His trophy case features seven Grammys and seven Latin Grammys…and his bandmates are just as good.
Queens College’s Colden Auditorium hosts Chucho Valdés: Irakere 50 Featuring Emilio Frías on Thursday, May 8, at 8 pm.
Let’s begin with Valdés. The Cuban pianist has enjoyed a 60-year career that includes all the Grammys, being named an NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2025, and receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music in 2011.
In 1973, he founded Irakere to provide innovative fusions of Latin Jazz and popular Cuban music with lots of percussion. (Of course, the group won a Grammy in 1980.)
The concert also features special guest Emilio Frías, a Cuban-born vocalist who gained fame as director of the group El Niño y la Verdad.
Ticket prices run from $50 to $90 with no additional fees.
Irakere is a nine-piece ensemble whose other members include José A Gola (bass), Horacio “El Negro” Hernández (drums), Roberto Jr. Vizcaíno Torre (percussion), Eddie de Armas Jr. and Osvaldo Fleites (trumpets), Luis Beltrán and Carlos Averhoff Jr. (saxophones), and vocalist Ramón Alvarez.
The group gained international recognition after a surprise performance at Carnegie Hall during the 1978 Newport Jazz Festival, which led to the Grammy.
Together on May 8, they will deliver a high-energy retrospective that blends intricate Jazz arrangements with the irresistible rhythms of Cuban dance music.
“We never were a dance group. We were a Jazz group,” stated Valdés. “But Jazz in Cuba had a limited audience, so we started playing dance music to attract new audiences for what we were doing — and it worked incredibly well. We had a tremendous dancing audience. But many times, that audience would stop dancing just to listen, and then it was as if we were at a concert. I always thought that the people who came to hear us wanted to hear good music, good arrangements, good soloing, something different. So, in our concerts, we aimed to please those who came to hear Jazz […] But there was also another audience waiting to dance to Bacalao Con Pan, so we played Jazz, and then we played music for dancing. We wanted the dancers to also have fun. And that’s what we’ll do on this tribute.”
Colden Auditorium is located at 65-30 Kissena Blvd. in Flushing. Several free parking lots are in the vicinity.
Images: Kuperberg Center for the Arts