Valdes and violinist zregina Carter are exquisit musicians who transcend genres. Friends for years, their collaboration at SFJAZZ is a natural, building upon Carter's passionate guest performances on Valdés' 2018 album, Jazz Bata 2. The recording, like the band itself, offers a grand synthesis: Seamlessly, it combines the Yoruban liturgical music of West Africa with popular Cuban dance rhythms and jazz.
This hybrid approach has been Valdés's stock-in-trade for half a century. He absorbed it from his father, the composer and bandleader Bebo Valdés, and he advanced it with his groundbreaking band Irakere. A generation younger than Valdés, Carter, a native of Detroit, has followed a similar path, connecting the dots between Motown and Mali.
She "taps into a broad musical vocabulary to weave new sound tapestries," says the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her a "genius" award in 2006, and she "is pioneering new possibilities for the violin and for jazz." Carter's muse has led her from European classical music to bebop, Southern blues and Afro-Cuban folk forms. That's why Valdés - who calls her "a genius of the violin" - asked her to record with him on Jazz Bata 2. She performs on the album's centerpiece tracks: "100 Años de Bebo (100 Years of Bebo)," a danzon-mambo tribute to his father, and "Ochun," which evokes the Yoruban orisha. Also the patron saint of Cuba, Ochun is said to be the lover of the exquisite and the refined. The sweet sound of the violin is traditionally associated with Ochun. Valdés associates that sound of beauty with Regina Carter.