Pianist/composer/bandleader Gonzalo Rubalcaba's star rises higher and brighter, casting cool fire and clear light on old and new world musics in Supernova, his seventh album for Blue Note Records. True to brilliant form, the 37-year-old, Havana-born virtuoso sets his incomparable technique and impassioned imagination utterly at the service of traditions explored in present time, across all borders.
Through Supernova Rubalcaba addresses the orchestral potential of the grand piano masterfully, seasoning it to his refined, unconventional taste with select electronic keyboards; he also demonstrates the effortless, elegant, hand-in-glove direction of his ensemble (bass, traps drums, Latin percussion). The result is an album of music that awakens, dazzles, excites, ignites—as have all the albums of his incredible two-decade career.
Opening with "Supernova," a propulsive theme Rubalcaba revisits for the album's climactic sixth track, "Supernova 2", the pianist's insistent melodies and percussive waves have crystal clarity. He dances over complex cross-rhythms with several varieties of grace, bringing sensitivity and command to the musical undercurrents binding African, European, Caribbean and other New World cultures. He airs and examines their contradictions as well as their resolutions in glorious sound.
From infancy Rubalcaba was steeped in the vernacular of his native island, and from childhood he was educated in the arts with Havana's perspective on U.S., European, Russian and Hispanic classical traditions, but he proudly identifies himself with jazz. By character he's a man on a lifelong quest for beauty and truth, and by patrimony he's heir to a great Afro-Cuban musical lineage—his father, who helped introduce the cha-cha-cha, still leads Charanga Rubalcaba, and his grandfather composed "El Cadete," the widely known processional Gonzalo reconceives in Supernova.
All of these personality dimensions, and Rubalcaba's implacable wit and soulfulness, too, are evident in Supernova. He performs an indelible reconstruction of the very first (circa 1930) Cuban-U.S. pop crossover hit, "The Peanut Vendor," as well as a tongue-not-entirely-in-cheek rendition of his ancestor's originally noble cadence. Rubalcaba indulges in seductive balladry in his bolero adaptations "Alma Mia" and "Otra Mirada"; he heedlessly dives into the finger-busting time shifts and chord changes of his self-penned challenge piece, "The Hard One," and he paints a verdant jungle soundscape on "Oren" (which means "pray”).
Rubalcaba is a serious keyboardist, ambitious, accomplished composer and a captivating performer. His in-person appearances are consistently triumphant—he's had nearly 20 years experience leading eclectically electric and acoustic ensembles on tour of international concert halls, elite music clubs and prestigious festivals ranging from Mount Fuji to Montreux, Switzerland to Jazz at Lincoln Center. A teenage prodigy, Rubalcaba quickly gained renown among aficionados and by the '90s had strong ties with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, and Joe Lovano, among others. Rubalcaba lived for six years in the Dominican Republic before moving to Coral Springs, Florida, where he currently lives with his family.
As on his just prior album Inner Voyage, his Blue Note studio productions Antiguo, Diz, Suite 4 y 20, and The Blessing, and projects recorded with others (such as bassist Charlie Haden's recent album, Nocturne), Supernova demonstrates Rubalcaba's transformation of 19th century piano romanticism (Lizst, Chopin, etc.), salon and regimental musics, Yoruba religious beats, swing, bebop, modal jazz and farther reaches of spontaneous play into a distinctly personal yet open, accessible style. More than ever, Rubalcaba draws directly in Supernova from what he calls "the most official and serious Cuban music, the danzón in itself, and its nuanced inter-relations with the bolero, son, conga, guaracha, rumba, and other black Afro-Cuban codes, all of which have had enormous bearing on North American music."
The danzón, in purest form, is a style of courtly refinement, distinct from the earthier, African-derived Cuban folk genres more prominent in the mix of commercial salsa. However, according to Rubalcaba, early in the last century Cuban composers such as Alejandro Garcia Caturla and Amadeo Roldán posted high standards for composition embracing all their island nation's musics, akin to compositional benchmarks set by such contemporaries as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Paul Hindemith.
Rubalcaba has comparable goals, embracing the whole of Cuban music as his point of departure. "We should come from 'there'," he emphasizes, meaning his heart, his Havana, and the Afro-blue habanera. Of course his band—including "Nuyorican" discovery Carlos Henriquez on upright bass, Venezuelan cousins Louis and Robert Quintero on Latin percussion, and Cuban Ignacio Berroa on trap drums—are all from "there."
"There's no danger we will lose the folkloric element of our work," Rubalcaba says. "The beauty is how we integrate our folkloric selves with the vanguard of expression, and elevate our themes to the level other composers have elevated theirs." One difference, he notes, is that none of the 20th century masters successful at reviving older musical legacies with modernist ears—Copland, Hindemith and Stravinsky come to mind—were jazz musicians.
"I want to speak in terms of myself and my band, look at the music from another point than what's established, not to depart from my source but to capture something in us and our time," he explains. "It wouldn't be right to ignore the music we live with now." Rubalcaba is specifically attuned to musical strains coming from the growing Afro-Caribbean-Latin-American U.S. population: "What's happening in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, those Atlantic seacoast countries, as well as all black music, to which I have an umbilical chord."
He doesn't play much traditional blues, or traditional son either, but Rubalcaba says, "Black music is where I come from." He has become increasingly confident and more comfortable—as he says, "loose-handed"—in the years since he took up residence in the States. Is Gonzalo Rubalcaba first of all a Cuban musician, or a jazz musician?
"It's difficult, trying to distinguish chemicals that have been mixed for a long time, trying to separate what you're brought up with and what you've acquired," he answers. "My roots are entrenched, involving what I've done for years. I can handle any musical language, style or technique, but I'm always going to pursue most what's growing from my own roots."
Rubalcaba's roots are undeniably Cuban—and he was hot-housed in Havana's Amadeo Roldan Conservatory—but he's shot up into stardom, blazing trails of global jazz. A supernova is a sudden solar explosion, but this pianist's engines are burning longer, more steadily than that. With Supernova Rubalcaba again distinguishes himself as a singularity, a beacon, a son of African-Cuban-American jazz and sun of 21st century musical artistry.