Interview with Bebo Valdés, pianist

"I'm learning a lot from the flamencos"

Ezequiel Paz. Madrid, July 2003
Photos: Leandro Betancor Fajardo
Translation: Joseph Kopec

Bebo Valdés has built a career based on hits. Close friend to some of the personages who have changed the course of history of Cuban music and Latin jazz, the greatest praises come to him from certain musicologists who relate him to the top nineteenth-century Cuban composers such as Saumell, Cervantes and Romeu. At the age of 84 and a half, his aged and somewhat arthritic, but still agile fingers, are capable of attacking frenzied scales and original tumbaos (rhythms) of mambo invented by Cachao López. Since the flamencos have taken him into their bosom, his musical feeling has become revitalized and broadened. Always brilliant in his piano circumlocutions, Bebo Valdés has crystallized his collaboration with Diego el Cigala into an album. The result is 'Lágrimas Negras' ('Black Tears'), a record of illustrious boleros sifted through diverse styles. Quejío with a tropical base, duende (magic) and flavor, blackness and jondo essence in which the cante and playing chase each other and find each other, caress each, kiss each other and melt into a single dream.

Bebo Valdés and Diego el Cigala

In the times of your musical training some of your most important influences come from Spain. What type of music had the most impact on you?

Manuel de Falla, Joaquín Turina and Isaac Albéniz. Falla for his arrangements; he had a very French technique based on the Spanish, he seemed like one of Albéniz's pupils. I loved the latter and Turina because they touched my heart. However, if I have to choose one of them, I'll take Falla; I think he's the best of them all.

Did flamenco appear in your life and make you relive that love affair with Spanish music in your youth?

(Laughter) You might say so, but some years went by from those great composers to flamenco, specifically, until a flamenco kid (Diego el Cigala) heard me play the bolero 'Lágrimas Negras' with Chucho and Cachao López and he told me that he wanted to learn. I told him why not from the beginning. Then the first encounter took place at Fernando Trueba's house. Playing with Dieguito I began to discover similarities between Cuban and Spanish music. For example, there's a malagueña cadence which is exactly the same as our guaguancó. As in many other cases, there are similar rhythms and harmonies thanks to African and Indian influences. Thus, we naturally started playing bulerías, seguiriyas and guajiras which are called colombianas here.

But, besides that thread connecting flamenco to Afro-Cubanism, there are other analogies between, for example, the tango and the comparsas and between the rumba flamenca and the "nation" songs of Yoruba origin...

Yes, I think all that is due to the fact that the colonization of Cuba began in 1509. Besides everything you mentioned, we mustn't forget an eminently Spanish genre which traveled to Cuba which was called the habanera. The same thing happened with the contredanse, but while the habanera reached Havana, the contredanse came in through Santiago de Cuba from Haiti and France. The Haitian landowners settled in Santiago and Guantánamo and brought their slaves with them. Those blacks who used to work on the sugar cane and indigo plantations had their types of music which were, among many others, the African-style contredanse and the changuí sound. But there are contradictory versions about the origin of the contredanse. Some musicologists question its French origin and say that it comes from English country music. I myself without having been able to prove anything consider it one hundred percent French.

Bebo Valdés

Let's skip to modernity and talk about Paquito de Rivera, the main person responsible for your return to stages worldwide following over twenty years of seclusion...

Paquito called me up one day in 1994 and asked me to help him because he had to do a musical presentation and he needed original pieces. I told him that I was away from that, that I hadn't composed anything for years. But do you have any ideas? Yes, I have quite a few ideas. Then I started going through my material and in 36 hours I prepared some pieces like 'Oleaje' ('Swell'), a score for piano solo. The album was for Paquito, but in the end he ceded the credits to me and that's how 'Bebo Rides Again' ('Bebo Cabalga de Nuevo', in its translation into Spanish) finally appeared.

You took part very actively in the musical life of the '40s and '50s, in the times prior to the Revolution. What do you remember about that period?

Cuba was frequented a great deal by Americans in those times, especially from November to March. They used to come and do rumbas, and play in the casinos... I was already into jazz at that time, though I was also absorbing the street routine, the boogie boogie, the danzón, the rumba. Then I started working with Cachao in an orchestra that we set up in 1937 in which he "disintegrated" the mambo his way with those crazy low notes that he threw in. Then Camacho's orchestra came, but I went on studying. In 1943 I joined the group of Wilfredo García Curbelo "Curbelito". I was already finishing my studies in those years; I had finished harmony and was beginning with counterpoint and orchestration. I wasn't used to varying tones in the middle of a show, so I was forced to go from the conservatory school to the street school.

next >>

revista@flamenco-world.com