Only an ensemble with so much to say could have succeeded in turning John Philip Sousa’s `Stars and Stripes Forever’ into a classic Cuban danzon, albeit one shot through with unusual chords and unconventional rhythms.
Every generation produces a few jazz pianists who tower over the rest, thanks to their vision or technique or some other outsized musical gift.
The Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, however, stands apart from most of his peers on not one but several counts, as he demonstrated Saturday night, when he opened the new jazz series at the Auditorium Theatre. Equipped with a monumental piano technique, an instantly identifiable keyboard touch and a keenly sensitive ear for color and tone, Rubalcaba would be worth hearing if he played nothing but C Major scales and arpeggios.
Combine this range of talents with a deeply original approach to group improvisation, and you have the rare artist who genuinely can be considered a kind of “Supernova,” as Rubalcaba titled his 2001 album on Blue Note.
If that recording marked a turning point for Rubalcaba, who began to downplay his leonine technique to emphasize the content of his musical ideas, he’s now pushing even more deeply into ultra-sophisticated, harmonically far-ranging, melodically elliptical ideas. You could hear as much on his brilliant recent recording “Paseo,” and in every mysterious gesture and subtle turn of phrase he played with his New Cuban Quartet at the Auditorium.
This was a music that required listeners to pay very close attention, for Rubalcaba offered few discernible melodies or danceable Afro-Cuban backbeats. Instead, Rubalcaba and the band crafted extraordinarily fluid, impossible-to-categorize improvisations. Fragments of themes often darted from one instrument to another; melody lines were hinted at rather than spelled out; gentle wisps of sound often dissipated into a mysterious silence.
Though some listeners might have found this mercurial brand of music-making unnerving, at least one member of the audience (and probably many more) reveled in the innovativeness of this work and the fearlessness of its execution. The sheer intuitiveness of the ensemble playing represented a significant achievement for Rubalcaba, saxophonist Luis Felipe Lamoglia, drummer Ignacio Berroa and electric bassist Jose Armando Gola.
The musical exchanges between Rubalcaba and Lamoglia, in particular, set a high standard for contemporary duo playing. In some instances, the two men ripped through intricate passagework with a speed, clarity and rhythmic elan that only comes from long hours of rehearsal and practice. At other junctures, the two jetted off in so many different musical directions that there was no way the work could have been scripted.
Only an ensemble with so much to say could have succeeded in turning John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” into a classic Cuban , albeit one shot through with unusual chords and unconventional rhythms. If this was Rubalcaba’s statement on the perpetually askew nature of American-Cuban relations, it made its point poetically.
Another tour de force came in a muted, exquisitely delicate solo version of “Besame Mucho.”
Still, for all the high art and high concept of this performance, one yearned to hear at least one piece in which Rubalcaba showed the full keyboard bravura he’s capable of, an all-out showpiece. For this, we probably will have to wait until next spring, when he releases a planned solo recording.
The evening opened inauspiciously, with the Chuchito Valdes Afro-Cuban Ensemble reveling in the kinds of south-of-the-border clichis that Rubalcaba always has taken great pains to avoid.
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hreich@tribune.com
