Cuba musician Bebo Valdes dies at 94

Bebo Valdes was credited with developing the batanga which turned into a dance craze.

By John Fordham/The Guardian

Cuban musicians have displayed an uncanny capacity to make world-famous comebacks as senior citizens.

Buena Vista Social Club stars such as Ibrahim Ferrer and Ruben Gonzalez represent the best-known examples, but the pianist and bandleader Ramon “Bebo” Valdes, who has died aged 94, ran them very close.

Valdes was one of the most creative and influential bandleaders in the pre-revolutionary Cuba of the 1940s and 50s. He defected from Cuba after the 1959 revolution and moved to Sweden. Having worked with the greats of 1950s jazz and popular music, he found himself playing modest Latin-jazz and hotel-piano gigs around Scandinavia, a quiet life he was to lead for three decades.

Then, in his early 70s, he was brought back into the spotlight through the encouragement of the saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera. Valdes subsequently went back on the road, won a raft of Grammy awards for his new recordings, appeared in a documentary about Latin jazz, Calle 54 (2000), and wrote the score for an Oscar-nominated animated film, Chico & Rita (2010), loosely based on his life.

As his duets with his pianist son, Chucho, and with the bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez revealed, the imposing 6ft 7in veteran remained a musician of elegant technical fluency, subtle touch and nimble spontaneity, with a sophisticated awareness of Cuban, American and European musical traditions. Though, like many Cuban musicians, he was conservatoire-trained in both European classical forms and local styles, as a young man Valdes had been excited by the bravura, fierce brass riffs and gliding sax countermelodies of the popular American swing bands.

Influenced by the Orquesta Casino de la Playa (which adapted traditional guitar hooks to jazz-piano parts but retained traditional Cuban percussion), Valdes developed his own approaches to playing and arranging, aided by a piano technique heavily influenced by Fats Waller and Art Tatum. The innovative Valdes was frequently credited with developing the batanga, a fast and intricate new groove that extensive radio exposure in 1952 turned into a dance craze.

Valdes was born in the village of Quivican, near Havana. He was taught piano by a friend of his mother’s and, after the family moved to Havana in 1935, he studied European classical and traditional Cuban music at the Municipal Conservatory. He began writing arrangements, and was working in clubs and on radio by the age of 20.  In 1943 he was in Wilfredo García Curbelo’s pop-oriented group, and then joined the trumpeter Julio Cueva’s band, specialising in uptempo adaptations of the traditional son dance form.

Valdes worked briefly in Haiti, and from 1948 was a pianist and arranger for the singer Rita Montaner, one of the biggest stars associated with the opulent, mansion-housed Tropicana cabaret club in Havana.

American jazz bands fusing swing, bebop and Cuban percussion influences were growing in popularity in the late 1940s through the influence of the Cuban bandleader Machito, and later through the “cubop” innovations of Dizzy Gillespie with the percussionist Chano Pozo. In 1952, the American producer Norman Granz invited Valdes and his Tropicana partners to record for him.

The results were hailed as the first impromptu Afro-Cuban jam session on disc, Valdes originals such as Con Poco Poco and Bebo’s Blues accelerated his already fast-rising career as a composer for sessions and film scores. Valdes also launched his advanced Cuban-bop orchestra Sabor de Cuba, which included Chucho.

In 1958, the bandleader’s stock was so high he was the arranger for Nat King Cole’s album Cole Espanol and taught the American star to sing in Spanish.

Following the ousting of the Cuban president Fulgencio Batista’s regime by Fidel Castro and fellow revolutionaries in 1959, Valdes fell out with the new government. He went to Mexico in 1960, eventually moving on to Europe and joining the traditional Lecuona Cuban Boys band in Spain. His family, including his wife, Pilar, and Chucho, remained in Cuba. On the band’s visit to Sweden in 1963, Valdes met Rose Marie Pehrson, with whom he began a second family.

For the next 30 years, he played largely local gigs and sought to enthuse the Swedes about forms of Cuban jazz long since usurped by salsa and its popular descendants. In 1994, Valdes and D’Rivera made the album Bebo Rides Again, and in 1996 Valdes made his US concert debut, aged 78.

Four years later, he and Chucho played a memorable duet in Calle 54. On the Grammy-winning El Arte del Sabor (2002), Valdes and D’Rivera collaborated on a repertoire running from Cuban traditionals to Route 66. The following year, he made the Cuban-flamenco crossover album Lagrimas Negras with the singer Diego el Cigala. That also brought a Grammy, and Valdes won two more for Bebo de Cuba in 2006. His eight-part composition Suite Cubana was performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York, and Valdes and Chucho toured together following their Calle 54 reunion, also making the album Juntos Para Siempre (2008).