On Thursdays the Temba scoundrel comes out from Madrid and adjacent areas to avoid the Friday and Saturday hustlers; First there is dinner, as God intended, and then each group takes its route to bars and cantinas, where there is always a penultimate drink, especially last night, whenthe heat It went up Gran Vía, down Castellana to Recoletos and broke the thermometer in the Botanical Garden, where two great Cubans embraced each other over clean saxophone and piano.
Paquito D' Rivera and Chucho Valdés rose to fame with Irakere, but they already came from home loaded with eighth notes and discharges, with feeling and cod with bread; with both their parents as inspiring bosses; Then the departure of the first separated them musically, but they continued to maintain the bond above the always out of tune State Security, which used crude onion-shaped microphonesMade in RDA.
A bombproof friendship that was not even interrupted in the saturnian and sad days of the Caribbean, when the geopolitical latitude of both forced Octave and Ce notes to be interspersed; as part of the lying and intemperate noise that has entered and left Cuban life since 1959, almost without interruption and with acute pain.
Chucho had already suffered the absurd estrangement with his father Bebo Valdés and did not want to repeat the mistake or concession with Paquito, who was also not willing to distance himself from the genius friend that he put into practice.Black mass all the melancholy that fits in his heart as a big man with the hands of a magician.
The greatness of Paquito D' Rivera does not consist only in having sold the box to the olive green hoarseness, being a consecrated man; but in its coherence in the face of terror, without letting political urgency contaminate its passionate brilliance, the best antidote against mediocre persecutors, unaware of the joy of discrepancy and the harmony of partying with Dizzy Gillespie and the Márquez Sisters, those Cuban jacarandos that filled stages in New York and Tenerife and, all, for half a peso.
The recent albumI Missed You Too was the plot line of the concert, with the Brazilian pianist Eliane Elías as a special guest, and to whom Chucho helped complete the albumMirror Mirror, which he could not finish recording because death took Chick Corea, his initial piano mirror partner.
It will be an unrepeatable album, to be listened to at different times; but incomplete until both of them get on stage in Havana and make the public delirious with their way of attacking the Cuban key, like this time, when Chucho heard the version of his songSquirt, on Paquito's clarinet and sent him a WhatsApp: You are a phenomenon, compadre, I still miss you, and the aforementioned replied as only virtuosos know how to do: I missed you too.
Nothing strange in a musical universe, with similar backgrounds as that of Blanca Rosa Gil, attacking Oswaldo Farrés in a corridor of the CMQ: Maestro, make me a hit... Girl, you think making a song is so easy... Oh, teacher, don't do it, you, with three words, make a number; the same one that Chucho and Bebo Valdés played, during their reunion in New York.
The Spaniards who packed the Botanical Garden in Madrid last night were unaware of many of these keys, but they didn't care because, as soon as the band played, they knew that it was worth braving the heat and postponing dinner and drinks to see that God touched their heads and fingers. fingers of Paquito and Chucho, two virtuosos who defeated barbarism with pure harmony, something as rare in Cuba as it is essential.
What do you think?
SEE COMMENTS (1)Filed in: