Washington, April 22 (Prensa Latina) Prestigious Cuban pianist and composer Chucho Valdés will receive the Jazz Master Award, the highest distinction currently awarded to a jazz musician in the United States, and which in its 2025 edition will be awarded for the first time to a foreigner and Latino.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will present the 2025 Jazz Master Awards during an annual concert on Saturday, April 26, at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Along with Valdés, Americans Marshall Allen (saxophonist), Marilyn Crispell (pianist) and Gary Giddins (critic) will be recognized for their outstanding contributions to the genre.
Considered the most influential figure in modern Afro-Cuban jazz, the US-based musician from the island was awarded the 2025 Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award last week, presented by the Longy School of Music in Cambridge.
Valdés received the award from the center’s president, Karen Zorn, and Jamie Bernstein, daughter of the prominent American composer and conductor (1918-1990) after whom the prize is named.
In justifying its decision, the academic institution emphasized that Valdés, 83, “embodies many of the key values cultivated at Longy, including the freedom to explore, creative thinking and innovation, and the joy of making and sharing music with others.”
He also praised Valdés’s six-decade career, “both as a soloist and as a conductor, in which he has distilled elements of Afro-Cuban musical tradition, jazz, classical music, rock, and more into a deeply personal style.”
Born into a family of musicians on October 9, 1941, his training began in childhood under the guidance of his father, the great Bebo Valdés, pianist, composer, and conductor, and his mother, Pilar Rodríguez, a singer and piano teacher.
During his long and successful career, the founder of the iconic group Irakere has, among others, the National Music Award in Cuba (2020), has won 13 Grammys (seven of them Latin Grammys) and in 2018 was inducted into the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame.
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