Jazz hopefuls so near, yet so far

Just before show time, a couple of aspiring young Cuban jazz musicians crowd into the cramped bathroom of a basement nightclub, place their horns to their lips, look dead-ahead into a smudged mirror and start blasting away.

Neither the brittle sound nor the harsh, fluorescent lighting of this makeshift rehearsal space is easy to take, yet by the time the two men emerge from the bathroom to stand before the microphones, they’re on fire, playing John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” as if their lives depended on it.

For all the urgency and passion of their work, however, they’re practically despondent after their first set, which they consider inadequate.

“Until I heard American jazz musicians performing live, I thought I was a good jazz player,” says Jorge Miguel Vistel Serrano, a much talked-about 20-year-old Cuban trumpeter who studies at one of the country’s top conservatories, the Instituto Superior de Arte (Institute of Superior Arts).

“But after I heard [trombonist] Steve Turre and [trumpeter] Roy Hargrove in person, I realized how far I am from the truth of this music.

“If I can’t come to America,” adds Serrano, “I may never get to the heart of jazz.”

Whether Serrano and his colleague, 19-year-old saxophonist Luis Deniz, need to be in the States to master the elusive art of improvising jazz is open to debate. Yet there’s no question that Serrano and Deniz, as well as uncounted Cuban jazz musicians young and old, increasingly find themselves trapped on this island.

Beyond the embargo that the U.S. placed on Cuba in the early 1960s, nearly eliminating financial ties between the two countries, the U.S. passed tough new visa laws after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Both the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 added new hurdles for foreign nationals attempting to visit the U.S.

And though the new rules blocked artists of many nationalities from performing in the States, the restrictions have been acutely felt by Cuban musicians, who already had experienced four decades of barriers.

“We’re trying to enforce the law as aggressively as Congress intended,” says Tony Fratto, a spokesman for the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees U.S.-Cuba commerce under its Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Although U.S. officials had loosened their interpretations of the embargo during the 1990s, leading to the busy American touring schedules of Cuban musicians in the Buena Vista Social Club film and recording, the tide turned dramatically with the arrival of the Bush administration.

“I don’t want to speak for the previous administration and what it did, or if the nuances [of its enforcement of the embargo] were different,” Fratto adds. “When we came into Treasury, we looked at our jobs, and the job of the Office of Foreign Assets Control is to enforce the Cuban sanctions program, and we try to make sure to do that.”

With the United States clamping down on interaction between the two countries, the opportunities for emerging talents such as Serrano and acknowledged giants such as pianists Chucho Valdes and Ernan Lopez-Nussa to visit America have diminished significantly. At the same time, American musicians and their managers have complained of increasing red tape in getting into Cuba, which has curtailed musical contact between the two nations.

American and Cuban musicians alike lament the opportunities that have been lost, as well as the promising musical careers that never will get started.

And they wonder why a decades-old political dispute between two nations can interrupt an artistic exchange that dates to the 19th century and has produced so much groundbreaking music.

“American music and Cuban music have been like sisters for very long,” says Lopez-Nussa, a revered jazz pianist who’s virtually unknown in the States, where he has toured just once, in 1999. “You can find in the ragtime music of New Orleans the same rhythms you hear in Cuban music, because in the 19th century people traveled between New Orleans and Havana all the time. The syncopated habanera rhythms of Spain and Cuba are not so far from the syncopated rhythms of Jelly Roll Morton. We speak similar musical languages, but now the conversation is being stopped.”

Studying the greats

A capacity crowd has gathered inside one of Havana’s top jazz rooms, La Zorra y El Cuervo (the Fox and the Crow), enthusiastically greeting the young band that takes the stage.

Once trumpeter Serrano, saxophonist Deniz and their rhythm section begin playing, it’s clear not only that they have mastered their instruments, but also that they have carefully studied recordings that Miles Davis cut with John Coltrane in the 1950s and Wayne Shorter in the ‘60s.

The wide-open, fervently lyrical character of Serrano’s trumpet lines and the high-energy solos of Deniz’s tenor sax represent a credible response to the groundbreaking work of Davis’ great first and second quintets.

But Serrano and Deniz also have imbued their performance with the unmistakable influences of more recent American players, including the bravura trumpet playing of Hargrove and Wallace Roney, and the harmonically nimble tenor saxophone work of Joe Lovano and Branford Marsalis.

“I don’t own any American jazz records, but I’ve listened to a lot of them,” says Serrano, who has won several jazz competitions in Havana.

No amount of listening to recordings, however, prepared Serrano and Deniz for hearing American jazz musicians live, during the Havana International Jazz Festival in 2000 and 2002.

The biennial event awakened the young men and their friends to the full glory of improvised jazz, an art form to which they already had decided to dedicate their lives. But the encounters with America’s jazz stars also showed them the artistic implications of being cut off from face-to-face contact with the U.S.

“When I played with Steve Turre ... I almost fell down from the excitement, and from realizing how much I still do not know,” says Serrano, who participated in a master class last December at the Instituto Superior de Arte led by Turre, a New York musician. “I realized that the only way to fuse our Cuban music with jazz is to play with the American musicians, just like the Americans learn Cuban rhythm by coming to Havana to play with us.”

But Serrano knows full well that he has about as much chance of fulfilling his dream of coming to the U.S. to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, arguably the top jazz conservatory in the States, as he has of finding $19,200 in annual tuition lying on Calle 23, the famed street on which La Zorra y El Cuervo is located.

Even if, by some miracle, Serrano were to locate an American sponsor who might back him, the young Cuban trumpeter probably would not get into the country because of the visa hurdles he would have to finesse.

“You see our problem,” saxophonist Deniz says between sets at the club. “You can learn to be a great musician in Cuba, and you can get very good at playing a kind of Afro-Cuban jazz. But unless you come to play in the U.S., like Chucho Valdes and Gonzalo Rubalcaba did, even if it’s for a short while, you never will become as good a jazz musician as you were meant to be.

“And you certainly will never be heard of by anyone in the U.S.”

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Howard Reich is an arts critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.