Piano superstars Chucho Valdés and Chick Corea had never played together before they squared off across two grand pianos in the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Nov. 15. This four-handed performance was the first of two consecutive evenings for the duo, with Valdés as the headliner and Corea as his special guest.
From the stage, after a warm introduction from Valdés, Corea expressed surprise that the two had never worked together—they’d been friends for a long time, after all. And over the five decades of their respective careers—both were born in 1941—their paths and musical interests had crossed often enough to have made this historic JALC performance always a possibility, if not an inevitability.
Such a musical meeting only made sense: two of the most influential pianists in the Latin jazz world would certainly have a lot to say to each other. In 1973, Valdés changed the course of Afro-Cuban jazz with the formation of his Latin fusion band, Irakere. Three years later, Corea staked his own claim in Latin jazz with the Iberian-roots album My Spanish Heart (Polydor). Both Valdés and Corea went on to win three Latin Grammys each, and Corea received yet another Grammy nomination, in the Best Latin Jazz Album category, for Antidote (Concord Jazz), in the days following their joint concert. A lot to say, indeed.
Before the history-making part of the evening, however, the two starry pianists played solo selections from their established repertoire. Valdés opened with a mostly improvisatory take on the Juan Tizol/ Duke Ellington standard “Caravan,” a staple of his live performances. He approached the tune contemplatively, making full use of the keyboard, shifting the tonal center now and again, and embellishing the exotic melody with Latin, blues, and swing riffs. Absent percussion, Valdés’ harmonic choices lay exposed—a tumble of shape-shifting lusciousness.
Valdés often borrows from the classical lexicon, as on his second tune, an original with an arresting motif, symphonic in its underpinnings and expansive in its feeling. From this motif, Valdés segued into an overtly modern improvisation that poured into a quote from the second movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2; he then returned to his motif for a traditional jazz outro—in all, a spectacular display.
Third, Valdés played “El Manicero (The Peanut Vendor),” a popular Cuban dance song and a reprisal from his 2001 album, Solo—Live in New York (Blue Note). In Valdés’ version that evening, the folksy elements of the song fell away as he improvised on the lilting theme, choosing out chords and creating jangly contrasts before returning to the dance groove.
Corea, up next, also opened his solo segment with an Ellington standard—a clean, cool rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood” from recent work with his trio (bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade). Like Valdés, Corea approached his first tune by leaning into rubato phrases and colorful re-harmonizations, feeling his way through it; later, he would briefly assert an aggressive rhythmic pattern before falling back into the richly conjoined textures of the melody and its changes.
These variations in temperament lent excitement to Corea’s performance and stemmed, perhaps, from his compositional approach to improvisation. As he moved into his next number, he expressed a fondness for pianists like Ellington who “were composers first”—and the type of musician he tries to emulate.
In this category, he also places composer-pianist Bill Evans, who wrote “Waltz for Debbie,” Corea’s second (and final) solo piece. As Corea caromed through the introductory improvisation, plucking the piano strings and arpeggiating odd chords, he would reference the tune here and there without settling into it; the tune almost seemed lovelier sculpted in bas relief like this.
When Valdés returned to the stage, the two agreed to start with Valdés’ playful composition “Mambo Influenciado,” which appeared on his first album, Piano y Ritmo (Areito) in 1964. Throughout, they traded off playing the groove-setting vamp, allowing the other to stretch out freely; they skittered through scales together up and down the keyboard; and they lobbed friendly musical challenges across the two instruments. The script, if there was one, was loose. The wordless communication, however, was tight.
From Corea’s prodigious opus, the two presented “Rembrance,” a relatively new original—Corea has been playing it on tour with banjoist Béla Fleck—that derives from an old Spanish song form. Smokey and seductive, the tune proved to be the most melodic of the evening, with fewer improvised sections and deceptively complicated syncronized passages between the players.
The two displayed a similar synchronization on Valdés’ “Conga Loca,” with its forceful pulse and offbeat tunefulness. It’s on tunes like this that the shades of difference between the players are apparent, with Valdés opting for the florid and dramatic and Corea for the sleek and straightforward.
These contrasts in style are intriguing, certainly, but no less so than that on-stage rapport that renders them inconsequential. On the closing number of their combined set, Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk,” Valdés’ and Corea charged through the familiar blues lines, catching each other’s eye to telegraph what’s coming next, lost in the sounds they were co-creating. Just two friends—jazz greats each—squaring off across two grand pianos. DB
(Originally published on Downbeat.com on 26 November 2019)