On Thursday, April 17, Cucurucho Valdés gave a concert in Yarini Habana, after two years of absence of Cuba and his scenarios.
Chucho’s nephew, who currently resides in Madrid, received our team during the sound test a few hours before the presentation. “I am very nervous, but at the same time excited and committed. I want to give them something always better,” he tells Oncuba already sitting on the piano that will play in this reunion with his audience and the musicians always.
“One is always very uneasy out of this land that saw him grow, that gave him all these gifts that Cuba gives and that in my case are the family and this tradition. So return here, touch the earth with my feet – as I say, ‘with my feet on my ground’a – it is a blessing and expose art in it even more,” he declares, alluding to the title of his last album, thrown under the EGREM seal in 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xar1-mnt_a
For this reunion, Roberto Carlos Rodríguez Valdés, name of Cucurucho, decided to be accompanied by other important Cuban musicians, with whom he also maintains a long friendship and has shared years of work: Jorge Reyes in the double bass, Adel González in the percussion, Alejandro Delgado in the trumpet and, as a guest, Alain Pérez.
“I have been lucky, since I started the career alone, to have the sympathy of many musicians with a lot of experience who have connected with my way of playing the piano, my style, my compositions. I am very happy and I feel very honored that this is happening.
“First, as people are exceptional, which is what motivates me to share on stage. Empathy, parties, understanding and when you enter the professional level everything is much better. I feel very comfortable because they are teachers of a lifetime,” explains Cucurucho.
His departure from Cuba was another step in his career, and an opportunity to find sound and even familiar roots, fundamentally his grandfather’s work, the great baby Valdés.
“I was touring Austria, Switzerland and France and I received a proposal in Spain to start working with bassist Javier Colina, a double bass icon, and I could not really miss it. He also wanted to explore other colors of Spanish, flamenco music, which are things that are in our roots, things that are also the basis of Cuban music.
“There we began to explore the repertoire a bit, doing things from the teacher Bebo Valdés, trying to make versions, with a lot of tact because Cuban music must be played with tweezers, and Javier really is a connoisseur of these music. Tribute to Bebo. We have played on stage throughout Europe and really liked it. It has been a different experience. I think I am in a good moment, on a good way and accompanied by the greats. It really is a tremendous honor. ”
While the artist already accumulated several laps throughout his career, living music from another part of the world has been a new experience for him.
“The day to day in the city where I live, Madrid, has been hard, emigration is not easy, we all know; but music is the only one that can save me from these concerns, the absence of all this, which is wonderful, my Cuba, my people, my audience. At the same time, I have won in discipline, in concentration, to grow and realize the bad things that I have done and the good ones that I am doing and the good ones that I am doing and the good ones.
“So I think he has contributed to me professional, in the spiritual, in the person I am being, because one is changing and I think it has been for good, so I thank everything that has happened to me, since I put my hands on the piano, since my mother came up with that wonderful idea,” he reflects excitedly, remembering his mother, Miriam Caridad Valdés, the dear teacher of several generations of several generations of several generations Cubans.
For Cucurucho, being in Cuba is not determined by geography, it is a feeling.
“I am in Spain and I think that I have never left here. Unfortunately, it is the opposite, but my heart is always here. I will never get away from this land. I plan to be while breathing. ”
