The classically schooled pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba from Havana played with the world-touring Cuban company Orquesta Aragon for many years before establishing his own formation The Grupo Proyecto. Rubalcaba found the necessary support in bassist Charlie Haden. Haden was the man with the right contacts, scoring performances for the pianist at important festivals like Montreal and Montreux. The Cuban Latin pianist has been gaining more and more recognition since he started releasing his records on Blue Note, where he signed on in the early nineties. Last year he won a Grammy for the best Latin jazz album (Supernova), as well as a Grammy for his co-production with Charlie Haden for the record Nocturne, which includes a large number of Cuban and Mexican boleros and ballads. Rubalcaba has certainly found an inspiring partner in Puerto Rican tenor and soprano saxophone player David Sanchez. The two make a nice duo, reinforced by bass player Armando Gola and drummer Ignacio Berroa. Under the umbrella of Eddy Palmieri and later Dizzy Gillespie, David Sánchez has managed to become the representative of the Cubop department, where jazz and Afro-Caribbean rhythms are blended. He is a young, hungry and devoted performer, who - whether as a soloist with his quintet or as a member of Slide Hampton's JazzMasters - never loses sight of his Latin American roots. As a young fellow he would listen to all sorts of music, ranging from various kinds of traditional Latin music to old jazz records, even though he didn't really completely understand them. Still, jazz took hold of him, certainly when Dizzy Gillespie took him in as the youngest member of his United Nation Orchestra and Sánchez started to understand that one of the most beautiful forms of making music results from the combination of different cultural backgrounds. During the last years of his life, Gillespie was an influential mentor to Sánchez. On his most recently released CD Travesía, the sax player demonstrates that he has been listening to musicians like Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus as well.
