{"id":6221,"date":"2016-12-14T02:11:42","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T02:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=6221"},"modified":"2016-12-14T02:11:42","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T02:11:42","slug":"back-to-cuba-through-a-door-i-hope-doesnt-slam-shut-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/12\/14\/back-to-cuba-through-a-door-i-hope-doesnt-slam-shut-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to Cuba, Through a Door I Hope Doesn't Slam Shut Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fb1c7c40-95a9-4ff5-ad45-c3579e347adf\"<\/a>
Chucho Vald\u00e9s (left) first played the Jazz Plaza Havana Festival in 1980, leading his legendary band, Irakere. He is the music director of this 32nd edition. Pianist Roberto Fonseca was just 15 at his Jazz Plaza Havana debut. He sis\u00a0artistic director of the first edition of a sister event, Jazz Plaza Santiago.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nHard to believe I\u2019m at JFK airport waiting to fly to Havana. Hard to believe I\u2019m going back (haven\u2019t been since 2010). Hard to believe I can fly direct, and for less than it costs to visit my folks in Jacksonville. Hard to believe that this sudden ease, and the renewal of cultural exchange that was missing during the Bush years may soon get shut down again by a brutal Fascist.<\/p>\n
\n
\nFidel, of course, is gone<\/a>. Trump will be president. Among the things these two men have in common: they rose to power surprisingly, and by making promises quickly\u00a0abandoned; they mastered the dark arts of fearmongering and propaganda. Among the things they don’t share: One of them was exceedingly literate and recognized the meaning and value of culture.
\nNot sure I\u2019ll bring back rum or cigars when I return from the 32nd<\/sup> annual Havana Jazz Plaza Festival, but I will come back to with stories to write. Stories about pianist Arturo O\u2019Farrill, who travels back this time with the ashes of his father, composer\/bandleader Chico O\u2019Farrill, to repatriate to an abandoned homeland. About trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who makes his first trip to the island, with a band that includes pianist Fabian Almazan, who left Cuba at age 9 and hasn\u2019t yet returned. About pianist Chucho Vald\u00e9s, a towering presence among Cuban musicians and the longtime music director of this festival. And about other Cuban musicians, such as trumpeter Yasek Manzano, who we rarely get to hear in the U.S.
\nAnd about the long embrace between U.S. and Cuban musicians, and the issues of identity and politics that swirl around it.
\nHere’s some background\u2014a piece I wrote for The Wall Street Journal (also pasted below),\u00a0after Presidents Barack Obama and Ra\u00fal Castro announced a path toward normalized relations.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
\nNarrowing the 90 Miles<\/strong>
\nHow U.S.-Cuba relations may play out for musicians
\nBy LARRY BLUMENFELD
\nIn late December, 10 days after Presidents Barack Obama and Ra\u00fal Castro announced a path toward normalized relations between the U.S. and Cuba, the dressing-room conversation at Dizzy\u2019s Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center\u2019s nightclub, mirrored many on the subject: hope mixed with wait-and-see skepticism.
\nDrummer Dafnis Prieto, one of four Cuban-born musicians now living in the U.S. in an all-star group billed as \u201cNuevo Jazz Latino All-Stars,\u201d said, \u201cA truer relationship between the two countries is what many people, especially artists like us, have been longing for. But as artists, we\u2019ve never had power in these decisions.\u201d
\nSaxophonist Yosvany Terry, once Mr. Prieto\u2019s conservatory classmate and bandmate in Havana, said, \u201cThe ideas are exciting, but we don\u2019t yet know how this will be implemented. The devil is in the details.\u201d
\nThose details are only beginning to take shape. The first steps of an earnest if tentative dance began on Jan. 21, when the U.S. and Cuba opened their highest-level diplomatic talks in nearly 40 years, in Havana. Thus began a process, as President Obama described in his Dec. 17 address, \u201cto move beyond a rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.\u201d
\nRenewed political ties hold special promise for the relations between jazz musicians from the U.S. and their Cuban counterparts, which are rooted in even earlier events. In the audience at Dizzy\u2019s that December night was percussionist Candido Camero, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He first arrived in New York from Cuba in 1946, just as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (after whom the Jazz at Lincoln Center club is named), along with Cuban musicians such as trumpeter Mario Bauz\u00e1, percussionist Chano Pozo and singer-bandleader Frank \u201cMachito\u201d Grillo began blending Cuban and American music in novel ways. These musicians created a new, popular and profoundly influential musical style but also furthered a bond that pianist Jelly Roll Morton recognized as essential to jazz\u2019s origins\u2014one never broken, yet hindered by a half-century of often-forbidding impediments.
