Live at Knight Chucho Valdés 85th Birthday Celebration

Cuban pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader Chucho Valdés, one of the most influential figures in modern Afro-Cuban jazz, was named a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. As noted in the NEA announcement, the distinction celebrates “a select number of living legends who have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of jazz.” The NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship is the highest honor the United States bestows on jazz artists.

The recognition crowns a 60-year career that includes seven GRAMMY®, six Latin GRAMMY® Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, and being inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame. Meanwhile, Mr. Valdés, 83, keeps creating, still curious and restless.

In September 2024, he presented his brilliant ensemble, the Royal Quartet, featuring three generations of top Cuban musicians, including Horacio “El Negro” Hernández on drums; José A. Gola, on bass; and Roberto Jr. Vizcaíno, on percussion. The release of Cuba & Beyond (Innercat Music Group), which earned a Grammy nomination, marked the 60-year anniversary of Mr. Valdés’s recording debut, Jazz Nocturno (Areito, 1964).

Cuba & Beyond was a superb bookend for a year in which Mr. Valdés led Chucho Valdés: Irakere 50, a celebration of one of his most important achievements: Irakere, a band he co-founded and led for more than three decades. With its bold fusion of Afro-Cuban ritual music, Cuban popular styles, jazz, rock, and classical music, Irakere opened unexpected possibilities to the sound of Latin jazz.

The historic Irakere 50 concert at the Arsht Center in Miami, was a highlight of the tour as it reunited Mr. Valdés with two Irakere mainstays that went on to become stars in their own right: reedman and composer Paquito D’Rivera and trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Arturo Sandoval.

The evening was also a special moment in the long-awaited reunion of Mr. Valdés with D’Rivera, his old friend and musical co-conspirator. Their paths diverged in the 1980s, and since they rarely played together, but after a warm, emotional reunion, they wasted no time. In January 2022, they recorded an album entitled I Missed You Too and later embarked on a tour with their Reunion Sextet that took them to Europe and the United States. The recording won a Latin Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album.

Any list of notable events in recent years in Mr. Valdés's career must include “La Creación” (The Creation), a three-movement suite for a small ensemble, voices, and a big band that had its world premiere at the Adrianne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami on November 5, 2021. The piece, which was commissioned by the Arsht Center, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, the Chicago Symphony Center, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, was performed throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Born in a family of musicians in Quivicán, Havana province, Cuba, on October 9, 1941, Dionisio Jesús “Chucho” Valdés Rodríguez distilled elements of the Afro-Cuban music tradition, jazz, classical music, and rock into an organic, deeply personal style.

His first teacher was his father, the pianist, composer, and bandleader Ramón “Bebo” Valdés. At the age of three, Mr. Valdés was already playing on the piano, with two hands, and in any key, the melodies he heard on the radio. Two years later, he began taking lessons on piano, theory, and solfege. He continued his formal musical education at the Conservatorio Municipal de Música de la Habana, from which he graduated at age 14. A year later, Mr. Valdés formed his first jazz trio. In 1959, he debuted professionally with the band Sabor de Cuba, a large ensemble directed by his father.

Mr. Valdés made his early mark as the co-founder, pianist, and leading composer and arranger of another landmark ensemble in modern Cuban music: the small big band Irakere (1973-2005). Irakere’s self-titled debut recording in the United States won a Grammy as Best Latin Recording in 1979.

While he remained with Irakere until 2005, Mr. Valdés launched a parallel career in 1998 as a solo performer and small-group leader. It marked the beginning of an enormously fruitful period highlighted by six albums on the Blue Note label, including the Grammy-winning Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note, 2000). A highlight of this period is Juntos Para Siempre (Calle 54, 2007), the duet recording with his father, Bebo. Juntos Para Siempre, which won a Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album. It was a heartfelt coda to a story of love and deep mutual admiration between father and son.

