Benalmádena has recently acquired a famous new resident: octogenarian Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés. His good friend Fernando Trueba recommended that he make the move to the Costa del Sol, after spending much of his life of exile in the chilly climes of Stockholm.


ebo was born in Quivicán, in Havana province, in 1918. A genius pianist and composer, he is a living legend of the golden age of Cuban music, and was in fact one of its most influential innovators. Valdés began his artistic career as a member of Julio Cueba’s group, forming part of one of the Caribbean’s most famous bands.
Some years later he would be appointed musical director of the prestigious Tropicana cabaret. The American producer Norman Granz, excited by the way Afro-Cuban music was going down in New York, got in touch with Bebo to make the first jazz recording in the island’s history. Following this, alongside Benny Moré, he got practically the whole world dancing the mambo and cha-cha-cha.
In Bebo himself resides much of Cuba’s musical history. The knowing interpretation of the ‘son’ and the courtly contredanse takes Bebo back to the years of French influence in the early 19th century, the source of all subsequent Cuban music. Later, influenced by the jazz sounds which were coming in from the United States, he was a leading light in the glory days of the Havana ‘jam sessions’. Within the wide range of his rhythmical styles, Valdés has turned to blues, ragtime and even boogie-woogie.
Following Castro’s uprising, Bebo emigrated to Stockholm, never to return. He vowed he would “not live in or visit any place under a dictatorship, of whatever political persuasion”, and has kept his word.
In 1994, Paquito de Rivera came across him, reinvented as a lounge pianist. That meeting led to the recording in Germany of ‘Bebo Rides Again’, a compilation of great Cuban classics, together with impressive original works composed by Valdés specially for the occasion. The project was to become one of the finest jazz records of the Nineties, thanks to the contribution, among others, of the congas of his friend Patato (inventor of the famous, and odd, penguin dance).
A little later, the director Fernando Trueba was to bring him out of the shadows once and for all with the film ‘Calle 54’, a ‘documusical’ which brought him together musically for the first time with his son Chucho, another gifted pianist. Trueba then got him tangled up in another daring project: ‘Lágrimas Negras’, a record which aimed to fuse Bebo’s jazz with the tortured flamenco of Diego ‘El Cigala’. The outcome could scarcely have had a greater impact: the disc went double platinum, the DVD gold, and the work received a Grammy, five Amigo awards, an Ondas award, and was the New York Times’ album of the year, among many other accolades.