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Jazzflits NL (feb 2010):
..Valle had een sprankelend en organisch toucher...
Pianowereld NL :
..hij is een echte pianoleeuw, een watervlugge pianist...krachtig en percussief..
Jazzreview UK:
..the kind of playing that makes you want to put your feet up, shut your eyes and appreciate the nuances...
Jazz Times USA:
Ramon Valle is a direct descendant of those afterhours descargas...
Jazzwise:
Highly competent...very deserving and convincing...
The Independent:
It s like dining at a three Michelin starred restaurant...a pleasure of the highest order...
Jazziz:
Here's a brave new entry to conga-free latin jazz...
Latin beat :
Energetic and upbeat, Ramon Valle's trio is right in the pocket...
Straight no:
Delicate compositions, extremely fluid and light...
Mojo :
This is international modernism with taut themes full of excitement and atmosphere and unshowy, organic blowing and rolling thunder grooves
The Guardian (UK)
Concert review in The Guardian (UK), click on image for larger view.
The Guardian / UK
20-02-2004
Ramon Valle, No Escape (ACT) by John Fordham
Valle is a more open, overtly emotional piano-trio master than Brad Mehldau: McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea are the musicians who come to mind as comparisons. He is a formidably sophisticated player rooted in Cuban jazz, but drawing on resources way beyond the usual suspects the idiom usually calls up.This is a fine ensemble performance for Valle and his two partners - Omar Rodriguez Calvo on bass and Liber Torriente on drums - with the sound of the bass more lovingly absorbed into the mix than Larry Grenadier is with Mehldau. Calvo's warm and luxurious sound is given considerable presence here, and the group sounds as close and responsive in its way as Mehldau's does. All the pieces are Valle originals, and they bustle and chatter with a heated, dancing, street-scene vivacity.
Some songs have a pungent Spanish flavour, some have a poignant, love-song simplicity (though in the case of Andar Por Dentro with a dark, tolling menace beneath). Some crackle with percussion and staccato alternations of dense melody and headlong swing; there's an effervescent broken-tempo blues, a stealthy, harmonicallymobile samba, and some bursts of free improvisation that even stray into the stormy waters of Cecil Taylor.
Frankfurter Rundschau / Frankfurt / Germany
12.07.2003
Ramón Valle Quintet at Jazz im Palmengarten:
Freedom of a summerevening
By Michael Rieth(...)
Ramón Valle sits down at the piano and sends the notes cascading around in the summer evening, like strings of pearls in wonderful, uninterrupted cantilenas that condense into highly compressed clusters of sound in which hair-raising complexity is concentrated in a single moment, while these moments, each for itself, expand again towards musical universality.In the beginning it is as if the sounds appear from God knows where, from the world of apparent chance, as if they played around with the light-and-shadow effect of chestnut trees, and took over the space. Then they become more concrete, more advanced, and while one traces them, one feels not only the contradiction of being serious yet undefined, but also the contrapuntal dialectic: Nothing is more serious than light-footedness, and nothing should be taken so light-heartedly as seriousness.
The musicians start off as a trio. But no sooner have the individualistic double-bass player Omar Rodriguez Calvo, often rather cumbersome yet always highly fluent, and the nimble-fingered and precise percussionist Dafnis Prieto Rodriguez together with Valle gone upwards on the roller-coaster into commitment, when the wind instruments are added, with Perico Sambeat on alto saxophone and Carlos Puig, trumpet, and the listener slides downwards again on the tensional curve.
(...)
The second half begins with Valle solo, he puts forward everything imaginable in the way of delicacy and power. One by one the others come in, first the rhythm section, then the wind instruments, as Valle's compositions allow the members of his band immense freedom. Puig remains the most traditional of them, his trumpet tone without frills or vibrato, Sambeat in his breaks plays the alto with the diction of a tenor (the same sonorous depths, just the higher registers a bit smoother), bass and percussion add their individuality to the total sound, while Valle alternately takes upon him the serving role of an accompanist and that of the leading soloist. The audience is inspired to something that rarely happens in the Palm Gardens: Exultation, short and restrained but unmistakeable - as a safety valve for the pressure the musicians keep building up again and again.
When he performed in Frankfurt at the Museumsuferfest [Museum Shore Festival] two years ago, Ramón Valle was compared to the young Cecil Taylor because of his easy saunter between extremes of tension and release. One thing is certain: Hardly any other pianist of his generation shows such a highly developed gift for these rich and dense improvised compositions as he does.
