{"id":268447,"date":"2023-04-21T14:43:58","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T18:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=268447"},"modified":"2023-04-21T14:43:58","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T18:43:58","slug":"three-ferocious-tigers-devour-the-big-apple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/culture\/music-culture\/three-ferocious-tigers-devour-the-big-apple\/","title":{"rendered":"Three ferocious tigers devour the Big Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"

A triad of Cuban jazz players has conquered the scene in the world mecca of jazz: New York. It\u2019s no small thing. It took them years and working like beasts.<\/span><\/p>\n

New Orleans was the cradle of the genre, but since the early 1920s, jazz has been the soundtrack of the Iron Babel, with the voices and hoarse, fine spirit of Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway, among other <\/span>Cotton Club<\/a> patron gods.<\/span><\/p>\n

That kilometer zero of New York jazz, in the black neighborhood of Harlem, was a creature conceived by a boxing champion and a gangster in prison who was born under the perversity of a cynical paradox: he generally did not admit blacks in the public.<\/span><\/p>\n

Triumphant trio<\/b><\/p>\n

Planting a flag in that devilishly competitive territory that is New York is a pike in Flanders. So hats off for Elio Villafranca, Pedrito Mart\u00ednez and Dafnis Prieto. They are victors in a jungle \u2014like all of them, Darwinian \u2014 in whose neighborhoods \u201cthere are people who sleeplessly vacillate as if fresh from a bloody shipwreck,\u201d as Lorca described in his book <\/span>Poeta en Nueva York<\/span><\/i>, written between 1929 and 1930 and which resulted from a frightening experience for the Andalusian in the middle of the financial crash.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the impetus of a bulldozer and the recycled exoticism of what is Latino as a cultural label, Cubans have penetrated the most sophisticated and elitist circuits of the Big Apple, the most cosmopolitan Atlantic city on the planet where more than 800 languages are spoken and where if you want to see Woody Allen play clarinet with his The New Orleans Band, you can do it on Mondays at Carlyle Caf\u00e9 with $120 in hand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Villafranca, Mart\u00ednez and Prieto are not only admired in purely musical niches, where the latter is even the owner of a jazz club; but also academicians, be it as professors, authors of technical literature or scholars.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe impact and notorious success of Cuban musicians in the New York jazz scene is perceptible in multiple dimensions,\u201d said musicologist Neris Gonz\u00e1lez (Granma, 1974), during a recent workshop at Casa de las Am\u00e9ricas, Havana, on the Cuban presence in the scenario of Latinos in the United States, the largest ethnic minority, with close to 20% of the total population of the North American country.<\/span><\/p>\n

A scholar of the phenomenon, Gonz\u00e1lez has followed the path of Cuban jazz players from the diaspora since the 1990s and revealed the various lines that feed it: the artistic, \u201csetting important guidelines for the scene where they have arrived, the same in the United States or outside of it, not only as project leaders but also as members of other groups.\u201d The creative, \u201ctaking certain spaces to position themselves as spearheads\u201d; the academic and recording industry, and, finally, the field of recognition of prizes and scholarships.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Musicologist Neris Gonz\u00e1lez (Granma, 1974), during a recent workshop at Casa de las Am\u00e9ricas, in Havana. Photo: Angel Marqu\u00e9s Dolz.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Villafranca. From tobacco plantations to skyscrapers that block the sun<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve worked a lot,\u201d Villafranca acknowledged a couple of years ago to journalist Ernesto Flores, from the BBVA bank\u2019s website.<\/span><\/p>\n

Born in San Luis, Pinar del R\u00edo, the pianist grew up in a farmer environment, where the best tobacco in the world is grown but not jazz, oblivious to rurality and its sound world of tunes and guitar playing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The boy Elio wanted to be a painter and, when he became interested in music, he studied a bit of guitar. A fan of the rock stridency of AC\/DC or the stylized singularity of a Queen, it would not be until he studied piano at the Higher Institute of Art, in Havana, with Russian and Cuban teachers, that he would be seduced by Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. He also graduated from ISA with his first academic choices: percussion and composition.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHis creations, endowed with a high rhythmic and percussive component, are impregnated with the cultural roots that his native Cuba has given him within other expressions of the Caribbean fused with jazz,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez considers, recalling that Villafranca\u2019s music is considered \u201cvisionary and emotional, innovative and technically brilliant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2003, his first album, <\/span>Incantations\/Encantaciones<\/span><\/i>, placed him in the orbit of the greats by being selected among the fifty best jazz albums of that year by <\/span>JazzTimes Magazine<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

With close to a dozen phonograms, Villafranca has been compared by critics with piano geniuses such as Duke Ellington and McCoy Tyner. In 2015, Chick Corea, with whom he had a great professional connection, chose him as one of five artists to present at his exclusive jazz festival.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Elio Villafranca. Photo: Kasia Idzkowska.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nominated a couple of times for Best Latin Jazz at the Grammys, winner of several academic awards \u2014 he received the first, the JALC Millennium Swing Award \u2014 and demanding scholarships \u2014 the Guggenheim Fellowship for advanced teachers \u2014, the author of the magnificent double album <\/span>Cinque<\/span><\/i>, with the participation of Wynton Marsalis, is a professor at the Julliard Conservatory, Temple University, NYU, and the Manhattan School of Music, in addition to having written several books; among them, the funny <\/span>Who Ate the Pie?<\/span><\/i>\u00a0for children, and being a representative of the Steinway & Sons piano brand.<\/span><\/p>\n