One of the most heartening recent developments in local music has been the emergence of the Chicago Cultural Center as a hub for top-rank performers.
Though the former home of the Chicago Public Library, on East Washington Street, for years has featured free public concerts, during the past several months its schedule of performances has gotten busier and better.
Consider Thursday afternoon’s recital by Cuban piano master Chucho Valdes, who has appeared sporadically in the Chicago area in various touring ensembles in recent years. This time, however, Valdes played an extended solo show in the Cultural Center’s magnificent Preston Bradley Hall. Though the room can be a over-reverberant even for a solo piano set, the beauty of the setting, the stature of the performer and the virtuosity of the performance easily compensated.
The fortunate listeners who jammed the place heard not only a formidable pianist but also received a lesson on the nature of Cuban instrumental prowess. Valdes, after all, epitomizes the Cuban approach to instrumental jazz, in which the most promising artists of every genre are trained first in the technical rigors of classical music.
The conservatory-style education produces jazz and pop musicians who typically command a technique considerably more imposing than that of their counterparts in the United States and beyond. No doubt this rigorous training owes to Havana’s historical ties to Moscow, which since the 19th Century has set the standard for conservatory education in general, piano virtuosity in particular.
So when Valdes began to play his solo jazz set, listeners heard not only a monumental sound backed by a brilliant digital technique but also a form of improvisation deeply rooted in the classical piano tradition. Listen closely to Valdes’ extended improvisations on standard American tunes, and you’ll hear the influence of Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and Ravel.
In several passages, in fact, Valdes appropriated specific ideas from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor (the fast-flying unison lines of the last movement) and Debussy’s “Fireworks” (the flurry of dissonance and color that opens the piece). But because Valdes adapted these ideas for his jazz improvisations and seamlessly blended them into the fabric of songs by Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen, among others, he effectively bridged the piano traditions of two centuries and two continents into a single, galvanic performance.
Listeners may have expected a sweet and lyric version of Kern’s “Yesterdays” when Valdes started the piece as if it were a jazz nocturne. But before long he was playing whole fistfuls of notes, letting loose with bravura octave passages in the left hand and florid arpeggios in the right.
The typical jazz pianist will not touch a well-worn tune such as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but no one would accuse Valdes of being typical. If his lushly poetic reworking of the piece borrowed from the French Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, it also pulsed with the rhythmic aggression of American jazz.
In all, a stunning performance by a pianist from whom one expects no less.
