Irakere: Young for 50 years

by Jake Cline

In 2020, with his 80th birthday less than a year away, Chucho Valdés told an interviewer that music had kept him feeling young. “When you love what you do, you live more, you live longer,” the pianist said.

The following October, Valdés reached that milestone birthday and kept right on living. In November 2021, the composer and bandleader premiered La Creacion, an Arsht Center commission that sought to explore the nature of time, via music inspired by the culture and religion of the Yoruba in West Africa. Seven months later, Valdés was back onstage at the Knight Concert Hall, co-headlining a concert with a childhood friend and one-time bandmate, saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera, that heralded the end of a four-decade professional and personal separation.

(Chucho Valdés and Paquito D'Rivera performed June 18, 2022 at the Knight Concert Hall. Photo by Daniel Azoulay.)

That reunion preceded another significant moment in Valdés’ life and career, the 50th anniversary of the founding of Irakere, the orchestral jazz band Valdés co-founded in 1973 in his native Cuba. Irakere, whose membership included D’Rivera and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, “marked a before and after in Latin jazz,” as music journalist Fernando Gonzalez noted in a 2022 Arsht Magazine article.

A large band with a gigantic sound, Irakere garnered international attention through aerobic, multilayered songs such as “Juana 1600,” “Bacalao con Pan” and “You Will Be Young for a Hundred Years.” The group’s outrageous musicianship and innovative spirit are on full display in a recording of a March 23, 1979 concert at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey. On this night, and presumably many others like it, the band sounded as if they were playing not only for the audience inside the theater, but also for listeners in the future, however distant, and daring them to mistake these performances for artifacts. Even Irakere’s reworking of two Mozart compositions was delivered with the idea that history has no end, that of course what’s old can be made new again, especially if it never felt truly old to begin with.

(Arturo Sandoval appeared October 1, 2022 at the Knight Concert Hall for a performance and screening of the film For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story. Photo by WorldRedEye.com.)

On Friday, February 9, Valdés will appear onstage with D’Rivera and Sandoval to play the music of Irakere, 40 years since they last did so together. It may feel like no time at all. (Tickets to the performance, part of the Arsht Center's Jazz Roots concert series, are sold out.)

The eternal quality of the group’s songs and the instinctive partnerships that bring it to life are not lost on the musicians. As González reported, Valdés acknowledges as much in the liner notes for I Missed You Too, the 2022 album he recorded with D’Rivera.

“A lifetime passed us by,” the pianist writes. “And yet, to this day, we don’t even have to look at each other to know what will happen in the music, what the other one will play or what direction he wants to take it. We know, and that’s the way it has always been.”

(Top: Photo of Chucho Valdés by Francis Vernhet.)

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Before the concert, Valdés will participate in Jazz Roots Sound Check, an Arsht Center arts-education program that offers students from Miami-Dade County Public Schools the opportunity to meet and jam with professional jazz musicians. Recent Sound Check sessions featured Branford Marsalis, Dave Koz and Cécile McLorin Salvant. Click the button below for more information on the program.