In 1963 took place at Payret Theater the First Jazz Festival celebrated in Cuba with the performance of all the groups of that moment, including the jazz band of the trumpeter Leonardo Timor, the only big band active after Armando Romeu left Cabaret Tropicana in 1961.

In 1966 it was organized the Young Orchestra of Modern Music, under the conduction of pianist Adolfo Pichardo, and a year later the National Council of Culture decides to create a new jazz band with the conduction of veteran Armando Romeu. By that time different groups of Jazz and latin jazz flourished, as the ones of Chucho Valdés and Samuell Téllez.

Around that time it was created, under the conduction of composer and guitarist Leo Brouwer, the Sonorous Experimentation Group of ICAIC , which was characterized by the fusion of diverse music as Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, jazz rock, Asian and European for concert.

Then the forties came and marked the beginning of the Cuban jazz potentialities with the integration of Irakere, in 1973, the first Cuban group that won a Grammy award. The super band conducted by Jesús “Chucho” Valdés was born from the Cuban Orchestra of Modern Music and the works realized by the great pianist with groups of different formats. Almost from the beginning Irakere was a school to many young jazz men.

Among the most relevant jazz men of this period it can be mentioned Emiliano Salvador, Ronzalito Rubalcaba, Ramón Valle and Ernán López-Nussa among others great talented musicians. In the case of jazz women we have María Caridad Valdés, Lilia Expósito (Bellita) and Lucía Huergo among others.

In 1979, the singer and multi-instruments player Bobby Carcassés organized a group of concerts in Casa de la Cultura of Plaza in Havana City, which would be the prelude of the event, first nationally and then internationally, that is nowadays the Jazz Plaza Festival, and that had his first edition in 1980. Among the visitors to this event is good to highlight the presence of Dizzy Gillespie and the British saxophonist Ronnie Scout, who was also the co-organizer of the festival in 1993.

As a conclusion, I agree with the researcher José Dos Santos about the permanence of the jazz in our country… Most of the Cuban musicians from the new generations, with classic academic education and spontaneous commitment with what is popular, are at the same time admirers or cultivators of jazz. That is why nobody should be surprised at knowing that the bands which accompany the main Cuban soneros nowadays, the so-called salseros, have very capable musicians for improvisation and friends of the descarga when there is a possibility…

Article by journalist Ubilde Gómez