recording he had just completed. It wasn’t what anyone might have expected. It was brief but intense. There was no nostalgia. Instead, there were explosions of high energy, lengthy, lightning-fast runs; splashes of vivid harmonies set by unexpected turns and mood changes; until the storm died out in a whispered ending. It suggested a note of where Valdés might be today — but that would be for another evening.
Saturday, Valdés, alongside Joe Lovano on tenor sax, Marcus Gilmore on drums, John Patitucci on bass, and Roberto Jr. Vizcaíno on percussion, set out to mine, one more time, tried-and-true classics such as “Blue Monk,” “Body and Soul,” and “Green Dolphin Street,” and in the process, turned the Arsht Center into an intimate jazz club.
It was a remarkable performance, both as a group and individually. At its best, improvisation is instant composition; it’s writing a piece within a piece, in the air, on the spot. And yes, it’s also a place for musicians to stretch out and showcase their technical prowess – always a risky proposition with lesser players. Saturday, no matter how far Patitucci took his melodic variations, how Lovano chose to suggest a vocalist through his phrasing and inflection, or how many rhythms and tonal colors Gilmore and Vizcaíno layered on their drums, the shared idea was consistently serving the music at hand. Given that narcissism seems to be the default approach these days, from sports to high politics, this was a gift worthy of the occasion.
As for the birthday man, while the concert celebrated Valdés the player, not the composer, the program smartly included his “Mambo Influenciado.” It’s a statement piece in his long career and a Latin Jazz standard in its own right and it got a many-sided probing by the group. Another highlight was the one piece in the program that was not a jazz standard: Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane in F♯ minor.” The reading by the Valdés – Patitucci duet was both elegant and subtly forceful, with a distinct jazz accent. “It will be Fauré as played by Bill Evans,” Valdés had suggested, tongue-in-cheek, in our conversation the week before the concert. By the end of their performance, Evans, Valdés’s jazz piano hero, was no doubt hovering around the house, listening in.
Happy birthday, Mr. Valdés. Same place, next year?
