You Can Dance to It: Roots of Tradition With Improvisational Freedom Jon Pareles December 5th 2012 – The New York Times

Dance rhythms teased throughout the concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night: a summit of Latin jazz pianists with Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba from Cuba, Danilo Pérez from Panama and Egberto Gismonti from Brazil.

Cuban guajira, Panamanian tamborito or Brazilian frevo would wink into view, hinting at tradition and its comforts. But they were only hints, brief flashes of a cultural talisman. Then the music would scamper off on dazzling individual tangents: playful, willful tempo fluctuations, thickets and inundations of dissonance, wry quotations, pensive melodic interludes. The concert was part of Carnegie Hall’s Voices From Latin America series; it was a night of hyperactive improvisational freedom grounded in deep musical erudition.

The program was mathematical: four solos, two duets, one quartet. It also had a tinge of friendly competition and the best kind of showing off. Mr. Pérez started his solo reaching inside the piano to damp a string so that the note he was tapping suggested a drum. He sprinkled impressionistic clusters, high and translucent and then lower and more aggressive, cleared them away to ponder a melody, then let a dance-tinged pattern emerge and put it through dizzying chromatic transformations.

Mr. Rubalcaba summoned the salon elegance of old Cuban music and then splintered it in multiple ways: with whimsical stops and starts, with argumentative bursts of dissonance, with breakneck sprints that could split into counterpoint. One of his pieces, “El Cadete Constitucional” — written by his grandfather Jacobo Rubalcaba — incorporated Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” recast as a slow dance.

Mr. Valdés played the flirt and the speed demon, moving in and out of a Cuban guajira to quote Bach or strew two-fisted dissonances up and down the keyboard. Mr. Gismonti set up luminous, rippling patterns behind optimistic major-key melodies that peeked out gradually, adding a few notes at a time, then swerved in and out of percussiveness and spikier harmonies.

With so many flying fingers the duets could be tangled. Mr. Pérez and Mr. Gismonti’s duet revolved around a balladlike melody that drifted in and out of focus, with copious layers of complex harmony. Mr. Rubalcaba and Mr. Valdés made things easier on themselves, sharing a Cuban vamp and more clearly delineating solo and accompaniment, sometimes tossing sly musical one-liners back and forth.

When all four pianists got together for a vintage Cuban composition, Ernesto Lecuona’s “Danza Lucumi,” things grew extremely cluttered, though twinkling solos emerged in an informal round robin. Eventually Mr. Rubalcaba and Mr. Pérez abandoned the keyboard and switched to drumming on their pianos — clearing the texture and returning to the dance.

The New York City Jazz Record

Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba made a major impact with his Blue Note debut in 1990, showing off a thunderous attack in interpreting the jazz canon. Since then, he has evolved as an artist, incorporating many styles into his approach. With XXI Century, a two-disc set, Rubalcaba displays his versatility and imagination, joined by bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Marcus Gilmore, with a few guests on several tracks. Included are familiar pieces by well known pianists taken in new directions. Bill Evans performed his bittersweet ballad “Time Remembered” with a touch of melancholy yet Rubalcaba takes a different path, increasing its spaciousness by slowly working his way into it and having the rhythm section playing a bit off-center, considerably reducing its emotional impact. Rubalcaba’s furious take of Lennie Tristano’s “Lennie’s Pennies” (a reworking of “Pennies From Heaven”) disguises the song’s source until it is well underway, as the trio launches a tense postbop workout. “Moore”, credited to Paul Bley (actually Gary Peacock’s “Moor”), has an avant garde air, with darting piano and dissonant arco bass. The pianist’s originals are even more varied. His “Fifty” blends AfroCuban and funk with a heavy percussive touch, prominent electric bass and judicious use of the electric keyboards. Lionel Loueke adds his voice and guitar to Rubalcaba’s intense, percussive “Oshun”, though the primary focus remains on the core trio and guest percussionist Pedro “Pedrito” Martinez. Loueke contributed the ominous and introspective “Alafia”, the leader’s tense solo, sporadically adding synthesizer, leaving the most lasting impression. Enrique Ubieta’s “Son XXI” initially puts the focus on the long solos by Brewer and Martinez, followed by Rubalcaba’s wild solo blending Cuban jazz and postbop. XXI Century is easily Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s most diverse and demanding release.

Rodarán “Playing Lecuona”, una película con Michel Camilo, Chucho Valdés y Gonzalo Rubalcaba

Pavel Giraud dirigirá el documental que se centra en la vida del pianista y compositor desde que parte de La Habana, su estancia en Nueva York y en Andalucía (sur de España), y sus años finales en la isla de Tenerife

Agencias, Madrid | 01/12/2012 11:36 am

Los pianistas Michel Camilo, Chucho Valdés y Gonzalo Rubalcaba rodarán una película dedicada al cubano Ernesto Lecuona, del que se cumplirán el año próximo 50 años de su muerte, informa Efe.

