Chucho Valdes and the Afro-Cuban Messengers

Chucho’s Steps
Border-Free
(World Village WVF)

Born in Quivican, Cuba, in 1941 and the son of celebrated pianist Bebe Valdes, Chucho began playing the home piano aged three and by the time he was a teenager he was leading his own band.

In his twenties he formed the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna and in 1973 he founded the most luminous of Cuban jazz groups, Irakere, while also building a formidable reputation as a solo artist.

In the nineties he began to record for the classic US label Blue Note and the albums that emerged — like the solo session at the Village Vanguard (Live in New York) or the superbly innovative New Conceptions — showed his eclectic brilliance, fusing his Afro-Cuban roots with the traditions of hard bop, Coltrane, Miles Davis and Horace Silver.

Chucho’s most recent band, the dynamic sextet the Afro-Cuban Messengers, has much of the elemental spirit of their rampant forebears, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, with a hugely Cuban verve and rhythmic pulse. 

Their 2010 album Chucho’s Steps begins with a hard-struck, stomping passage from Valdes in the opener, Las dos Caras (Both Sides) before Reynaldo Melian Alvarez takes a fiery trumpet solo and Chucko bounds out of his keys and the percussive fury of Yaroldy Abreu Robles makes its testimony. 

The rhythm of the authentic Danzon runs through the blood of the next track, with its repeated  changes of pace and a balladic tenor saxophone message from the beautifully toned Carlos Miyares Hernandez.

Zawinal’s Mambo is a salute to the Austria-born pianist of Weather Report, with both Alvarez and Hernandez blowing songfully over the surging rhythm and Chucho leaping into a blustering solo.

Bassist Rivero Alarcon marks out the path for Begin to Be Good, where the lyricism of Alvarez’s horn tells its story with a powerful lucidity. 

New Orleans is dedicated to the Marsalis family of the Crescent City, and is Chucho playing off the horn ensemble and rampaging down his keys, with a street parade simulation at the end.

The echoes of West Africa pulsate through the Yoruba origins of Yansa with the added bata drums and Dreiser Durruthy Bombale’s compelling vocals. Chucho’s pounded piano is one more complex drum in a forest of sound. 

Julian is back to the sextet and expressively wrought solos all round and Chucho’s hands hitting his keys with even greater weight. 

The closer is a loving nod to Coltrane, whose Giant Steps has been transmuted to Chucho’s Steps. Hernandez is within ’Trane’s spirit and Alvarez’s trumpet sings out its joyous Cuban message before Chucho’s choruses put him abreast of the master.

His 2013 album Border-Free has a photo of Chucho with a full Comanche head-dress on its sleeve, and its title track Afro-Comanche holds the narrative of the rebellious Comanche native Americans who were deported to the eastern side of Cuba during the 19th century, where they lived and founded families with Cubans, creating an Afro-Comanche heritage. 

Cuban griot Chucho and his drum-piano tell their story of a wearisome journey to a
faraway island of exile, servitude and release, and Angel Gaston Joya Perellada’s pungent bass tells of more insurgent history.

Border-Free is an album of eloquent tributes, to his father (Bebo), his mother (Pilar), his grandmother (Caridad Amaro) and the beloved Cuban composer Margarita Lecuona (Tabu).

On three tracks Chucho is joined by tenor saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and their union reaches a particular splendour on the closing track (Abdel), dedicated to a prominent Moroccan musician and seething with the triangular musical life-force of Africa, Cuba and New Orleans. 

The colloquy of drums, Perellada’s plunging beat, the heat of Chucho’s pianism and the final uplift of Marsalis’s soprano saxophone coda burn your ears and melt into your consciousness.