Grammy-winning saxophonist, composer and producer Joe Lovano is fearless in finding new modes of artistic expression. With a Grammy Win for his 52nd Street Themes and 14 other nominations, he has won DownBeat Magazine ’s Critics and Readers Polls countless times as Tenor Saxophonist, Musician of the Year, Jazz Album of the Year and Triple Crowns from DownBeat. He has also received numerous awards from Jazz Times and the Jazz Journalists Association for Tenor Saxophone, Album of the Year and Musician of the Year.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio on December 29, 1952 he attended the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston where years later he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate. Since 2001 he has held the Gary Burton Chair in Jazz Performance and is a founding faculty member since 2009 of the Global Jazz Institute at Berklee directed by Danilo Pérez. He is a guest lecturer at New York University’s Jazz Program, Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music as well as Clinician at Universities around the globe.

From 1991 through 2016, Lovano released an unprecedented 25 records as a leader for the historic Blue Note Records. Joe Lovano Quartet: Classic! Live at Newport featuring Hank Jones was recorded in 2005 and released in 2016 to critical acclaim. In 2019, Lovano released his debut album as a bandleader on ECM Records, Trio Tapestry, with Marilyn Crispell and Carmen Castaldi. Over the next few years, Lovano saw the release of three additional ECM Records albums: ROMA, a collaboration with Enrico Rava; Arctic Riff, a special guest appearance with the Marcin Wasilewski Trio; and the sophomore release from Lovano’s Trio Tapestry, Garden of Expression. In 2021, Lovano released Other Worlds, his third album with Sound Prints, a quintet he co-leads with trumpeter Dave Douglas. The next year brought a collaboration with guitarist Jakob Bro, Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian. In 2023, Lovano released his third Trio Tapestry recording entitled, Our Daily Bread. Most recently, Lovano released Homage, a follow-up recording with the Marcin Wasilewski Trio.

In addition, composer Mark Anthony Turnage wrote a Concerto for Saxophone and Chamber Orchestra for Joe called “A Man Descending” which has been performed globally and Maestro Michael Abene orchestrated an album of all-Lovano originals called Symphonica for the WDR Symphonic Orchestra and Big Band, which was released on Blue Note and received a Grammy nomination.

Joe has performed and recorded with a long list of jazz greats including Woody Herman, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Mel Lewis, Bob Brookmeyer, Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Tony Bennett, Abbey Lincoln, Charlie Haden, John Scofield, Gunther Schuller, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Ed Blackwell, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Hank Jones, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, Dave Douglas, Judi Silvano, Ravi Coltrane, Chucho Valdés, Ornette Coleman, Diana Krall, and many others. Joe has created an extensive body of work for his own ensembles including strings, woodwinds, his horn-rich Nonet, the Classic Quartet, Trio Tapestry, and more.

Joe Lovano continues to explore new horizons within the world of music as a soloist, bandleader and composer.

Terence Blanchard has been a consistent artistic force for making powerful musical statements concerning painful American tragedies – past and present. A true “Renaissance” man, Blanchard stands tall as one of jazz’s most-esteemed trumpeters and defies expectations by creating a spectrum of artistic pursuits. Boundary-breaking and genre-defying, Blanchard is recognized globally as a dazzling soloist and a prolific composer for film, television, opera, Broadway, orchestras and for his own ensembles. In fact, leading theater magazine TheaterMania recently cited Blanchard as “the most exciting American composer working in opera today.”

An eight-time Grammy Winner and twice Oscar-nominated film composer, Blanchard became only the second African-American composer to be nominated twice in the original score category at the 2022 Academy Awards, duplicating Quincy Jones’ feat from 1967’s In Cold Blood and 1985’s The Color Purple. Blanchard’s work has placed him at the forefront of giving voice to human rights, civil rights, and racial injustice, including the 2015 album “Breathless, ’’an elegy for Eric Garner, who was killed by police and whose words, “I can’t breathe,” became a civil rights rallying cry.

