‘IT’S A REUNION’
Pianist Chucho Valdes named Artist in Residence for 2022 Detroit Jazz Festival
Chucho Valdes was having dinner at home in Malaga, Spain, on Sunday, April 3, when his wife Lorena’s phone started to go crazy.
They quickly learned that the Cuban pianist — and newly named Artist in Residence for the 2022 Detroit Jazz Festival — had won his 10th Grammy Award, Best Latin jazz Album for the “Mirror Mirror” project with Brazilian singer-pianist Eliane Elias and the late Chick Corea.
Via Zoom and an interpreter, the next day, Valdes was still buzzing about the honor. “One of the most important things that has happened in my life is to share this Grammy with Eliane and Chick Corea,” he noted. “(Elias) decided to invite two pianists. We did the recording in parts, and it went truly fast. It was very fluid. It was a very, very good communication between all of us.”
The Grammy win was certainly a nice set-up for the announcement of Valdes’ role in the Detroit festival — which will take place, presumably in person for the first time since 2019, over Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 2-5. Valdes, 80, previously presented his “Jazz Bata” at the festival in 2018, when Corea, ironically, was Artist in Residence.
“It’s one of my favorite festivals,” he says, “because, really, it’s a reunion of a family of musicians. It’s what we all dream. It’s an ambience of being together and sharing.” Valdes was also impressed with the festival’s organization, and he remembers that the audience “is super special.”
Being the Artist in Residence, meanwhile, will allow Valdes “to present myself with different projects. That opens a lot of perspective of what a musician
can do.” He’ll be playing new music with a quartet as well as performing in another ensemble with saxophonist Joe Lovano and Detroit-born vocalist Dianne Reeves. Most ambitious, however, will be a suite called “The Creation,” which Valdes describes as “a history of the African roots and the Caribbean and in the Americas, which will be performed with a large and fluid ensemble of musicians.
And if it seems odd that Valdes would be going back to “The Creation” at this stage in his life, he maintains that it’s a natural destination — or at least Way-station — for what’s been a long and remarkable career.
He was born in Cuba and learned piano from his father, the late Bebo Valdes, a well-known bandleader who went into exile, first in Mexico and finally in Sweden. Chucho became a leader himself in 1964 with “Jazz nocturno,” the first of more than two dozen albums to bear his name on Blue Note, EGREM, Areito and other major jazz labels. He was an original member of the
Orquesta Cubano de Musica Moderna in 1967, and six years later he co-founded Irakere, a Grammy-winning Afro-Cuban jazz group that’s still considered active, with Valdes’ son Chuchito now in his place.
Valdes also recorded a 1988 album, “Straight Ahead,” with Arturo Sandoval, and he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Berklee College of Music in 2011. He’s been active in jazz education as well, including at the Havana National school in his homeland.
“The music has so many ways of evolving that you never get to the end,” explains Valdes, who still practices six to eight hours each day. “(the end) does not exist if you work, if you keep investigating.”
Valdes will be in Detroit on April 30 for the festival’s Preview Event, streaming performance which will include the announcement of the 2022 lineup. More information and updates will be available via detroitjazzfest.org.