Word: chucho
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...corporeally total experience, rather than a nexus between limbs and the mind. Alternately, when not gliding around the performers, Trueba breaks his musicians down into their component parts, focusing on agile fingers and tapping nimble feet. He savors the contradiction inherent in the great hulking character that is pianist Chucho Valdes. Valdes is an imposing, giant of a man both in height and in sheer solidity, not to mention musical reputation in the jazz community. His playing is an incomparable mixture of Cuban and North American impulses. Trueba reels in close on his mammoth hands, as they span octaves...
...times, Calle 54 has the feel of a music video sampler-brilliantly performed but somewhat contrived-but in the music's margins, when father and son Bebo and Chucho Valdes play a piano duet or when Chico O'Farril wanders aimlessly in the New York City night, the film becomes intensely real and touchingly personal. Calle 54 may indeed be Trueba's "way of repaying a debt of gratitude to Latin jazz," but for novices and the well-versed alike, it also serves to educate and foster a love of the music. Trueba has succeeded, for all the spectacle...
...CHUCHO VALDES Bele Bele en La Habana (Blue Note) A native of Cuba, this fleet-fingered performer is one of the world's finest pianists. Mixing jazz with traditional Afro-Cuban musical forms such as son, danzon and mambo, he creates ferociously cerebral songs that break boundaries, cross oceans and are too spirited for any embargo to contain...
Past midnight now, and Jesus arrives. Jesus ("Chucho") Valdes is the greatest jazz pianist in Cuba, perhaps one of the greatest pianists in the world. He's a tall man, 5 in. north of 6 ft., and wide-bodied. He is casually dressed tonight, clad in an untucked purple shirt, jeans and Fila sneakers. He has played in the U.S. before, but this month he is embarking on his first sizable Stateside tour, one of the most extensive by any Cuban performer since the embargo began in 1962. Valdes has a new solo CD to promote, Bele Bele...
Ultimately, this fascination led to an historic deal between the Cuban government and the American record company Columbia. Irakere was signed and recorded two Columbia records with promises for more group efforts as well as solo projects for Paquito, Chucho and Arturo...