The Chucho Valdés Quintet will be on a world tour in the next two months. The group performers are Mayra Caridad Valdés (vocals), Lázaro Rivero Alarcón (bass), Juan Carlos Castro Rojas (drums), Yaroldy Abreu (percussion), and, of course, Chucho Valdés at the piano.

Valdés will be at Mosaic Music Festival in Singapore on March 21 and at the Dewan Filharmonic Petronas in Malaysia on March 22. March 25-29 he will be at the Blue Note in Tokyo, Japan (with Michel Camilo). From March 31 to April 3, he will perform at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London, England. Then he will head to Switzerland to participate in the International Jazz Festival in Bern from April 6-10, and at the Cully Jazz Festival on April 12. From Switzerland, he will travel to Tunisia to play at the Barceló Carthage Thalasso Hotel in Carthage on April 15, ending up at the Athenas Concert Hall in Athens, Greece, on April 17.

To describe Valdés, the ad for the Singapore festival quotes Time: “He is a faucet, a river, a flood of music….There is history here: the imaginative, intricate runs of Art Tatum, the restless romanticism of Bill Evans, and of course, the hot, insistent rhythms of Cuba.”

Photo of Chucho Valdés from http://www.caycompass.com/cgi-bin/CFPnews.cgi?ID=10382210

Also see http://www.mosaicmusicfestival.com/2010/microsite/ch_chucho.html, http://www.jazzfestivalbern.ch/html/festmain_e.htm, http://www.cullyjazz.ch/, and http://www.ronniescotts.co.uk/schedule/2010/april