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Chucho Valdés is an internationally appreciated pianist celebrated for his interpretations of classical, jazz, gospel and traditional pop music.  He presents these genres of music almost always through the lens of the musical styles from his Cuban heritage.  He is well versed in many Latin musical styles (montunos, claves, salsa, merengue, bossa nova etc.), and always brings a unique touch to his performances with technical acrobatics on the keyboard.

Chucho is a large guy (About 6′5″).  If you catch him on a break at the studio he will happily tell you about how his friends told him to be a boxer when he was young, but once he stepped in the ring and his sparring partner caught him on the chin with a solid hook, he decided that wasn’t the way to go.  Instead, he has contributed his enormous hands and long reach to creating chord voicings that most people don’t have the luxury of playing.  He is sort of like a Cuban Sergei Rachmaninov (though he is a very close resmblance to James Earl Jones).  He performs internationally as both a solist and in ensemble settings.  He spent the early part of his career performing in a group called Irakere, one of Cuba’s finest.

His approach to the piano is very percussive and syncopated.  As stated above, he is well educated in various genres and fuses them together seamlessly to create his own unique style.  On a personal note, I have seen Chucho perform three times and have met him in a Hollywood recording session once.  He makes my short list of favorite pianists (along with Art Tatum, Martha Argerich and Gene Harris to name a few).  His contributions to music are significant and his legacy is secure.  You can find more about Chucho at www.valdeschucho.com

Paul Kim is a singer/songwriter based in Saratoga, CA, yet his musical influence is being spread across the USA through his live performances. A vocalist since childhood, Paul developed his musical gifts at an early age singing in choirs and participating in a multiple voice singing group in high school. With influences stemming from R&B and gospel music, Paul’s soulful delivery caught attention in last year’s season of American Idol where he advanced through multiple rounds as a legitimate artist.

Since then, Paul has been in the studio (with yours truly) recording songs for his debut solo album. In between sessions he performs live around the country and is currently negotiating several overseas performances as well. Be on the lookout for Paul as an actor soon as well, there are several roles on the table which will be announced at a later date!

On a personal note, I spent a weekend in Paul’s hometown of Saratoga to participate in some shows he had in the region. After meeting his family and myriad groups of friends I’ve come to realize that Paul has a lot of people cheering for him on a personal level. If it really does take a village then Paul is ready to go!

That’s right, your boy (that’s me) has been recently named as the musical director for the Paul Kim tour (of American Idol fame), and apparently my sovereignty will extend to international boundaries as we are currently negotiating overseas performances.  To date I have provided live music for Paul’s performances at KoreAm & Radio Korea in Los Angeles, a private engagement in San Jose and most recently at Indiana University’s Taste of Asia celebration.  More shows to follow, stay tuned!

     Anyone under 30 might not remember Jesse Jackson pumping his fist at the 1984 primaries chanting “Keep Hope Alive!”  Inspiring to say the least because sometimes all you need is hope to get you through the tough times.  Even when hope is contributing to the tough times, you still gotta stick it out.  When it comes to Hope Solo, I’m a fan and it has very little to do with her protecting the goal box for 300 minutes (though that certainly helps).  Greg Ryan, however gets the marshmallow award for the year, and needs an immediate dose of reality, “leave the feelings at home and do your job, man.”

     Let’s be clear about this: I love Briana Scurry. I will never forget her pumping her arms in the air and screaming like a beast when she stopped Liu Ying at the 1999 World Cup.  That’s the competitve fire I want out my favorite athletes, and if I see her somewhere I am definitely going to thank her for her contribution to society.  I’m really happy for her too that she was able to end this year’s World Cup on a good note, holding Norway to one goal and bringing a medal home for her efforts (not that her trophy case needs any more hardware), she has an excellent legacy.  So I’m cool with Briana, just like I’m cool with MJ (any MJ will do in this situation: Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Michael Johnson or Magic Johnson ).  But just like the sun sets, a new day begins.

