Irakere

If there would be a list of afro-cuban orchestras then it would start with the 1973 founded “institution” Irakere. What makes this recording a highlight of the many releases of the band is the tracklisting – from Scott Joplins“Ragtime” over Mozarts “Adagio” right up to Chucho Valdes’s “Misa Negra” – it reads like the Who’s Who in music history.

North American Latin jazz audiences were knocked out when this LP came out, for it was the first idea many of us had of the explosive power of this Cuban jazz/rock band, which had been let briefly out of Cuba to tour. Columbia taped them live at New York's Newport Festival and Switzerland's Montreux Jazz Festival, and the result was a noisy, ambitious, frenzied, tremendously exciting mixture of everything but the kitchen sink. Co-founder, keyboardist and arranger Chucho Valdes was as thoroughly attuned to the thumping electric bass, the careening buzz of a synthesizer and bell-like electric piano as he was to his homeland's complex rhythms and his own classical training – and despite the cultural embargo, the 11-piece group was in touch with then-current developments in American jazz/rock.

In 1962, two of the most influential and talented instrumentalists that Cuba ever produced were brought together. Saxophonist/clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera was invited to hear pianist Chucho Valdés at a local club in his Marianao neighborhood of South Havana. The two soon became a musical partnership that helped shape jazz in Cuba. Their paths would separate in 1980 when D’Rivera left Cuba.