\nSince the U.S. embargo of Cuba began, the ability of Cuban and U.S. musicians to travel back and forth has shifted with political winds. The late 1970s saw a brief but notable loosening of tensions. By 1985, a hard line restricted cultural exchange. In the late 1990s, even as the Helms-Burton Act tightened many sanctions against the Cuban government, some doors opened, particularly for artists, through an official U.S. effort to encourage \u201cpeople-to-people exchange.\u201d Trumpeter Roy Hargrove\u2019s Grammy award-winning 1997 album, \u201cHabana,\u201d featuring stellar Cuban musicians such as pianist Chucho Vald\u00e9s, was one reflection of vibrant cross-cultural collaborations at the Havana International Jazz Festival, then under the musical direction of Mr. Vald\u00e9s.
\nThe unexpected commercial success of the 1997 album, \u201cBuena Vista Social Club\u201d\u2014produced by American guitarist Ry Cooder, recorded at Havana\u2019s Egrem studio, and showcasing a collective of musicians then mostly unknown to U.S. listeners\u2014generated a fresh U.S. wave of popular fascination with Cuban music. Still, the 1998 Carnegie Hall concert captured in Wim Wender\u2019s Oscar-nominated documentary about that recording would have been impossible to produce by 2004, owing to harsh U.S. travel restrictions regarding Cuba. Singer Ibrahim Ferrer, a Buena Vista member, could not accept his 2004 Grammy award for a subsequent album onstage; he was denied a visa to attend the ceremony. In fact, following a memorable December 2003 engagement by Mr. Vald\u00e9s at Manhattan\u2019s Village Vanguard, no other musician living in Cuba played in the U.S. until 2009, when the Obama administration began loosening travel restrictions.
\nThe present shift in policy is more formal and holds more lasting promise. Already, rule changes should bring more American musicians and listeners in direct contact with Cuba. As of Jan. 16, U.S. citizens can travel to Cuba for one of a dozen approved purposes (including public performances) without prior written license from the U.S. Treasury Department, a time-consuming process that has intimidated promoters, producers and American travelers. Out-and-out tourism will not be permitted, but visitors from the U.S. will be allowed to spend more, use credit cards, and even bring home up to $100 in Cuban cigars.
\nThe removal of Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, as is currently under review, would presumably end the State Department security checks and visa denials that have led to last-minute cancellations of U.S. tours by Cuban groups. Though President Obama\u2019s call for an end to the embargo is unlikely to gain congressional support, a less broad easing of commercial restrictions might permit American presenters to pay fees to Cuban artists, who are now allowed only per diem and travel reimbursements. Such changes might enable longer artistic residencies and collaboration on a grander scale, perhaps even an orchestra or institution based in both the U.S. and Cuba.
\nThe past and present of American jazz and Cuban music intertwine in obvious ways. New York\u2019s current jazz scene cannot be adequately described without highlighting the contributions of Messrs. Prieto and Terry, the sudden ubiquity of percussionists Rom\u00e1n D\u00edaz and Pedrito Martinez, and the innovations of some half-dozen other Cuban musicians, all now living in the U.S.
\nLikewise, musicians from the U.S. have long marked the Cuban scene. When I interviewed Mr. Vald\u00e9s in his Havana home in 2010, one wall of his study was dotted with photos of storied Cuban musicians, including his father, the pianist Bebo Vald\u00e9s, who died in 2013, and who played with American stars like Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan during his decadelong tenure as pianist and arranger at Havana\u2019s famed Tropicana nightclub. \u201cCuban music and American jazz, that\u2019s what we lived and breathed in my house,\u201d Chucho told me. \u201cI learned to play Jelly Roll Morton by listening to my father play.\u201d
\nSome fear, reasonably, that an influx of tourism from the U.S. to Cuba may encourage the packaged nostalgia that often accompanies increased commercialism. Yet a freer exchange between musicians from both countries could rekindle energy akin to what Chucho Vald\u00e9s grew up around.
\nAnd it may foster something yet deeper.
\nPianist and bandleader Arturo O\u2019Farrill learned of the current diplomatic breakthrough while in Havana, where he recorded an album combining his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra with Cuban musicians, titled \u201cThe Conversation Continued.\u201d Mr. O\u2019Farrill, who was born in Mexico and raised on Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side, is the son of the Cuban composer, arranger and bandleader Chico O\u2019Farrill. Arturo\u2019s immersion in Cuban music began with a personal search for identity but now reflects a broader aesthetic mission that he sees as enabled by renewed relations.
\n\u201cNow we can begin in earnest to have a healthy relationship in which Afro-Cuban music is not so exoticized,\u201d Mr. O\u2019Farrill said, \u201cone in which we look at each other as inheritors of a common legacy, and as true partners.\u201d
\nIt remains to be seen whether diplomatic relations will, as President Obama announced, \u201cbegin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.\u201d But the policy changes already in motion may help turn such a page for the best jazz musicians of this hemisphere.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hard to believe I\u2019m at JFK airport waiting to fly to Havana. Hard to believe I\u2019m going back (haven\u2019t been since 2010). Hard to believe I can fly direct, and for less than it costs to visit my folks in Jacksonville. Hard to believe that this sudden ease, and the renewal of cultural exchange that … <\/p>\n

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