     Enter Hope Solo.  This girl has just as much fire as her predecessor.  You don’t rack up 300 consecutive minutes of goal-keeping perfection on accident, it’s obvious she is talented.  In her mind she is the most talented player on the team.  And that’s exactly what she should think.  Her position is probably the only one in a team sport where you can have this mentality (aside from pitchers in baseball).  Goal-keepers are a little strange in the first place, anyone who grows up saying “I want people to kick a ball at me as hard as they can” is a little weird.  But I was a pole vaulter in high school (an equally counter-intuitive activity), so I can relate.  In any event, goalies don’t have to cooperate with their teammates as much as strikers and stoppers, they are the last line of defense, and they wear the brunt of the blame and the adulation of the glory directly based on the outcome of their play.  Hope fits the bill, her parents were obviously clairvoyant (I don’t necessarily believe in clairvoyancy but I do like the way the word looks in this article) when they named her.  Solo accounts for the fact that she is in that goal box all by herself, Hope illustrates the emotion that we have towards her when the opposition breaks through everyone else trying to score on our national pride.  She is a renegade personality just like Uncle Han was verses the Empire, only in this case it seems her nemesis is an over-sensitive crybaby in head coach Greg Ryan.  After lambasting him publicly, she retracted part of her statement the following day on her website.  I was upset because I didn’t think she needed to adjust anything, just like I’m riding with Mike Gundy for his tirade in Oklahoma.  But then I was pleased to see that she only retracted all sentiment that came across as a hit towards Briana.  When Hope said “There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves” I really do believe here when she says that was not intended to hurt Bri.  That tells me that she wanted to play and she believes in herself, and substitution trickery by her coach clearly communicated that he did not believe in her, or even in himself because it was his previous rotation that brought 300 minutes of World Cup shut-out soccer.  This is nothing new though, and this is not really where my gripe lies.  All sports have seen a veteran substituted over a younger player in hopes that experience is the best tool.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  But when Hope blasted him after the game I loved it.  “Well it’s not professional,” I hear you out there.  Doesn’t matter, it was the rage of a competitor speaking her mind and that’s it.  She didn’t insult his family, she didn’t disrespect him as an individual.  Kobe Bryant said at point blank range that he had no respect for Phil Jackson as a man.  It doesn’t get any more personal than that and guess who has coached Kobe the last two years with no disciplinary action whatsoever?  But then again I guess that is the point, Greg Ryan is no Phil Jackson (Senator, you are no John Kennedy).

      The quotes by Ryan afterward were ridiculous. “This has only just happened. We’ll work to try to get past this hurdle,” there are “always opportunities for reconciliation.”  This is my personal favorite, the night before the Norway game, “We have moved forward with 20 players who have stood by each other, who have battled for each other. And when the hard times came — and the Brazil game was a hard time — they stood strong. Now it’s the 20 who have stuck together who will be ready to go out and compete against Norway.”  So not only does he decide not to play Hope, he doesn’t let her attend the game, as far as I know she may have been banned from the entire stadium.

      Are you serious?  This guy sounds like he wants to go on a retreat with Hope walking on hot coals before he’ll let her play again.  Maybe they need to play the game where one falls backwards and trusts the other to catch them.  There’s no crying in baseball! Get back to work, call her in the office, yell her head off and put her back on the field.  Like I said, I am glad that Briana was able to go out and restore her legacy on a high note defeating Norway, but the events surrounding this is weird.  Hope was unprofessional in her comments, okay yes I agree.  Guess what, Ryan was even more unprofessional by commenting back on them, and definitely by pulling the pee-wee move of the year by not letting her sit on the bench, which is exaclty where she should have been if she wasn’t playing.  Kristine Lilly says Hope is a distraction.  Remember how Rasheed Wallace distracted his team to the NBA Championship Title in 2004?  Or how about the championships that Dennis Rodman distracted his team to in Chicago from 1996-1998?  If distraction is calling out your coach from time to time keeping him accountable, go ahead and distract me.  Brandi Chaistain seems to agree, and when Julie Foudy speaks, people listen.  I just hope the right people are listening because if this is a prelude to Beijing, get ready for the ride.  I’m riding with Hope, I’m keeping Hope alive, and if I see her I’m shaking her hand also for her contribution to society.  I’ll try to resist the urge to ask her for a ride in the Millenium Falcon but I’m not making any promises.

