Artist Bio:
"Patato: The Legend of Cuban Percussion," offers a 21st century audience the chance to meet one of the musicians who first made Cuban music such an important part of the American music scene in the mid-20th century.
Now in his seventies and still going strong, Carlos "Patato" Valdes is considered one of the greatest conga players ever to tap the skins. He has played with most of the great figures in the Latin Jazz movement of the 1950s, including a lengthy stint with Herbie Mann's groundbreaking septet and multiple recordings with Tito Puente.
Like Niccolo Paganini with the violin or Jimi Hendrix with the electric guitar, Patato revolutionized the way people hear his instrument. Patato invented a more easily tuned conga that became the standard for Latin Percussion, the most famous conga manufacturer. His melodic approach to the conga makes the drum sing, and his fingers seem as nimble today as they were in the days when he was playing with Arsenio Rodriguez in New York, helping to blaze the trail that led to the musical style known as salsa."To be revolutionary in music means not to repeat oneself. Permanent criticism is the law of evolution. The law of revolution is to constantly change while building and not destroying." With these words, Carlos Maza wrote the best description of his own career.
Since 1991, he has signed around ten records testifying to his constancy within an immanent disruption. Whether producing himself or working for independent labels or majors, on piano solo, Brazilian trio or playing with the Cuban young guard, Carlos Maza multiplies formulas while always keeping the basis of his peculiarity: the desire to change the world with his own strength thanks to the grace of his diversified, highly "rhizomic" aesthetics.
However, this young man does not want to forget where he comes from, wants to know where he is going and knows how far he has gone. For him, September 11th remains linked to the year 1973, as Pinochet overthrew democracy in Chile. He was born a few months later. His father was already in jail; his mother soon in exile. Since that time, Carlos Maza grew up between France, where he regularly returns, and La Havana, where he settled at the beginning of the 80's. He learnt everything thre, trained at the Guanabacoa Music Academy, and listened to the popular music filling the island.
"When I was eight, I had to catch a bus to go to school. Three hours to go and three hours to return. During the trip, I used to remake the world on my own, to dream of music."
Over 20 years later and after a lot of hard times, this native of Lautaro (a village of indian farmers, 600 km away from Santiago do Chile) has become a good family father. However, Carlos Maza persists in his desire to remain without norms and refuses to keep churning out "formalinized" forms. This is the meaning of this dubious Jansenist's music, like a widely applied utopia: scholarly and popular, narrative and abstract, sensual and intelligent, it is full of melodic jewels but with highly rich rhythms... A surrealistic dreaming mind with feet well planted in the field of social reality. He has built with the time a widely open universe, but deeply rooted in his own conviction. Far away from the noises of the world, at the heart of the Cuban country in which he lives, this "music loony" and "work maniac" unceasingly composes on his old Petrov piano.
He has started to work on a symphony, an album for strings, another dedicated to Chilean music "cleared of the "El Condor Pasa's exotic-folkloric vision," another more "trash" stuff called "provisional support," and so on.... He is always there, where he is not expected.
Surely, no album resembles the others, but they all reflect this strong personality playing all instruments (he excels as a pianist, guitarist, flutist, saxophonist) and undoubtedly the most brilliant composer of the Latin-American new generation. He thus presents himself as heir to the Brazilian Egberto Gismonti and Hermeto Pascoal, two artists with whom he shares the same sense for abstraction, a poetic prosody aiming at bringing together all Latin American music, an improvised virtuosity which is never a demonstrative triviality.
But he also knows all the traditional Cuban music: from Ernesto Lecuona to Bola de Nieve, and all sounds coming from the oriente seraglio — bolero, charanga....
This is all being used to nurture his fantasy. "Neither Cuban nor Chilean, just Latin-American:" This is Carlos Maza's main idea, what defines best his transversal view of the continent on which he was born. It is also there, a bit further to the north that jazz music expanded. An it is probably the reason why this musician, defining himself as a "patriot of the world," always keeps a link, particularly with Ellington's and Monk's music — "the highest idea of freedom of expression and creation," according to him.
There are particularly two women, who have been close to him for decades: Mirza, his wife, with her guitars and her voice; Ariana, his first fan, a playful pianist, a tonic accordionist and an unusual singer.
They are all at the service of a music about which one does not always know whether it is improvised or fully written. It does not really matter. What matters is the swing.
It is really not easy to put his longing for music in a little drawer. Carlos Maza is not so convenient. Rather than Latin jazz music, one should speak about a certain idea of an uncertain jazz, a way to express oneself, but not as an academic formula nor as an additional process. It is much more a way of living and stirring up one's expressiveness. (Jacques Denis) —Courtesy Calabash Music
