Gabriel Hernandez, Legendary Cuban Jazz Pianist, in Concert with Cuban Flutist Ricardo Benitez

Two Cuban jazz masters take you on “a journey through various genres of Cuban and international music.”

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Gabriel Hernández is a peerless virtuoso in San Miguel, a pianist who could have sat in with jazz players at Birdland in the 1950s and held his own.  A graduate of the fabled Luis Casa Romero academy in Camagüey, Cuba, where he received classical training and then made the switch to jazz, Hernández has shared the stage with the likes of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Ray Charles, and performed with artists such as Tito Puente, Roy Hargrove, Arturo Sandoval, Paquito D’Rivera, and Greg Fishman, among others.

Hernández is instantly recognizable around town – a burly, gregarious man with round glasses, a goatee beard, and a wild shock of curly hair.  He performs frequently at restaurants on a digital keyboard, and always packs in the customers.  But an artist of his stature properly belongs in the concert hall, on a concert grand piano.

Luckily, on Saturday, October 22, at 7pm, Hernández will headline a concert at the Miguel Malo auditorium at Bellas Artes, as a Steinway Series benefit for Libros para Todos, the nonprofit reading initiative for children from low-income Mexican families. He will be playing the concert hall’s nine-foot Steinway D, with a full range of tonal colors to showcase the pianist at his best.

Hernández is calling the concert Piano Solo y Mala Compañía – meaning “bad company.” The latter is a joke, because for the second half he’ll be teaming up with decidedly good company, the Cuban-born jazz flutist Ricardo Benítez.

Benítez also graduated from the Camagüey academy, and later on was an instructor there.  He is a recording artist and touring musician, with a penchant for combining classic Cuban music with elements of Latin jazz.  Hernández says his set with Benítez “will be a journey through various genres of Cuban and international music” – including works of two key figures in the “creolization” of Cuban national music, Manuel Saumell and Ignacio Cervantes – “with touches of contradance, danzón, jazz and original contemporary music.”

Reserved seat tickets are 500, 400 and 300 pesos, and can be purchased by clicking either of the “Buy Tickets” buttons in this newsletter; or online at boletocity.com; or at the Boleto City ticket office on the ground floor of Mercado Sano, Ancha de San Antonio 123, Monday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm.