'I may never get to the heart of jazz'

By Howard Reich

Tribune arts critic

February 9, 2003



Just before showtime, a couple of aspiring young Cuban jazz musicians crowd into the cramped bathroom of a basement nightclub, place their horns to their lips, look dead-ahead into a smudged mirror and start blasting away.

Neither the brittle sound nor the harsh, fluorescent lighting of this makeshift rehearsal space is easy to take, yet by the time the two men emerge from the bathroom to stand before the microphones, they're on fire, playing John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" as if their lives depended on it.

For all the urgency and passion of their work, however, they're practically despondent after their first set, which they consider inadequate.

"Until I heard American jazz musicians performing live, I thought I was a good jazz player," says Jorge Miguel Vistel Serrano, a much talked-about 20-year-old Cuban trumpeter who studies at one of the country's top conservatories, the Instituto Superior de Arte (Institute of Superior Arts).

"But after I heard [trombonist] Steve Turre and [trumpeter] Roy Hargrove in person, I realized how far I am from the truth of this music.

"If I can't come to America," adds Serrano, "I may never get to the heart of jazz."

Whether or not Serrano and his colleague, 19-year-old saxophonist Luis Deniz, need to be in the States to master the elusive art of improvising jazz is open to debate. Yet there's no question that Serrano and Deniz, as well as uncounted Cuban jazz musicians young and old, increasingly find themselves trapped on this island.

Beyond the embargo that the U.S. placed on Cuba in the early 1960s, nearly eliminating financial ties between the two countries, the U.S. passed tough new visa laws in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Both the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001 and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 added new hurdles for foreign nationals attempting to visit the States. And though the new rules blocked artists of many nationalities from performing in the States, the restrictions have been acutely felt by Cuban musicians, who already had experienced four decades of barriers.

"We're trying to enforce the law as aggressively as Congress intended," says Tony Fratto, a spokesman for the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees U.S.-Cuba commerce under its Office of Foreign Assets Control.

While U.S. officials had loosened their interpretations of the embargo during the 1990s, leading to the busy American touring schedules of Cuban musicians in the "Buena Vista Social Club" film and recording, the tide turned dramatically with the arrival of the Bush administration.

"I don't want to speak for the previous administration and what it did, or if the nuances [of its enforcement of the embargo] were different," Fratto adds.

"When we came into Treasury, we looked at our jobs, and the job of the Office of Foreign Assets Control is to enforce the Cuban sanctions program, and we try to make sure to do that."

With the United States clamping down on interaction between the two countries, the opportunities for emerging talents such as Serrano and acknowledged giants such as pianists Chucho Valdes and Ernan Lopez-Nussa to visit America have diminished significantly. At the same time, American musicians and their managers have complained of increasing red tape in getting into Cuba, which has curtailed musical contact between the artists of two nations.

American and Cuban musicians alike lament the opportunities that have been lost, as well as the promising musical careers that never will get started. And they wonder why a decades-old political dispute between two nations can interrupt an artistic exchange that dates to the 19th Century and has produced so much groundbreaking music.

"American music and Cuban music have been like sisters for very long," says Lopez-Nussa, a revered Cuban jazz pianist who's virtually unknown in the States, where he has toured just once, in 1999.

"You can find in the ragtime music of New Orleans the same rhythms you hear in Cuban music, because in the 19th Century people traveled between New Orleans and Havana all the time. The syncopated habanera rhythms of Spain and Cuba are not so far from the syncopated rhythms of Jelly Roll Morton.

"We speak similar musical languages, but now the conversation is being stopped."

Responding to jazz greats

A capacity crowd has gathered inside one of Havana's top jazz rooms, La Zorra y El Cuervo (The Fox and the Crow), enthusiastically greeting the young band that takes the stage.

Once trumpeter Serrano, saxophonist Deniz and their rhythm section begin playing, it's clear not only that they have mastered their instruments but that they carefully have studied recordings that Miles Davis cut with John Coltrane in the 1950s and Wayne Shorter in the '60s. The wide-open, fervently lyrical character of Serrano's trumpet lines and the high-energy solos of Deniz's tenor saxophone represent a credible response to the groundbreaking work of Davis' great first and second quintets.

But Serrano and Deniz also have imbued their performance with the unmistakable influences of more recent American players, including the bravura trumpet playing of Roy Hargrove and Wallace Roney and the harmonically nimble tenor saxophone work of Joe Lovano and Branford Marsalis.

"I don't own any American jazz records, but I've listened to a lot of them," says Serrano, who has won several jazz competitions in Havana.

No amount of listening to recordings, however, prepared Serrano and Deniz for hearing American jazz musicians live, during the Havana International Jazz Festival in 2000 and 2002. The biennial event awakened the young men and their friends to the full glory of improvised jazz, an art form to which they already had decided to dedicate their lives.

But the encounters with America's jazz stars also showed them the artistic implications of being cut off from face-to-face contact with the U.S.

"When I played with [trombonist] Steve Turre earlier today, I almost fell down from the excitement, and from realizing how much I still do not know," says Serrano, who participated in a master class at the Instituto Superior de Arte led by Turre, a brilliant New York jazz musician. "I realized that the only way to fuse our Cuban music with jazz is to play with the American musicians, just like the Americans learn Cuban rhythm by coming to Havana to play with us."

But Serrano knows full well that he has about as much chance of fulfilling his dream of coming to the U.S. to study at Boston's Berklee College of Music, arguably the top jazz conservatory in the States, as he has of finding $19,200 in annual tuition lying on Calle 23, the famed -- if potholed -- street on which La Zorra y El Cuervo is located. Even if, by some miracle, Serrano were to locate an American sponsor who might back him, the young Cuban trumpeter probably would not get into the States because of the new visa hurdles that he would have to finesse.

"Bringing Cubans to the United States became tremendously more difficult with the beginning of the Bush administration," says Bob Guild, a program director at New Jersey-based Marazul Charters, which facilitates travel between the two countries.

"Basically, the application process takes longer than it ever did before, and whether or not a Cuban musician finally is going to get a visa is totally unpredictable."

Treasury Department spokesman Fratta says that there has not been a slowdown in processing applications. But, he adds, "Some people may have noticed an increase in the numbers of penalties for people who violate the embargo, and perhaps a slowdown in the processing of appeals of these penalties."

Some of the most pronounced effects of the chill in U.S.-Cuba relations have stemmed from the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, which went into effect last August and added new barriers to visitors from foreign nations considered state supporters of international terrorism. Cuba is on this list, along with Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

"Even if the slowdown in issuing is simply due to the backlog caused by the new legislation, the fact remains that it's getting harder for Cuban musicians to come to the States," says a Chicago attorney who specializes in these cases but declined to be identified.

Others point to the unfortunate case of Polo Montanez, an immensely popular Cuban singer who was going to tour major American cities last fall. When his managers realized the bureaucratic obstacles involved in bringing him to the U.S., they canceled the tour.

On Nov. 26, Montanez, whose real name was Fernando Borrego, was killed in an auto accident in Havana, at age 47.

"Now no one in the U.S. ever will hear Montanez," said Martinez, who was involved in making arrangements for the aborted U.S. tour.

"How many more opportunities to hear great music, how many more opportunities to speak with each other are we going to miss?"

For a young Cuban musician such as saxophonist Deniz, the obstacles to getting to America have become virtually impossible to transcend.

"You see our problem," says Deniz, between sets at the jazz club.

"You can learn to be a great musician in Cuba, and you can get very good at playing a kind of Afro-Cuban jazz.

"But unless you come to play in the U.S., like Chucho Valdes and Gonzalo Rubalcaba did, even if it's for a short while, you never will become as good a jazz musician as you were meant to be.

"And you certainly will never be heard of by anyone in the U.S."

Hanging on the paperwork

What Deniz, Serrano and their young colleagues may not realize is that even Valdes, Lopez-Nussa and others of their stature are having just as much trouble getting past the U.S. border.

During last year's Latin Grammy Awards, held in Los Angeles in May, 22 musicians from Cuba were not allowed into the U.S. to take part in the proceedings. Among those kept out was Cuba's most prominent jazz musician, Valdes, who came to America regularly in the 1990s but now has trouble getting in.

"We just finally succeeded in getting Chucho into New York a couple of weeks ago, but literally until the last minute we had no idea if he would be able to make his engagement at the Village Vanguard," says Martinez, the San Francisco immigration lawyer.

"Chucho was scheduled to leave on a Saturday morning, but his paperwork from the States did not come through until 3:55 p.m. on Friday, the day before," continues Martinez.

"Simply not knowing whether you'll be able to make an engagement in the U.S., not knowing whether the paperwork will come through on time is enough to kill your career in the U.S., even if you're lucky to already have started one, like Chucho."

Indeed, after Lopez-Nussa received glowing reviews following his American debut engagement, in 1999, the pianist believed that his American career was off and running. Managers across the U.S. were queueing up to present the next great Cuban pianist, but two planned tours fell apart when Lopez-Nussa could not get permission to enter the U.S.

Taking a chance

Since then, no American manager has been willing to take a chance on Lopez-Nussa, or his greatly accomplished colleagues, for fear that upfront costs spent on booking clubs and running advertisements will be lost when the U.S. decides not to provide a visa.

"When I played in the United States in '99, it was one of the greatest experiences of my musical career," says Lopez-Nussa.

"I felt when I was playing in the Chicago Cultural Center, for example, that the people were with me every beat, that they understood what I was trying to do at the keyboard, that they felt and followed the development of the tune.

"But when the follow-up tours fell apart, the managers in the States weren't interested anymore."

Meanwhile, American musicians trying to travel to Cuba to share what they know and to learn about Afro-Cuban jazz are running into similar roadblocks.

At last December's Havana International Jazz Festival, many American performers and managers complained about the difficulty involved in clearing required paperwork through Washington on time. The strictures for Americans visiting and working in Cuba are based upon regulations issued by the U.S. in 1963 under the Trading With the Enemy Act. "The basic goal of the sanctions," reads a Treasury Department summation of the rules, is "to isolate the Cuban government economically and deprive it of U.S. dollars."

The recent, tough enforcement of this doctrine has made it increasingly difficult to obtain the licenses, say the American musicians.

"I never had it so hard getting into Havana as I did this time," Turre said.

Added Larry Clothier, a prominent manager of American jazz artists, "This may be the last time in a long time that you'll see American musicians coming to Havana in any numbers."

But it isn't just the bureaucratic hassles that express the icy state of U.S.-Cuba relations.

In past years, the American Interests Section in Havana -- which serves as the U.S. mission there -- planned lavish receptions for American and Cuban musicians playing at the Havana International Jazz Festival. In December, however, the American Interests Section didn't acknowledge the arrival of American jazz artists and their followers, let alone host them.

When asked to articulate American policy on travel to Cuba, an American Interests Section representative said that Americans visiting Cuba without the proper licenses would be subject to prosecution to the full extent of the law.

Considerable hardship

American musicians who have difficulty getting into Cuba face no significant damage to their careers, for they still benefit from the promotional muscle that American record companies and booking agencies provide them around the world.

The Cubans who cannot come to America, however, say they face a considerable hardship, because the U.S. embargo and tightened travel policies do worse than just cut them off from the players they admire most and from the biggest, most lucrative market in the world. The embargo also chokes off their international performing and recording careers, they say.

"To be cut off from America is, in a way, to be cut off from most of the world's music industry," says Jorge Gomez, whose Moncada band holds a legendary stature in Cuba but is virtually unknown in the U.S.

"When you go to Italy, you see America's MTV and VH1 on the television. But you don't see the Cuban artists on there, because of the embargo.

"So even though we can go to Europe, the effect is much smaller than if you have the promotion of the United States.

"When it comes down to it, if you want to make an impact on the world of Latin music, you always have to deal with executives in New York or Miami," adds Gomez. "If you can't get to them, you have problems."

