Cuba in the heart of Jazzaldia

The histories of jazz, piano, and Cuban music have intersected on numerous occasions, writing memorable pages in 20th century popular music.

Few mergers as natural as jazz with Afro-Cuban, one of the oldest that the genre had, with references that date back to the 1940s, such as Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá or Cándido Camero, who helped lay the foundations of that fusion that survives today with all the different forms of Latin jazz.

On the second day of this year's Jazzaldia, Cuba colonized the Plaza de la Trinidad stage, with the full presence of Cuban musicians in two concerts led by two great piano names: Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Chucho Valdés.

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Rubalcaba is one of the most overwhelming pianists of his generation, and in his performances in San Sebastián it became clear that, despite a somewhat irregular recording career in recent years, he is still an extraordinary musician. Probably for logistical reasons due to the pandemic, he performed in a duet with the singer Aymee Nuviola, together with whom he published

last year

, an album recorded at the Blue Note in Tokyo with a full band. The duo format took the songs to a completely different place than it would have been with a band, more intimate, although without losing the pulse and the Latin force behind them. The versions of classic boleros such as

and

sounded finer

than more deliberately festive vehicles, such as the

made famous by Celia Cruz, which in Nuviola's hands touched the popular verbena.

The singer had great moments, and the difficulty of raising that music with only piano and voice is not a small thing, but there were some parts in which the line that separates Latin excellence and the summer beach bar concert was blurred.

On the other hand, as if they were sounds from a parallel concert, Rubalcaba's solo passages were all sensational, with articulate, eloquent and brilliant phrasing.

Pure gold.

The Cubans Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Aymee Nuviola, during their performance on Thursday on the second day of the San Sebastián Jazz Festival.

Javier Etxezarreta / EFE

Chucho Valdés, who joined the festival lineup at the last minute, after the cancellation of Mulatu Astatke, received the Donostiako Jazzaldia award on the same stage as his father, the great Bebo Valdés, 18 years earlier. Perhaps inspired by the emotionality of the moment, and because Chucho, now almost in his eighties, seems to be still in full musical form, his concert in San Sebastián was reminiscent of his best moments; Valdés is a great pianist, but live he has proven to be capable of the best and the worst, depending on the day, often a victim of the temptation to fall into excess and the pyrotechnics that some audiences welcome so well. In Jazzaldia there was some of this —some solos with many notes and little content—, but not enough to ruin the concert as a whole,that he recovered his pulse every time the thing seemed like it was going to get out of hand.

The band was also key: made up of three excellent Cuban musicians based in Madrid, the double bass player Reinier

Elizarde, the drummer Georvis Pico and the percussionist Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, they accompanied Valdés with true mastery, making the quartet a powerful engine of Latin rhythms. . Valdés and his people went through the guajira, the son, a tribute to Chick Corea in the form of his classic

and even a

of jazz standards in which Valdés chained solo classics such as

,

,

and

, before leading to a

who played the whole band. A whole journey through different episodes of the musical life of Valdés or, what is almost the same, of Latin jazz of the last decades.