Afro-Cuban Shows Ready to Heat Up SFJAZZ This Weekend

Juan de Marcos and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars perform at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco during Cuban Music Week.

Cuban musicians have been scattered around the world for more than half a century in search of freedom and opportunity, but the family ties that bind them endure.

Those connections and that brilliant music will be present when SFJAZZ kicks off its summer sessions with a program dedicated to Cuba, featuring a stylistically diverse array of artists spanning classical music, traditional Afro-Cuban idioms and jazz. The musicians share relationships that go back generations.

Carrying the pre-revolutionary musical torch rekindled by the Buena Vista Social Club album and documentary in the mid-1990s, Juan de Marcos and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars headline Cuban Music Week with four concerts at the SFJAZZ Center from July 11 to 14. De Marcos was the talent scout and musical director for the Ry Cooder-produced sessions, and as the former Buena Vista musicians left the scene, his 13-piece band played a leading role in keeping popular 1940s and 1950s styles like bolero, danzón and son alive on international stages.

“I write all the music for the band,” de Marcos, 70, said during a recent video call from his home in Maryland, where he has lived for the past decade. “I select the repertoire, I write all the arrangements and I mix my own compositions with gems of Afro-Cuban music. We rehearse four or five days before we go on tour because everyone lives in different places — New York, Miami, Vegas.”

The All-Stars are comprised largely of the same musicians who have been with the group for the past five years, including de Marcos’ wife, percussionist and band manager Gliceria Abreu Caron (though their two daughters no longer tour with the group). He noted one major change: For the first time, the group includes a musician who wasn’t born in Cuba. New York timpanist Caleb Michel’s parents are from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Always ready to introduce Cuban music to new audiences, de Marcos collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the 2021 animated musical “Vivo,” lending his voice to a main character and providing lead vocals on the song “One of a Kind.” Most recently, he brought Cuban music Off Broadway with “Buena Vista Social Club,” a musical based on the 1996 project with a script by Cuban-American playwright Marco Ramirez. The production will open on Broadway in November.

“I have great respect for the work he has done, especially in promoting our traditional Cuban music,” said virtuoso pianist Aldo López-Gavilán, who will perform four concerts July 12 and 13 at the SFJAZZ Center and a concert July 23 at Campbell Recital Hall as part of the Stanford Jazz Festival. “He is a great musician and arranger, he knows the roots of jazz. But beyond that, the way he achieved great success saved this great music that had disappeared in Cuba and around the world.”

A classical prodigy from an illustrious musical clan, López-Gavilán performed at Zellerbach Hall in 2022 when Cal Performances introduced him to his brother, Harlem Quartet violinist Ilmar Gavilán, as part of a tour marking the siblings’ reunion after decades of separation by lingering Cold War barriers. Their separation and eventual collaboration was the subject of the 2020 documentary “Los Hermanos/The Brothers” by award-winning Bay Area filmmakers Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel.

For López-Gavilán, the reunion “was great, after waiting so long to be able to play here in the States, to do this long tour not only as a duo but also with the Harlem Quartet,” he said. “It was very intimate for us. It’s mostly my music and some of my arrangements. Ilmar understood exactly what I wanted, but he changed a lot of things too, and I couldn’t say anything about that.”

Rounding out SFJAZZ’s Cuban lineup, Jorge Luis Pacheco will perform two Joe Henderson Lab concerts on July 11. Winner of the 2014 Montreux Jazz Solo Piano Competition, he is a spectacular musician who, like López-Gavilán, is equally versed in Afro-Cuban, modern jazz, and European classical traditions.

López-Gavilán calls his young colleague Pachequito and points out that they have known each other since birth as family friends. “His mother is a choir director and I was in the choral world,” López-Gavilán said.

“We have played together many times, including as a piano duo at a few festivals in Miami and at the Kennedy Center. He is a brilliant young musician, not just a pianist. He loves to sing and he can do a lot of things with it. I am very happy that we are meeting again in San Francisco.”

Although their busy touring schedules have prevented López-Gavilan and de Marcos from spending much time together over the years, they also share a family bond.

“Her father is a friend of mine,” de Marcos said, referring to the famous Havana composer and conductor Guido López-Gavilán. “My daughter is a conductor and her father was her teacher.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].

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AFRO-CUBAN ALL-STARS

When or: 7:30 p.m. July 11-13, 3 p.m. July 14; SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $35-$125; www.sfjazz.org

Jorge Luis Pacheco: 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. July 11; SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $30; www.sfjazz.org

Aldo Lopez-Gavilian: 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. July 12 and 13 at the SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $30; www.sfjazz.org; 7:30 p.m. July 23 at the Stanford Jazz Festival, Campbell Recital Hall; $62; stanfordjazz.org