Ramón VALLE’S ‘DANZA NEGRA’
RAMÓN VALLE ABOUT ERNESTO LECUONA, By Edo Dijksterhuis /NRC HANDELSBLAD 21.05.02
“When Ernesto Lecuona was 12 years old, his family was so poor that he worked a part-time at a cinema. His job was to accompany silent movies on piano. All of it was improvisation: he would look at the screen and instantly translate what he saw into music. Later on, when he wrote operas and film scores, he continued to work in the same way: he would follow what he saw. The result was a very visual form of music, and I think that is why he is so famous in Cuba”.
Although Ernesto Lecuona (1895-1963) is scarcely known in Europe, in Cuba he is seen as the ‘Latin Gershwin’. When Ramón Valle was studying classical piano in Havana he would often choose Lecuona’s work whenever he needed a national composition for his exams. However, he only started to really study the composer when his new record company ACT asked him to choose a few pieces for his label debut. Valle did not want to be yet another pianist to dust off American standards, so he chose his national heritage. The result, Danza Negra came out recently. “I must admit that initially the idea didn’t quite appeal to me. Interpreting Lecuona is like playing with fire. There is a reason behind every note in Lecuona’s work. You have to be extremely good to change anything in his music, otherwise you might as well give up immediately. The first piece I arranged was La Conga de Medianoche. I frenetically wrote six, seven sheets of music full of complex harmonies. But when I looked back on them, I realised that I was not arranging, I was competing with Lecuona. And that was the last thing I wanted to do. I didn’t want to hide behind Lecuona as if he were a sort of excuse to play the piano either. No, I wanted to comment on his work and translate it for jazz lovers. One of my most important methods of commenting is changing the perspective.” In Danza de los nanigos, for instance, Lecuona gives his view on an afro-Cuban dance. The piece was written in the form of a secta, but the melody is stronger than the rhythm and rather poetic, romantic. It is as if he is looking at the dance from a distance. In my version I chose to describe the dance from within. I have blended in more black atmosphere by not having the groove depend solely on the rhythm section, but involving the piano, trumpet and saxophone too. I replaced Lecuona’s classic melody development with solos. But it also works the other way round. La Comparsa, for example, is about a carnaval parade like the ones that were popular in the Fifties. In the original version it sounds like Lecuona was there, like he was a part of the festivities. In the thrusting left hand you hear the batadrums. I on the other hand created a distance, as if I’m behind a window looking in. And I see and hear this traditional party through modern eyes and ears. I added a modern jazz element to the melody”. With a typical Cuban syncopation, however. In other words, the accent is not just after the beat but before it.
“Above anything else I look for the story in Lecuona’s music. Malaguena, for instance, is about a woman from Malaga who dances beautifully but disappears mysteriously every time. In Lecuona’s original version the woman is portrayed using a rather pronto, dramatic flamenco style. I took one, in my opinion essential, chord from that. This chord illustrates the situation from the very beginning. Then the saxophone comes in and describes in his solo the woman he just saw. The quintet answers with the same chord as if by saying: ‘Yes, that’s the same woman we saw!’ After that the trumpet and the piano, in turn, tell about their experiences with the woman. Eventually, everyone agrees that this woman is a phantom.” The flamenco chord then slowly transcends into a Cuban guaguanco rhythm. It is as if we take her to Cuba and encourage her. If you close your eyes you can almost see it. It is as if you’re listening to a film by Lecuona.” , By Edo Dijksterhuis /NRC HANDELSBLAD 21.05.02.
Ramón Valle Plays Ernesto Lecuona; Danza Negra *****HHHH
ACT(ACT, 9403-2)
For his debut with ACT, pianist Ramón Valle deviated from the tried and tested standards repertoire, turning instead to the work of Ernesto Lecuona (1895-1963). Growing up in Cuba, Valle was constantly hearing Lecuona’s music on the radio and during his classical training in Havana, he played it many times—whenever an examiner requested “a national composition”. The mature Valle now has a highly personal take on Lecuona and this makes Danza Negra more than just the umpteenth interpretation of the “Cuban Gershwin”. This is sophisticated commentary. Valle unravels the originals, exposing essential chords and melodies and applying his own vision to them. Sometimes this leads to a conscious alteration of the atmosphere. For example, the original, lively flamenco rhythm of “Malagueña” has been bent toward the Afro-Cuban tradition. Inversely, Valle has tempered the stirring rhythms of “La Comparsa” to produce a more detached version. To remind the listener that a jazz quintet is playing here, Valle is generous with musical quotes (e.g. “Caravan” in “Malagueña”). The band can really swing and the solos are inspired. This high-quality album builds real bridges between Cuba and Jazz, the present and the past. Jazz, No. 4 2002
Powerful Jazz by Cuban Piano Prodigy
by Armand Serpenti/Trouw [NL] 26 May, 2002
For his latest CD Danza Negra, subtitled The Ramón Valle Quintet plays Ernesto Lecuona, Cuban pianist Ramón Valle recruited four steaming hot musicians. With Perico Sambeat on alto saxophone, Carlos Puig on trumpet, Omar Rodríguez on bass and Julio Barreto on drums, Valle presented the album on Saturday evening to an enthusiastic capacity crowd in Amsterdam’s Bimhuis.
