Rubalcaba mines his past with `Paseo'

Gonzalo Rubalcaba's three-night stand at the Real Deal Jazz Club & Cafe later this month is among the highlights in a particularly strong fall season for jazz in Boston. And his Sept. 24-26 run there could hardly be timelier.

Two days after the Cuban expatriate's Cambridge set wraps up, Blue Note Records will be bringing out "Paseo," the sparkling follow-up to Rubalcaba's highly successful 2001 CD "Supernova," which earned him Grammy nominations in two categories: best Latin jazz album and best instrumental composition.

Meanwhile, Verve Records has released "Land of the Sun," Charlie Haden's exquisite tribute to the music of Mexico and the undervalued composer Jose Sabre Marroquin, on which Haden is joined by Rubalcaba and Rubalcaba's longtime drummer Ignacio Berroa, as well as Joe Lovano, Miguel Zenon, and others. Rubalcaba wrote all the arrangements on the new Haden disc, a sensible assignment given his having earned a third 2002 Grammy nomination for his arranging on Haden's CD "Nocturne."

Rubalcaba's Real Deal appearance, like the new CD, will feature his New Cuban Quartet, in which he and Berroa are joined by fellow Cuban expats Felipe Lamoglia on saxophones and Armando Gola on electric bass. As Rubalcaba, 41, explains by phone from his home near Fort Lauderdale, "Paseo" is largely his new group's reassessment of music from his past, with five of the nine tunes on the CD having first been performed by previous groups of his a decade ago or more.

"I thought it was a wonderful moment to take this music again into consideration," Rubalcaba says, "and put that in the hands of the new people, different musicians. And I think it worked very, very good. It doesn't sound like this is music that was done 10 or 15 years ago."

The music, like all of Rubalcaba's work, is built on his exceptional ability to meld the many musical idioms he has mastered, chief among them jazz, European classical, and those of his native Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. On "Paseo," the result is music as seamless and compelling as it is contemporary, despite its many elements.

Ten years on, those old compositions are sounding better to Rubalcaba than ever. "The good thing is if you feel that you have been developing yourself as a musician, not only as a player but as a thinker," he says. "The reality is that I could think at that level as a composer, but I didn't have experience enough to play it. Right now I think we are a little bit more relaxed, more cultured."

A decade ago was also when Rubalcaba began making his long-delayed first appearances in the United States. It would have happened several years earlier, but the US government wouldn't grant Rubalcaba a visa when Dizzy Gillespie -- his earliest big-name jazz advocate -- tried to bring him to Central Park for a performance. The two had met when Gillespie went to Havana for a 1984 jazz festival, caught Rubalcaba's band at the Hotel Nacional, and asked the young pianist to sit in with him at the festival.

"I know that he was talking about me to everybody everyplace he went after Cuba," says Rubalcaba. "It's something that I'll appreciate the rest of my life."

For now, Rubalcaba and his all-Cuban band have a more pressing priority.

"We are taking our history to a different point, a more international point," he says. "I don't want to make music that only the Cuban people can understand. I want to make music that everybody around the world can understand, can enjoy."