Desde La Bahia - TT: From the Bay Area

Latin Beat Magazine, Dec, 2001 by Jesse Varela

It was a tremendous combination of musicians that, as 84-year old Mongo says, "happens once in a lifetime." Tjader would later score a crossover hit on the R&B Top 40 charts in 1964 with Soul Sauce (Guachi Guara), a soul guajira. In 1980, he was honored with a Grammy Award for his La Onda Va Bien album on Concord Records. It was Tjader who helped launch the career of Mongo Santamaría, and who was singularly one of the most influential West Coast jazz instrumentalists of his generation.

"I'm not in any condition to play now," says Santamaría, who is retired in Miami and hasn't recorded or performed for the last five years, due to health problems. "I've had several operations recently for my eyesight and I've got problems with my hip. I'm going to truthfully honor the memory of Cal Tjader, who opened the door for me and gave me a lot of opportunities."

CHUCHITO! Being the son of one of the world's greatest pianists must be difficult. Yet, for Chuchito Valdés, the son of the Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer Jesús Chucho Valdés, it's been a natural evolution that has guided him down a musical path very similar to his father's. At 35 years of age, he is the eldest son of a family of five, and carving a name for himself as a pianist, composer and arranger.

"I began studying classical music as a boy," says Chuchito, who performed earlier this year with his Afro-Cuban Ensemble at Fuel 44 in downtown San José. "When I was 13 or 14 I decided to put my piano studies aside and play baseball."

He dropped the piano briefly, but soon returned to La Escuela de Música Ignacio Cervantes to specialize in classical as well as Cuban popular music. His awareness of jazz arose around the age of three to four, when he heard bis father play records by Bill Evans, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson and Cubans Peruchín, Lilí Martínez, and his grandfather Bebo Valdés.

His first professional jazz stint was at age 16 with Cuban vocalist and trumpeter Bobby Carcassés. From there, he has accompanied a variety of popular singers: Pello El Afrokan, (the king of mozambique), Anibel López (the sister of Silvio Rodríguez) and Sonido Contemporaneo, a group that included such virtuoso alumni as Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Hilario Durán.

"We played a lot of jazz standards and were the only group in Cuba really doing that; tunes like On Green Dolphin Street, Giant Steps, All The Things You Are. When I turned 26 I decided to relocate to Cancún, México, where I now reside with my wife."

For Chuchito, the most important influence, aside from his father, is the original Irakere band. As a youngster, he was at many of their rehearsals and absorbed their knowledge. In the late 1990s, he joined the new generation Irakere band when his father decided to pursue a solo career. It was a gifted cast that included trumpeter Julio Padrón.

"I went with my father every day to rehearsals and saw how Arturo Sandoval and Paquito D'Rivera practiced their passages. I experienced a great innovation in Cuban music and it's one of the best things that ever happened to me. It expanded Cuban music, and in particular, gave horn players a jazz perspective to follow. It was the roots of what people now call timba; a fusion of bebop and timba developed by my father, Chucho Valdés."