BRATTLEBORO-The Vermont Jazz Center is excited to present Grammy Award–winning pianist Zaccai Curtis in concert Saturday, Jan. 17, at 7:30 p.m., when he will be performing two sets of Latin jazz with the musicians who appeared with him on the award-winning album Cubop Lives!
He will be joined on stage by his brother, Luques Curtis, on bass, plus three percussionists: Willie Martinez III (timbales), Camilo Molina (congas, pandero), and Reinaldo DeJesus (bongos, chekere, guiro).
Curtis based the instrumentation and groove of his group primarily on the work of the legendary Puerto Rican pianist Noro Morales, but stylistically, his music is more expansive. His personal style marries the deep and varied rhythms of Afro-Cuban music with the sophisticated harmonic and melodic language of bebop.
The music on Cubop Lives! is Curtis’s adaptation of Cubop, a sub-genre of Latin jazz that was pioneered by Dizzy Gillespie, Machito, Mario Bauza, and Chano Pozo (among others) in the 1940s.
The instrumentation of piano, bass, and three percussionists was used by Morales and other Latin pianists, but none of them embraced the bebop language. So the serious application of Cubop to this instrumentation, with piano as the lead instrument, is where Zaccai Curtis makes his mark.
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As a young man of Latino heritage, growing up in the fertile music scene of Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1980s and ’90s, Curtis was encouraged by family and exposed to a wide variety of top-level musical experiences, especially in jazz and Latin music.
As a pianist, he became interested in specific piano styles, and he studied how to apply the instrumentation, drive, and variety of Latin rhythms epitomized by Morales to the bebop repertoire of Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, and others.
In an interview with the In the Key of Latin Jazz podcast, Curtis discussed his decision to focus on using the piano and bass in concert with three percussionists.
“I’ve performed with all the different configurations,” he said. “And when I have congas and timbales, that’s great. […] Or even drums and congas. I love it.
“But when you have that guiro [a rasp-like instrument played by the third percussionist], especially when you’re playing a cha cha, […] the high-pitched sound that kind of just drives everything,” and that the percussionists get to interact with each other.
“In our ensemble, you get to see these musicians shine, and that’s what I love — they’re all incredible and world-class,” Curtis said. “The people love it.”
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Curtis’s quintet thrives on excitement, precision, and pure musicality. The arrangements are extremely detailed, and the musicians move seamlessly between sections and time feels.
In an interview with the Rabbit Hole Sessions podcast, Curtis said that the group had been working on some of the arrangements for seven or eight years before they were ready to take them into the studio. He recalls that the actual recording session felt to him like a “snapshot” of their musical development.
For their Grammy Award–winning release, two of the compositions were based on Latin “big band” pieces that Curtis condensed into the piano, bass, and three-percussion format. They include “Cuban Fantasy,” a Ray Bryant classic, which was performed and recorded live by Machito in 1961, and “Minor’s Holiday” which was transcribed from trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s 1955 album, Afro-Cuban.
Other gems from Cubop Lives! include a suite of Noro Morales tunes, a handful of Curtis’s originals, a few Great American Songbook selections, and Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”
In his In the Key of Latin Jazz interview, Curtis also relayed the importance of the “Maple Leaf Rag” in his repertoire and in the development of jazz itself.
“What Scott Joplin wrote was naturally in clave,” he said. and that the connection to New Orleans clave and Congo square “is such a super-deep aspect of the music.” He described it as a way to show his connection with his mentors, Donald Harrison and Eddie Palmieri.
“I dedicated the album to both of them,” he said.
Harrison is from New Orleans and Palmieri was Nuyorican (from New York City, and of Puerto Rican heritage); one can hear the confluence of New Orleans second-line and Cuban/Puerto Rican salsa in Curtis’s concept.
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To assist in listening to Curtis’s music, it is helpful to reference the term “Cubop.”
According to a news release promoting Cubop Lives!, “Cubop refers to the cultural and musical fusion of Cuban music with bebop. By referencing Cubop in the title of the album, Curtis has deliberately aligned the music to acknowledge and denote luminaries such as Machito and his Afro-Cubans, Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Bauzá, and Chano Pozo. The implication of the title, then, states that the influence of these trailblazers permeates the music of the present.”
Curtis’s music is a 21st-century development of this fusion.
“I wanted to make a period piece album that brought a new perspective to an older style — one that wasn’t covered the way I thought it could be,” he said in the news release. “Cubop Lives! points out the earliest of “jazz fusion” and the combination of cultures that related to each other socially, politically, and of course, musically.”
It feels a bit contradictory that Curtis is producing forward-thinking music when the two styles he gleans from (Afro-Cuban instrumental music and bebop) reached their zeniths between 1945 and 1965. Nonetheless, his music is decidedly fresh and its influence on today’s jazz is undisputable.
Zaccai Curtis’s life has been a continuum of creation, study, and hard work. In his interviews, he is quick to acknowledge the impact of his family and his mentors — Jackie McLean, Ralph Peterson, Harrison, and Palmieri. He now passes that knowledge forward; he is an avid educator who teaches at the University of Hartford and the University of Rhode Island.
During the pandemic, he served on the faculty at the VJC Summer Jazz Workshop. As a composer, Curtis is a three-time ASCAP Young Jazz Composer winner, recipient of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism’s Artist Fellowship Grant and the Chamber Music America “New Jazz Works” grant. Curtis has twice been selected for the Jazz Ambassador program by the U.S. Department of State and, in 2020, was voted as a “Rising Star” in the DownBeat Critics’ Poll.
Curtis also runs his own record label (Truth Revolution Recording Collective), and as such has released more than 100 albums, including projects by Palmieri, Harrison, Julian Gerstin Sextet, Jen Allen, Rachel Therrien, Andy González, Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Santi Debriano, and many others.
As a recording artist, Curtis has appeared on albums by Palmieri and Harrison, as well as Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), Brian Lynch, Ray Vega, Ralph Peterson Jr., Jimmy Greene, Joe Ford, Lakecia Benjamin, Pedro Martínez, Samuel Torres, Mambo Legends Orchestra, and many others.
After winning the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz album, bandleader Zaccai Curtis commented, “I’m so honored to be recognized and contribute to the Latin jazz and jazz tradition (America’s Classical Music). The importance of musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá, and Machito cannot go unsung as we all proudly continue to build on the backs of their work.”
Come listen to Curtis fulfill that musical mission at the Vermont Jazz Center.
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Tickets, on a sliding scale ($25 and up) can be reserved at vtjazz.org or by calling 802-254-9088, ext. 1. Mobility access is available by emailing or calling to schedule a time for one of our staff to meet your party. For those unable to attend in person, check out the VJC’s livestream at vtjazz.org.
Eugene Uman is director of the Vermont Jazz Center. The Commons’ Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and be unabashedly opinionated, passionate, and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts column was submitted to The Commons.