(Source: Kim Elliott via the Hartford Courant)

24 Jan 2012, Owen McNally: “Still very much an irrepressible life-force at 70, Chucho Valdés, the renowned Cuban pianist, composer and bandleader, is on a winter tour of the United States that sets down for high-energy maneuvers … at the cabaret series at the University of Connecticut’s Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts. … The title track [of his new CD], ‘Chucho’s Steps,’ … is a 50-bar adventure in challenging harmony in which he pays tribute to John Coltrane’s intimidating masterpiece, ‘Giant Steps.’ Valdés notes that as a young man in Cuba he would listen on short-wave radio to a program called ‘The Jazz Hour’ on The Voice of America, an experience that opened his ears to Coltrane’s innovations and the creative fervor of the new, iconoclastic music that was fermenting in the States.”