Zaccai Curtis

Cubop Lives!

Truth Revolution

Pianist and composer Zaccai Curtis, like others with Afro-Cuban heritage, plays in so many different contexts that it’s sometimes easy to overlook the foundation of his style. In the past year, Curtis has been the pianist for rising saxophone star Lakecia Benjamin. In Newport 2019 he was in the piano chair for the late Ralph Peterson Jr.’s. ensemble who honored Art Blakey with a set of hard bop tunes. He’s played with Chief Adjuah and Donald Harrison too. Knowing that the Hartford-based pianist counts the late Jackie McLean as his leading mentor, certainly reinforces the notion that Curtis is equally at home in the styles of jazz and Afro- Cuban jazz. Currently Zaccai is a professor of music at the University of Hartford: Jackie McLean Jazz Studies Division and University of Rhode Island. As a composer, Curtis is a three-time ASCAP Young Jazz Composer winner, recipient of the Connecticut Commission on Tourism’s Artist Fellowship Grant and the Chamber Music America “New Jazz Works” grant. Now, with Cubop Lives!, he honors the Afro-Cuban Jazz tradition.

The goal of this project was to bring a new perspective to the older style, one that he didn’t feel was covered much in these contemporary times. The album’s title, as you’ve likely guessed refers to the cultural and musical fusion of Cuban Music with Bebop. That alone evokes such pioneers as Machito and his Afro-Cubans, Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Bauzá and Chano Pozo.  The phrase Cubop Lives! is also an inherent reference to the influence of Charlie Parker by referencing the phrase “Bird Lives!”, and moreover the influence of Jackie McLean, who composed the famous piece of that title. Curtis refers to it as one of the earliest forms of ‘jazz fusion,” that began in the ‘40s, the confluence of cultures socially, politically, and musically.  He took meticulous care in curation of these pieces, and carefully selected a cast of musicians to highlight each voice. Curtis cites that there are only a handful of musicians who can render this music faithfully. They are Willie Martinez (drums, voice, timbales), Camilo Molina (percussion), Reinaldo De Jesus (percussion, drums), and his brother, Luques Curtis (bass). Curtis merges his own originals with his arrangements of pieces that define the style. Composers include Thelonious Monk, Ray Bryant, Dizzy, Hilton Ruiz, Noro Morales, Scott Joplin, Kenny Drew, Kenny Dorham, and Charlie Parker.

The album kicks off with two originals, “Earl”, and “Black Rice”. The former is a mambo, originally recorded in 2016 with a horn section and pays tribute to Bud Powell, Curtis’s all-time favorite pianist and “a true innovator in Afro-Cuban Jazz.” “Black Rice” is a blues, but one that can be played either as a straight-ahead swing tune or locked into a clave. For this recording, Curtis chose the latter. The linkage from his originals to classic bebop pieces such as Monk’s “52^nd Street Theme” are seamless. Listen to the last section of “Black Rice” and you may well think that it’s a Monk tune. Yet, he also applies the Afro-Cuban tinge to such well-known pieces on the Young/Heyman ballad “When I Fall in Love” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

Yet, the most surprising inclusion is Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” He notes a striking number of correlations and similarities to contemporary Afro-Cuban piano playing. The way Joplin’s right-hand part is “broken” in octaves, striking single notes or chord tones in the upper reaches strongly resembles how the pianist plays a montuno in Cuban music. The entire piece is compatible with a clave rhythm, and as a result, Curtis’s arrangement leaves the right-hand part almost entirely unaltered from Joplin’s original, only making some adjustments to the left-hand part to add more of the “Spanish Tinge” that Jelly Roll Morton talked about.

Importantly, there is a four-piece suite that honors the influential Puerto Rican pianist, Noro Morales. The suite begins with “Maria Cervantes” and continues with “Oye Men”, before going into “Stromboli” and concluding with “Rumbambola”. This is the most striking example of highlighting an artist whose contributions to the form are largely overlooked in these times.

Curtis’s piano playing is joyously vibrant throughout. The absence of horns puts the focus completely on the keys and the percolating rhythms from his bandmates. If you hadn’t sensed the linkage between the forms of bebop and Afro-Cuban before, this will bring that into magnified focus.

• Jim Hynes

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