Chucho Valdés will celebrate his 81st birthday in October. He has been married three times, has six children and one of them is just 15 years old. In fact, he is younger than some of the grandchildren of this famous Cuban pianist.
“Little happens, but it happens,” said the musician who then let out one of the many laughs that spiced up the interview he offered from Miami.
The pretext for the talk was the unique concert that he will offer at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he will perform The Creation in the series entitled Sounds of the Caribbean. This new work, which he will perform accompanied by a large band and Afro-Cuban songs and percussion, will celebrate the 81 years of existence of the jazz master.
The masterful show will be repeated at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York on two dates, October 7 and 8.
“I think that this work is the result of the fact that I began to study the Yoruba roots, the rhythms, the songs of the Santeria religion from a very young age,” he said. “But also all the music from the Caribbean, from the south of the United States – jazz, of course – and I made a very big fusion because Afro-Cuban music is Afro-American and has roots throughout the continent.”
Thus, it exposes the history of creation according to La Regla de Ocha, the religious syncretism derived from Yoruba, also known as Santeria, and is interpreted in the Lucumí language, explained the artist.
Chucho Valdés is accompanied in these presentations by the Monk’estra, the pianist Hilario Durán and John Beasley as musical director.
However, and despite the great satisfaction that the execution of this concert causes him, Chucho carries with him the recent loss of two of his brothers who died victims of covid. That means that the musician is the only survivor of the couple that his mother and his celebrated father, the late pianist Bebo Valdés, once formed. He is survived by several siblings from a different mother.
Of all these losses, Chucho said that the one he misses a lot is precisely his father, who died in 2013 and with whom he had a very close relationship. In the last years of Bebo’s life, the two did several tours together.
“He was my teacher for many years,” he said. “I was the pianist in his orchestra and now in the last fifteen years we have been playing together and living a block from each other in Malaga, because he lived in Malaga afterwards; we were friends, we shared many things in life […] I miss his presence, his voice.
Bebo and Chucho separated when Chucho was 19 years old. Bebo left Cuba and asked her son to take over the family. Father and son met again 18 years later, when Chucho traveled to New York as part of the Irakere gang.
“We played Carnegie Hall, and I knew [que mi padre] I was in the public,” he said. “When we met again he was so emotional, with many tears and many hugs; we were talking all night […] It was unforgettable”.
Currently, all of Chucho’s children are musicians, some jazz and others classical music. None of them play in his band, but he doesn’t rule out the possibility of them getting together on some common project.
Meanwhile, he wants to be remembered with the most transcendental music he composed with Irakere, such as “Bacalao con pan” or the ballad “Claudia”.
“And of course dancing and drinking rum,” he said. “A lot of rum, because Cubans drink a lot of rum.”
In detail
What: Sounds of the Caribbean with Chucho Valdés, Willie Colón and Cimafunk (guests)
When: wednesday 8pm
Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles
How: tickets $9 to $67; reports hollywoodbowl.com