Irakere

Members of Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna established Irakere, whose title means forestation. Serving simultaneously as an experimental workshop and a performing unit, the ensemble ranks among the most significant acts across Latin music broadly and Cuban traditions specifically. Its wide-ranging and frequently innovative style has shaped Afro-Cuban jazz along with the island’s popular dance forms. Traditional percussion—bata drums, güiro, claves, maracas, bongos, congas, cowbells, and erikundis—combines with brass, reeds, winds, electric keyboards, bass, and guitars to fuse Yoruba, Abakua, and Arara folkloric elements with jazz, rock, and funk. The 1975 release Grupo Irakere on the state-owned Areito label quickly attracted domestic listeners. International tours began in 1977 with appearances at jazz festivals. Irakere and Chekeré Son appeared on Columbia in 1979. At least one recording emerged each year from 1975 through 1991. Following a four-year pause, Bailando Asi surfaced in 1995, after which annual issues resumed until Pare Cochero in 2001. Occasional performances and tours continued for another decade. Mr. Bongo launched reissues of the early catalog in 2023.

Pianist Chucho Valdés, son of Cuban music legend Bebo Valdés, and veteran music director, arranger, and conductor Armando de Sequeira Romeu—both previously with Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna—formed the state-sanctioned, percussion-focused Grupo Irakere to blend Cuban folkloric sounds with contemporary styles including jazz, funk, fusion, and rock. The group became the first modern Cuban jazz ensemble. Its original roster signed with the state-owned Areito imprint, which issued the live-in-studio Teatro Amadeo Roldan Recital in 1974. After receiving praise throughout Cuba’s music circles and featuring reed and woodwind players Paquito D’Rivera and Carlos Averhoff, trumpeters Jorge Varona and Arturo Sandoval, drummer Enrique Pla, bassist Carlos del Puerto, vocalists and percussionists Oscar Valdés and Armando Cuervo, plus numerous percussionists, the band returned to the studio following live engagements and further material development. Grupo Irakere appeared in 1976, followed by more than a year of international jazz-festival touring that included the Belgrade Jazz Festival and the Warsaw Jazz Jamboree, two prominent Eastern European events then situated within the Soviet Union’s Eastern Bloc.

In 1978 the ensemble shortened its name to Irakere and captured live performances at festivals in Montreux, Switzerland, and Newport in America. Columbia selected five extended tracks from those concerts for the album Irakere, issued simultaneously by Areito in Havana and Columbia in the United States in 1979. The set reached the jazz charts domestically and received a Grammy Award for best Latin Music Album. That same year JVC in Japan released the second album, Chékere Son. Musically more influential, it introduced Cubanized bebop horn lines that subsequently became standard in Afro-Cuban jazz and the modern popular dance style timba.

After extensive touring, Irakere began stylistic shifts during the 1980s by incorporating songo, the Cuban genre originated by Los Van Van in the early 1970s. Songo converted historic and folkloric rhythmic components from rhumba into popular dance music, modifying the son montuno and mambo frameworks that had prevailed in Cuban popular music since the 1940s. This direction appears clearly on Cuba Libre (JVC, 1980) and 2 (Columbia, 1980), notably on the fusion jazz and dance track “Xiomara.” European and Japanese critics hailed the music as the future sound of jazz, whereas most American critics responded with misunderstanding. Also in 1980 Paquito D’Rivera defected to Venezuela before relocating to the United States; saxophonist Germán Velazco took his place.

By the time Bailando Así arrived in 1985, the group had fully adopted timba, threading its jazz approach through merengue, bolero, salsa, and samba. The single “Rucu Rucu A Santa Clara” became an international dance-floor hit. Several months later the primarily Latin-jazz set Tierra En Trance followed. In the next year Tributo a Benny Moré paid homage to the historic Cuban bandleader through salsa, bolero, rhumba, and merengue.

While timba dominated Cuba and the wider Caribbean throughout the 1980s and 1990s, several of Irakere’s stronger recordings appeared in progressive dance clubs in Miami and New York City. The band had become Cuba and Latin America’s leading timba dance ensemble, reflected in the sales of Quince Minutos (1987), Exuberancia (1991), Encontro Com Cuba (1992), and From Havana with Love (1996). The genre attained its commercial and global height by 1997, the year timbalero vocalist Jose Miguel joined and the Grammy-nominated Babalú Ayé appeared. After the supporting tour, Chucho Valdés, still the central figure, chose to stop touring with the group in order to form a jazz quartet. His son Chuchito served as director through 1999, overseeing the all-salsa Indestructible (1998) and Yemayá (1999), titled after the Yoruban religion’s water spirit, both issued on Blue Note and credited to Chucho Valdés & Irakere. The pianist subsequently signed a solo contract with the label. Although he continued using electric keyboards, which distanced some conservative North American jazz critics, the album—a blend of intense Afro-Cuban jazz, timba, bolero, and funk—found listeners worldwide. The final album, Para Cochero, emerged in 2001. Touring persisted for several more years. In 2010 the U.K.’s Far Out Recordings reissued Cuba Libre to strong reviews and support from progressive DJs. Valdés honored Irakere with tours in 2014 and 2015 marking the ensemble’s 40th anniversary.

As part of its Cuban Classics series, the Mr. Bongo label remastered and reissued Teatro Amadeo Roldan Recital and Grupo Irakere in 2024.