In 1960, as Cuba’s political fabric was being torn apart, 19-year-old Chucho Valdés watched his father Bebo Valdés, director of the Tropicana Club Orchestra and Orquesta Sabor de Cuba, leave the island for an exile that would silence him on the world recording stage for more than 30 years. This episode follows how the teenager left behind in Havana did not merely carry his father’s tradition but dismantled and rebuilt it, leading his first recorded sessions at 22 in January 1964 with players like Paquito D’Rivera, Carlos Emilio Morales, and Guillermo Barreto, then co-founding the state-sponsored Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna in 1967, backing singers like Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo.

In 1973 he and his inner circle formed Irakere, a musical laboratory fusing songo rhythms and batá drums with Afro-Cuban jazz, and won a Grammy in 1980 from behind the geopolitical wall. The episode covers the late-1990s pivot to Blue Note and solo and small-group work, Grammys for Habana with Roy Hargrove’s Crisol and for Live at the Village Vanguard, the 2008 two-piano reunion album with Bebo, Juntos Para Siempre, which won a Latin Grammy and a Grammy, the Afro-Cuban Messengers, later wins for Chucho’s Steps, Jazz Batá 2, and Mirror Mirror with Eliane Elias and Chick Corea, and his naming as a 2025 NEA Jazz Master alongside the Leonard Bernstein Award.

• How the discipline of playing backup for vocalists became the incubator for musical rebellion
• What actually happens when songo’s displaced clave collides with bebop harmony
• Why a closed 1970s Havana ecosystem mutated the DNA of Cuban folkloric music so fast
• The terrifying independence of his two hands once the horns and percussion were stripped away
• Three generations at the keyboard: Bebo, Chucho, and Chuchito Valdés