Blanchard is also heralded as a two-time opera composer whose Fire Shut Up in My Bones is based on the memoir of celebrated writer and New York Times columnist Charles Blow. The Metropolitan Opera premiered Fire Shut Up in My Bones on September 27, 2021, to open their 2021-22 season in New York, making it the first opera composer by an African American composer to premiere at the Met in its 138-year history. The recording of those performances received a Grammy Award for “Best Opera Recording,” and The New York Times heralded “Fire” as “inspiring,” “subtly powerful” and “a bold affecting adaptation of Charles Blow’s work.” Of the historical moment, Blanchard said, “I don’t want to be a token, but a turnkey.” “Fire” has been widely recognized as one of our nation’s most important cultural milestones and returns to the Met for a highly-anticipated second run in April of 2024.

Blanchard’s first opera, Champion, about the troubled life of boxer Emile Griffith, premiered in 2013 and starred Denyce Graves with a libretto from Pulitzer Prize Winner, Michael Cristofer. Champion premiered at the Met in April 2023 to widespread critical acclaim. It too received a 2024 Grammy for “Best Opera Recording.”

But there is a center of gravity. It’s Blanchard’s beautiful, provocative, inspiring jazz recordings that undergird all these projects. The same holds true now as it did early in his career in 1994 when he told DownBeat: “Writing for film is fun, but nothing can beat being a jazz musician, playing a club, playing a concert.”

From his expansive work composing the scores for over 20 Spike Lee projects over three decades - ranging from the documentary When the Levees Broke to the recent Lee films, BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods (both of which garnered Blanchard Oscar nominations), Terence has interwoven beautiful melodies that create strong backdrops to human stories like Regina King’s One Night in Miami; Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou; George Lucas ’Red Tails; the HBO drama series Perry Mason (now in its second season); Apple TV’s docuseries They Call Me Magic (for which Blanchard received an Emmy nomination) and Gina Prince Bythewood and Viola Davis’ critically acclaimed film, The Woman King.

In his expansive career as a recording leader Blanchard delivered Absence, a collaboration with his longtime E-Collective band and the acclaimed Turtle Island Quartet which received Grammy nominations in November 2021 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo for Blanchard. Recorded in February 2020 just before the Covid-19 lockdowns, Absence started out as a project to show gratitude to Wayne Shorter. “I knew that Wayne wasn’t feeling well at the time, so I wanted to honor him to let him know how much he has meant to me,” says Blanchard who today lives in Los Angeles as well as in his native New Orleans. “When you look at my own writing, you can see how much I’ve learned from Wayne. He mastered writing compositions starting with a simple melody and then juxtaposing it against the harmonies that come from a different place to make it come alive in a different light."

Born in New Orleans in 1962, Blanchard is a musical polymath who launched his solo career as a bandleader in the 1990s. Since then, he has released 20 solo albums, garnered 15 Grammy nominations, composed for the stage and for more than 60 films, and received 10 major commissions. He has been named an official 2024 NEA Jazz Master as well as a member of the 2024 class of awardees for the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Letters, and currently serves as the Executive Artistic Director for SF Jazz, the largest non-profit jazz presenter in the world.

Regarding his consistent attachment to artistic works of conscience, Blanchard confesses, “You get to a certain age when you ask, ‘Who’s going to stand up and speak out for us? ’Then you look around and realize that the James Baldwins, Muhammad Alis and Dr. Kings are no longer here...and begin to understand that it falls on you. I’m not trying to say I’m here to try to correct the whole thing, I’m just trying to speak the truth.” In that regard, he cites unimpeachable inspirations. “John Coltrane playing Alabama, even Louis Armstrong talking about what was going on with his people any time he was interviewed. Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter who live by their Buddhist philosophy and try to expand the conscience of their communities. I’m standing on all their shoulders. How dare I come through this life having had the blessing of meeting those men and not take away any of that? Like anybody else, I’d like to play feel good party music but sometimes my music is about the reality of where we are.”