HAVANA.- The latest to arrive in the great family of music lovers, the cuban pianist Rolando Luna, 45, reveals to AFP his devotion to until of improvising, which he defines as a path full of surprises in which he freely mixes jazz, music classical and traditional Cuban sounds.
“Improvisation (…) is traveling a path without having ever taken it before and I love that,” Luna says in the interview, a few days before her solo concert in Havana, within the framework of the 39th edition of the Festival. International Jazz Plaza de Cuba.
“I don’t know what’s out there, but I’m going to walk and that’s where I’m surprised,” adds the pianist during a rehearsal at the famous Abdala studios in the Cuban capital, where he recorded his first album in early 2000, which was very well received. of local criticism.
However, unlike many of his Cuban colleagues, who grew up in musical families, this virtuoso’s path to stardom was not linear.
His beginnings in music
Born in 1978 in Havana to engineer parents, Luna began studying classical guitar at the age of 12, but he became extremely bored and thought about giving up music, until he discovered piano and jazz three years later.
“There was a concern when I saw people playing jazz,” explains this musician and composer, with a splendid smile and braids that fall over his neck.
“When I find the piano, I find another world that was not the one they taught me in classical guitar school. I fell in love with that world,” he confesses.
However, it is difficult to make a name for yourself on an island that has produced so many illustrious musicians and pianists such as Bebo and Chucho Valdés, Ernan López-Nussa, Omar Sosa, Roberto Fonseca and Gonzalo Rubalcaba.
But his adolescent passion was so consuming that it allowed young Luna to make up for lost time in a few years: in 2007, at the age of 29, he won the Piano Prize at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival, in Switzerland, where he captivated both the jury and to the public.
“Music is one”
His career continued with the help of the diva of the legendary Buena Vista Social Club, Omara Portuondo, who named him her companion. Like his colleague Fonseca, a few years older than him, she spent 10 years with the famous group. “A very important opportunity in my life,” he emphasizes.
Highly sought after, Luna multiplied his collaborations, participating in the recording of some 200 albums in Cuba, before launching a solo career and asserting his inventive and generous style.
Recognized for his mastery of classical music, jazz and the wide range of Cuban rhythms, he is capable of making spontaneous detours towards The marsellesalos Beatles o The Appearanceby the famous Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona.
“For me all music is one, and that’s what I try to do when I’m at my concert, I try to play classical music, bring it closer to popular music, (and) do popular music with the rigor that classical music does. “Details Luna, who now divides her life between Toulouse, in the southwest of France, and Havana.
The last three years have been fertile for him. In France he was invited by trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf to join his 2021 tour, and released two consecutive albums: “Mi Alma en songs” (2022), with versions of traditional Cuban songs, and Rolando’s Faces (2023), a double solo album.
An upcoming album, Rolando Luna Trio Liverecorded during the Festival l’Esprit du Piano in Bordeaux, southwestern France, will be released in March.
“Music is the weapon I use to communicate with people because I am an introvert,” adds Luna, who transforms on stage and seems possessed.
The pianist will perform soon in the American city of Miami, before returning in the summer to the Jazz in Marciac Festival, also in the southeast of France, where he was considered in 2021 “a true revelation” of the event.
FUENTE: AFP
