Chucho Valdes: Latin Jazz Founders (DVD)

Contents

If you want to know what became of the greatest Cuban musician of the last 30 years, you will find the answer in Chucho Valdes featuring Irakere: Latin Jazz Founders. Directed by Ilena Rodriguez, this DVD tells the story of one of the most legendary groups in modern Cuban popular music: Irakere. It features live performances of Misa Negra, Chango, Stella Va A Estallar and many others as well as interviews with Chucho and Oscar Valdes, Carlos Emilio Morales, Juilio Oadron and many more.

Quotes

Irakere still continues to excite even this jaded writer's aging blood ... the Valdes' arrangements are such that the horns always cut through and against the rich, Cuban clavebackboned polyrhythms producing a 'gotcha, coming-and-going' sensation in the body. It is an experience not to be missed. -- Roy Strassman, All About Jazz

Read About This Recording

If you want to know what factors motivated Chucho Valdes to establish Irakere, if you would like to become familiar with the impressive list of musicians who came to be a part of the band, how it became a mythical formation thanks to the brass section, the incredible itinerary that caused them to travel all over the world, what the ex-members expressed about what it meant to them to have played for Irakere, what many of them thought of Chucho Valdes and what Chucho Valdes thought of many of them, the elevated opinion that many jazz luminaries had of the group, how many different types of work that they had realized ... if you want to know what became of the greatest Cuban musician of the last 30 years, you will find the answer in Chucho Valdes Featuring Irakere: Latin Jazz Founders.

The brilliant pianist Jesus Chucho Valdes, the son of legendary Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes, founded in 1973 Irakere, named for an Yoruba word meaning forest or jungle. The band produced several major headliners over the years, notably trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, and his sound is a lush but quirky synthesis of Valdes' Afro-Cuban heritage and early classical training, plus bebop jazz. He draws heavily upon Cuban folk sources, traditional rhythms and country dances, but is just as likely to channel the spirits of Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or co-author a tune with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Ludwig Van Beethoven. An incredibly inventive and fluid pianist, revered as a national treasure in Cuba, Chucho writes most of the band's compositions and arrangements.

Irakere won a Grammy