Ernesto Lecuona (1895-1963) was a celebrated pianist and composer in classical music circles in Cuba. He was tremendously prolific, writing piano music, orchestral works, songs and operas, and scoring plays, ballets and films. Valle—in Europe since 1998 and now living in Amsterdam—satisfied his recording label’s requests for something special by arranging ten of Lecuona’s piano pieces, simultaneously linking Lecuona’s oeuvre to the culture of his country of birth.
Those expecting the kind of music popularized by the elderly men of the Buena Vista Social Club will be disappointed by Valle. He interprets the musical heritage of his homeland in powerful jazz, full of underlying tensions and imaginative harmonies and with a touch of melancholy—his tireless left hand interweaving stirring rhythmic accents through extended lyrical themes.
The band members met at the conservatory in Havana and together they attacked the demanding material with inspired zeal. While playing, Valle communicated like a composer—swapping themes, steering the atmosphere and keeping everything fresh, open and clear. The warm Spanish tones of the wind instruments were especially beautiful in the duets—in the intimate sounding “Andalucia” the brass sparkled. While Sambeat showed that he is also capable of letting rip with raw and ragged solos, the trumpet’s features sounded dull and mediocre.
On the CD the illustrious drummer Horacio “El Negro” Hernández displays his virtuosity with multi-layered rhythms and innovative breaks, but the man behind the drum kit during the presentation tour is Julio Barreto. His frantic play generated wild enthusiasm among the audience. While his left foot alternated between hi hat and cowbell, his right foot pounded the bass drum, an infectious swing sounded from the ride cymbals and his drumsticks (all three!) raced over his kit in recalcitrant rhythms.
Piano and drums combined perfectly. Now and then Valle repeated motifs to provide a point of reference for the wildly diverging rhythms, but more often his fingers hammered out teasing syncopations, as in the fast, highly synchronized “Gitanerias” and in “Malagueña”, Lecuona’s best-known melody, that skipped between Spanish, Cuban and American atmospheres. Both live and on CD, Ramón Valle shows himself a true piano prodigy.
(...) This is the CD one that will really put Ramón Valle on the map. Doing a Latin jazz tribute to one of Latin America's most important composers is a challenge (...) What Valle does with Lecuona's compositions is admirable. He plays tribute to Lecuona's melodies by changing the context in which we are used to hearing them. Lecuona is a composer with definite French and Spanish influences typical of the mestizaje that characterizes Latin American culture. In Valle's interpretation these influences are present but so is "swing."
An important virtue of this CD is that the music is not centered on the piano. This is truly a group effort by a group of versatile and mature musicians. Ramón Valle has a delicate, melodic, but rhythmic touch. He has his own style.
Born in Matanzas, Cuba, bass player Omar Rodríguez Calvo studied classical and modern music in Havana until 1995. In Europe, he worked with Cubanismo, Ramón Valle, Julio Barretto, Frank Emilio Flynn, Armando Peraza and others. The Spaniard Perico Sambeat shows, once again, that he is at home in almost any musical context. He and Cuban trumpet player Carlos Puig are solid jazz improvisers and their unisons usually carry the melody. Carlos Puig lives and teaches in Madrid. He also appears on Julio Barretto's CD "Iyabó". Then there is Horacio "El Negro" Hernández but he needs no introduction! This is a well-crafted CD with lots of group dynamics and precision. Everyone gets the opportunity to show their improvisational skills. Overall, the ethnic flavors are varied even within the same cut. There are some gypsy-flamenco overtones as well as moments of Caribbean waltz (Danzón). "Gitanerias", "En Tres Por Cuatro", and "Córdoba" are outstanding because this superb group really gets to stretch out.
Goyo Pappas and Luis Moreno posted on the internet June 23, 2002
Read more reviews in 3 languages (english-spanish-dutch), just click on the images to enlarge.
El Pais 1995
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El Periodico 1995
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La Vanguardia 1995