Without the promotional push that American corporate interests can produce, however, a Cuban jazz musician is lucky if he sells 1,000 copies of a CD, Gomez says.

Moreover, isolation from the U.S., as well as the generally distressed state of Cuba's economy, has left Cuba's jazz musicians without the tools that their American and European counterparts take for granted. The latest microphones, synthesizers, musical instruments and recording technology are well out of reach for most Cuban players, whose limited careers cannot support high-priced gadgetry.

Yet the Cuban musicians justly take pride in how much they have achieved without these tools, creating a music that remains more technically virtuosic and historically informed than that of any other jazz musicians in the world -- even if the instruments often are dilapidated and the technology out of date.

Consider just a few recent examples. Though Americans haven't yet heard it, Lopez-Nussa's new band Havana Report merges ancient Afro-Cuban rhythms with sleek, contemporary jazz improvisation in astonishingly fluid, natural and graceful ways. The music, superbly documented on the "Habana Report" CD (on the Unicornio label), is not available in the U.S.

Gomez's band Moncado, meanwhile, performs with an ensemble precision and a joyous dance-beat fervor that might create a sensation in the U.S. -- if they could be heard here (the band toured the States once, in 1986).

Why don't the Cuban musicians just defect to Europe, then make their way to the States?

"Why should I have to move outside of my country to be a Cuban jazz musician?" Gomez asks.

"Why should I have to become a European or an American?"

Adds Lopez-Nussa, "I need the Cuban life to play the music I play. If I went to live in Paris or New York or Chicago, not only my music would change but my life would change. I would need to do a hundred different things to make a living.

"Here I just make music. I need the beautiful old buildings and the traffic and the cigars and, most important, the other Cuban musicians to make the music I know. If I took myself away from this music and this place, it would not be me anymore."

Certainly the riches of Cuban culture are ample, as is apparent one afternoon during a music industry party at the Tropicana, Havana's most opulent nightclub.

On this occasion, however, the main attraction isn't the scantily clad dancers but Cuban singers and instrumentalists convening at an annual party hosted by BIS Music, a record label that has specialized in Cuban fare since 1995.

One by one, great artists such as the septuagenarian singer Omara Portuondo and the emerging singer-songwriter William Vivanco take the stage, their work collectively attesting to the vibrancy of Cuban jazz and jazz-tinged music to this day.

"Where else in the world are you going to hear music like this?" the Havana music journalist Guille Vilar asks a visitor.


Playing against the odds

Yet these monumental artists languish in Cuba, revered by their fans, increasingly cut off from the U.S. and overlooked wherever U.S. interests prevail.

Day to day, they live decent, if not luxurious lives, the best jazz artists typically enjoying the comforts of a two- or three-bedroom apartment, a Soviet car, a well-worn musical instrument and, perhaps, a home computer. The most successful of the artists obtain satellite TV by buying the satellite dishes in Europe, assembling them in Havana and planting them in their back yards, where the satellites pick up everything from CNN to Bravo.

Even the most prosperous musicians, however, endure some of the hardships that fall on most everyone in Havana, including the rolling blackouts in a city perpetually starved for electricity and paychecks in Cuban pesos, which are accepted nowhere else in the world (and therefore keep Cubans tied to the island).

But the musicians say they are willing to withstand these difficulties in order to preserve their identity as Cuban jazz artists.

Still, they yearn for the day when they can come to America as easily as they can travel to Europe or South America, and show the world what it has been missing.

"If I could come to America, everything would be possible," says Serrano, the talented young trumpeter.

"I do not see how I am such a danger to America."



Second of two parts: Travel restrictions after terrorist attacks and the increasing chill in U.S.-Cuba relations mean that Havana's towering jazz virtuosos cannot reach American listeners. Because the U.S. stands at the center of the world's music distribution systems, more than two generations of Cuban jazz masters have been silenced.

Last week:

Cuban musicians are revered for their skills achieved by merging Soviet-style training with Afro-Cuban tradition. Read Part 1 at www.chicago-tribune.com/cubajazz.