Chucho Valdés

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® Awards, 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, 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 Valdés’s recording debut, Jazz Nocturno (Areito, 1964).

Cuba & Beyond was a superb bookend for a year in which 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 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 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 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, 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 solfège. 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, Valdés formed his first jazz trio. In 1959, he debuted professionally with the band Sabór de Cuba, a large ensemble directed by his father.

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, 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.