El rodaje estará a cargo de la productora Trova Films, al estilo de las películas musicales “Buena Vista Social Club”, de Wim Wenders, y “Calle 54”, de Fernando Trueba y tendrá lugar en las ciudades que fueron importantes en la vida del músico cubano, es decir, La Habana, Nueva York y Santa Cruz de Tenerife, donde falleció.

“Lecuona fue un pianista importantísimo porque puso los ritmos ‘caribe’ al piano. Estoy entusiasmadísimo con el proyecto”, ha asegurado Michel Camilo a Efe, que cree que el filme “estará listo” para 2013.

El cubano Pavel Giraud dirigirá la película, que se centra en la vida del pianista y compositor desde que parte de La Habana, su estancia en Nueva York; en Andalucía (sur de España), donde compuso temas tan conocidos como “Guadalquivir”, “Granada”, “Gitanerías” y “Malagueña”, y sus años finales en la isla de Tenerife, en el Atlántico.

En Playing Lecuona, explica la productora en su página web, Chucho Valdés (Quivicán, 1941) será el “cicerone” en La Habana natal del compositor, y allí fusionará el jazz con los ritmos afrocubanos.

En Nueva York, Camilo (Santo Domingo, 1954), creará “elegantes atmósferas sonoras” y Gonzalo Rubalcaba (La Habana, 1963) hará en Sevilla, el corazón de la Andalucía homenajeada por Lecuona en sus composiciones, un mix de latin jazz con flamenco.

“Y todos ellos interpretarán a Ernesto Lecuona en Santa Cruz de Tenerife en un encuentro sin precedentes”, añaden.

En el filme participarán como invitados otros artistas como Omara Portuondo, Alfredo Valdes Jr., Ana Belén, Almendarez (Chocolate), Niña Pastori, Raimundo Amador, Xiomara Laugart, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Alicia Alonso y El Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Huberal Herrera, el Ballet Flamenco de Andalucía y Caco Senante

El documental está apoyado por el programa Ibermedia, el ICAA, el Gobierno de la región de Canarias y la TV pública de Canarias.

Howard Reich, Arts critic - 9:48 a.m. CST, December 1, 2012

The music of Cuba stands at the very root of jazz, its rhythms and song forms intermingling with sounds that emerged in New Orleans as the 19th century slipped into the 20th.

Today, when we think of Cuban jazz, we tend to look nostalgically back to the radiantly romantic music of pre-revolution Cuba celebrated in the “Buena Vista Social Club” film and its many off-shoot recordings. Their high lyricism and seductive dance beats evoke images of gleaming 1950s cars and glamorous nights in plush Havana nightclubs.

All of which made Friday night’s concert at Symphony Center an ear-opening tonic, for it thrust that music unflinchingly into the present. There was no revisiting past triumphs, no re-warming of Afro-Cuban musical clichés. Instead, a beautifully programmed double-bill showed how ancient ideas in Cuban music are being transformed for the 21st century and absorbing a vast range of influences from around the globe.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba ranks among the most accomplished jazz pianists in the world today and perhaps stands at the top of that elite group, thanks to a colossal technique and an unfettered musical imagination. In recent years, he has become increasingly introspective at the piano, particularly in solo work. For the most part, he has put aside his technical feats and explored, instead, the most intimate sounds and ultra-sophisticated harmonies he can draw from the instrument.

So his solo set, which opened this evening of Cuban music, amounted to something of a quasi-classical recital, albeit one laced with rhythmic motifs and compositional structures of his homeland. Even in referencing music of Cuba, however, Rubalcaba drew as much from its classical idioms as its jazz lexicon, in effect eradicating barriers between the two.

You could hear it in the way Rubalcaba embraced swing-tinged rhythm at one moment and its stricter classical counterpart the next, freely improvised statements without backbeat in some passages and meticulously articulated dance pieces elsewhere. Much of this music built upon the cross-genre achievements of the Cuban classical master Ernesto Lecuona, albeit in decidedly contemporary terms.

Rubalcaba synthesized many of these elements in an idiosyncratic re-invention of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma,” presented here as a Chopinesque rhapsody replete with exquisite melodic filigree and a remarkably advanced chordal palette. Only a pianist with Rubalcaba’s footing in both classical and jazz orthodoxies could have pulled it off.

Even in his encore, Rubalcaba teased listener expectations, offering what began as a seemingly abstract improvisation and only in its last bars hinted at its source material: the indelible “Besame Mucho.”

And yet, at least one listener wished that at some point in Rubalcaba’s set he would have burst free of so much hyper-cerebral pianism – as profound as it is – and simply cut loose with the kind of galvanic, Art Tatumesque virtuosity of which he alone is capable. Maybe next time.

Certainly the program offered a fitting counterbalance to Rubalcaba’s piano contemplations with Ninety Miles, a muscular ensemble of musicians from Cuba, the United States and beyond. Read More……

hreich@tribune.com

Twitter @howardreich

ESPECIAL/EL NUEVO HERALD