     So there I was at the end of the recording process with my album, ready to mix it down and send to press.  I had successfully written, produced, engineered, and performed all of the music without any assistance; basically doing my best Prince impersonation as an all in one musician.  Oh believe me if I had the budget I would have paid an engineer to record while I sang, that would have saved me from constantly hitting the record button and running in the booth for months.  But in reality, I still would have opted to do it alone because the fact of the matter is as long as you are true to the art then there is no one who is going to give your project as much love and attention as you will no matter what.  From that perspective I am pleased with my efforts, but back to the point…

     Now we were at the mixing phase.  But wait, I hadn’t mixed a whole album before.  One voice in my head kept saying, “What’s your problem?  You’ve mixed for platinum artists and heard your own work on the radio several times, you know the formulas.  You know frequency, compression, dynamics, overtones, fundamentals, and even physics, you got this!!”  That’s great, but the problem was the other voice, the one that was saying, “No way man, all that work was for other people’s album.  This is different, you might be biased to your own stuff.  What if you are too critical or not critical enough?  What if you can’t hear objectively because it is your creation?  You know all engineers say that you should let someone else mix the stuff that you track because it needs a fresh set of ears.”  As most people in life do, I listened to the second voice, allowing the doubt to convince me that I was not qualified to succeed in such an undertaking, so I of course began to assess my budget to see if i could find any mix engineers to do what I would do: my best.

     Guy after guy (after girl) fell off of the list.  I let mixing engineers have a crack at it, but no one was giving my music that ‘magic’ sound that I thought they would be able to give it.  After losing time (and enough budget) on these experiments, I came to realize that my theory is true: no one is going to treat your creations with as much enthusiasm as you.  Even if these mix engineers WERE better qualified than me, id didn’t really matter.  They can probably mix faster than me, but I finally realized they aren’t going to mix better than me because they aren’t going to try as hard.  After much frustration, I decided that if no one is going to help me get this done then I’ll just do it myself.

      What a liberating experience.  Applying all of my techniques, I sat in the studio for TEN days straight, growing a beard and the whole nine, oh it was grimey.  But I was on a mission, comparing my mixes to my favorite songs, analyzing frequencies, filtering highs and lows, adding compression, creating the stereo field.  The deeper I got into the project the more I realized how much I knew and the more I realized how much I was learning.  In the end I had a product that I was proud of and an experience that contributed to my overall growth as a musician.  Urban Renaissance is my creation, and although I will never say that I did it all alone (which would be ridiculous since there are features on the album), I can certainly say this is a point in my life where I didn’t let anyone stop me or discourage me from reaching my goals.  I didn’t believe the hype around me saying I couldn’t successfully do this (it wasn’t just the second voice in my head making that claim, that same point of view was also shared by most of my colleagues).  Instead I found success when I believed in myself.  Self assuredness comes with a large responsibility, however, which is honesty.  You must take an honest look at your capabilities and assess whether you are capable of something.  But selling yourself short is not an option, and in this case it is envigorating to knowthat through this project I have re-established the fearless approach towards obstacles that I have always had.  I look forward to the next opportunity to know myself through a process.

Monday’s show (January 22, 2007) at Temple Bar (in Santa Monica) was a blast.  This is the first show for me since the release of my album, Urban Renaissance.  Decent audience turnout, plenty of support from friends as the show was in my hometown of Los Angeles.  Overall, I was excited! Read the rest of this entry »