Chucho Valdés & Irakere 50

Valdés is a seven-time Grammy and six-time Latin Grammy winner and recipient of a Latin Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award for musical excellence.

More recently Valdés won a Grammy for his work Mirror Mirror, an album he recorded with his fellow pianists Eliane Elías and the late Chick Corea, and a Grammy for the disc I missed you too, (‘Yo también te extrañé’), the album of his reunion with the maestro saxophonist and clarinetist, Paquito D’Rivera, a friend of many years who was also a pillar of ‘Irakere’.

Valdés launched ‘Irakere’ in 1973, and to interpret his musical vision with this group, he selected notable members and the principal soloists of the legendary Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, a big band comprising Cuba’s best musicians, which was organized in 1967 to play jazz and pop. In 1973 the budding ‘Irakere’, still a band-within-a-band, recorded Bacalao con pan, a song that became a huge success and made them known. It was an irresistible, danceable song that hinted at the depth and breadth of the writing and playing. This piece became ‘Irakere’s’ first major hit and it foreshadowed innovations that would become known years later as timba, a popular dancing style today in Cuba.

‘Irakere’ became a self-standing band in 1975 and remained active until 2005. However, the discovery of ‘Irakere’ for American audiences began with a chance encounter in Havana in 1977 when, in the first official visit by Americans to Cuba since the Missile Crisis, a jazz cruise ship carrying musicians that included Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and a young Ry Cooder (almost two decades before Buena Vista Social Club) dropped anchor in Havana harbour. They heard the group, were bowled over by the writing and the virtuosic playing, and, once back in the States, championed Irakere’s case to the late Bruce Lundvall, then president of CBS Records. Months later, Lundvall visited Cuba, attended a concert and audition, signed the group on the spot, and lobbied to have Irakere appear at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York City.

It was on June 28 1978 when, included in the programme and unannounced, Chucho Valdés and ‘Irakere’ closed the evening at Carnegie Hall and burst onto the global stage. A few months later, an album titled Irakere, including selected tracks from that concert in New York and a later performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, won the Grammy for Best Latin Recording.

Line-Up:

Chucho Valdés: piano

Julián Valdés: percussion

José A. Gola: electric & acoustic bass

Horacio Hernández: drums

Roberto Jr. Vizcaíno Torre: percussion

Eddie de Armas Jr.: trumpet

Osvaldo Fleites: trumpet

Luis Beltrán: saxophone

Carlos Averhoff Jr.: saxophone

Ramón Alvarez: vocalist