Cuban Legend Comes to Blue Note Via Canada

Blue Note Records is making an important move into Cuban jazz. Although the still-difficult political climate between the United States and the island nation makes it impossible to acquire Cuban acts directly, the company’s EMI Canada affiliate has signed legendary pianist-composer-bandleader Jesus “Chucho” Valdes and his equally renowned band, Irakere, to a recording contract.

“Although they will be nominally on the EMI label,” says Blue Note Records President Bruce Lundvall, “we’ll be involved in the recording and will release albums, either on the Blue Note or the Metro Blue label.”

The initial release will be a live recording of Valdes in a solo performance in New York on Jan. 29 as part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center program. After that, Lundvall said, “we’ll do the first studio album with Chucho, a quartet and a horn player. I can’t say at the moment who the horn player will be, but you can bet that it will be a high-visibility artist.”

The first Irakere recording, a studio session that will apparently take place in Canada, will come later in the year. And it will be followed by recordings of other well-known Cuban ensembles. “We’re still in the signing process,” says Lundvall, “but they will be well-known Cuban bands. It’s no mystery that some of the finest jazz and jazz-related music in the world is being played there, and we intend to be among the leaders in presenting this superb music to American audiences.”

Jazz at Music Center: Arts institutions usually make changes at a glacial pace. And the alliance between the Music Center and the Monk Institute of Jazz is no exception.

The partnership, announced with considerable fanfare in May, reportedly elevated jazz and jazz education to a level equal to that of the other performing arts organizations at the Music Center. Results have been slow in arriving, however, with the only visible manifestation being September’s successful “Women in Jazz” program for high school students.

But T.S. Monk, the institute’s director, believes matters are moving at a proper pace.

“We’re going to do this slowly, and do it properly, so that everything we do is five-star,” he says. “We take our time, involve the right people and we don’t bite off too much at one time.”

Still, the partnership’s first major, open-to-the-public event, a gala opening concert at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Dec. 9 to raise funds for the institute’s jazz education programming in Los Angeles public schools, hasn’t come a moment too soon. With a lineup of artists that includes Herbie Hancock, the partnership’s creative director, along with Ray Brown, Kenny Burrell, Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Stevie Wonder and others, the program provides some much-needed sizzle.

Prizewinner: Guitarist Jim Hall will receive the 1998 Jazzpar Prize. The $30,000 grant, which is presented by the Danish Jazzpar organization, is the largest international award of its kind. Hall, 66, will receive the prize in Copenhagen next April. The presentation also will feature a performance by Hall with a Danish American double quartet (jazz quartet and string quartet), performing a program of original compositions. Past Jazzpar winners include saxophonists Lee Konitz and David Murray, drummer Roy Haynes and pianist Tommy Flanagan.

Book Report: “The Gramophone Jazz Good CD Guide” (B & W, $21.95) is out with a second edition of its useful overview of jazz on CD. It includes a dependable list of recommendations for a basic jazz collection, as well as a detailed listing of albums considered by its editors to be the most representative of an artist’s work. And, unlike other guides, it surveys the jazz qualities of a few recordings by performers--Doris Day, Glenn Miller and others--not generally included in the jazz lexicon.

Author Scott DeVeaux’s “The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History” (University of California Press), is an insightful work of musical scholarship. Moving past the limited view of bebop as either an evolutionary or a revolutionary force in jazz, DeVeaux properly contextures the music’s origin in its proper time and place--the artistically and socially turbulent war years of the ‘40s. And he does so with concise and thorough attention to the musicians, the society in which they were obliged to function, and their music (which is analyzed in thorough, musicological fashion). The book, due Dec. 1, belongs on the short list of absolutely vital jazz historical works.