By Fredric Dannen
A number of years ago, a friend invited me to hear the Cuban-born jazz pianist Gabriel Hernández, promising that I was going to be dazzled. “You won’t believe this guy’s technique,” the friend said. “It’s like listening to Bud Powell. You’d think he had 20 fingers.” This friend was given to hyperbole, so I figured he was exaggerating.
He wasn’t. San Miguel has a lot of excellent musicians, but I never expected a resident pianist who could have sat in with jazz players at Birdland in the 1950s and held his own. Hernández’ virtuosity is remarkable. I was somewhat less surprised when I read his press bio. He had begun his musical studies at the fabled Luis Casa Romero academy in Camagüey, Cuba, where he received classical training, and made the switch to jazz by the age of 15. Hernández had gone on to share the stage with the likes of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Ray Charles, and performed with artists such as Tito Puente, Roy Hargrove, Arturo Sandoval, Paquito D’Rivera, and Greg Fishman, among others.
Hernández is instantly recognizable around town—a burly, gregarious man with round glasses, a goatee beard, and a wild shock of curly hair. He performs frequently at restaurants on a digital keyboard, and always packs in the customers. But an artist of his stature properly belongs in the concert hall, on a concert grand piano.
I am pleased to report that I have arranged for that to happen. On Saturday, October 22, at 7pm, Gabriel Hernández will headline a concert at the Miguel Malo auditorium at Bellas Artes, Hernández Macías 75, as a Steinway Series benefit for Libros para Todos, the nonprofit reading initiative for children from low-income Mexican families. Hernández will be playing the concert hall’s nine-foot Steinway D, with a full range of tonal colors to showcase the pianist at his best.
He is calling the concert “Gabriel Hernández: Piano Solo y Mala Compañía”—meaning “bad company.” The latter is a joke, because for the second half he’ll be teaming up with decidedly good company, the Cuban-born jazz flutist Ricardo Benítez.
Benítez, a virtuoso in his own right, is another graduate of the Camagüey academy, and later an instructor there. He is a recording artist and touring musician, with a penchant for combining classic Cuban music with elements of Latin jazz.
Hernández says his set with Benítez “will be of a journey through various genres of Cuban and international music,” including works of two key figures in the “creolization” of Cuban national music, Manuel Saumell and Ignacio Cervantes, “with touches of contradance, danzón, jazz, and original contemporary music.”
Reserved seat tickets are 500, 400 and 300 pesos and can be purchased online at boletocity.com or at the Boleto City ticket office on the ground floor of Mercado Sano, Ancha de San Antonio 123, Monday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm.
