I was sure I had already heard the song before... That day I was looking for a little dose of Latin Jazz with vibes and Victor Mendoza came to my mind, so I found a live video of him, where Eguie Castrillo conducts a Big Band (he's amazingly roots on the timbal). On that concert they played María Cervantes... the tune on the vibes really sounded familiar to me, so I did a further search on YouTube and, to my surprise, found it's featured on that memorable Tito Puente's concert live at Montreal, a video I saw almost 10 years ago, truly, a top tier piece. I always remember I watched it on the VCD format (obviously, original DVDs here were very difficult to find). Tito's version has this charming B part where eight-notes in the melody turn into up-beat quarter note triplets, giving a very intense melancholic feel, if the climbing-receding-climbing again melodic minor was not melancholic enough.María Cervantes, Tito Puente Live
*Besides Castrillo's and Puente's, on YouTube there are other renditions of María Cervantes, by Seis del Solar, Richie Ray and Noro Morales, the composer. It is featured in Rebeca Mauleon's Latin Real Book.
Recently, I've been planning to perform a little list of songs composed by latin jazz oriented piano players, and I decided to include the María, which shares the list, among others, with And Sammy walked in (Michel Camilo), Silver serenade (Horace Silver), Midnight Mambo (Oscar Hernández) and Chucho Valdes' Mambo influenciado and Claudia.
Just to have some words to say to the audience, I looked a little for whom had Noro written this beautiful tune. It also seemed really curious to me, that the title had the surname as well, not so many songs dedicated to a person have one: there were Claudia and Sammy on my list, for a token (My first guess was that María is such a common name that Noro (1912-1964), the Boricuan, decided to include the family name).
It turned out that Ms. Cervantes (1885-1981), was a prominent Cuban pianist and composer, daughter of Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905), pianist and composer as well. Even more surprisingly, Mr. Cervantes was giving concerts in Cuba, the USA and Mexico with the purpose of raising funds for the independence from Spain. There's some music from Ignacio on YouTube, as well as Fusión de almas which he started writing and she finished after his death.
Fusión de almas, Ignacio y María Cervantes
A further coincidence: Chucho Valdes also dedicated Contradanza, (a song included in the Havana Jam, one of my very first approaches to Latin Jazz) to María Cervantes... I've always loved the trumpet-keyboard passage.
Contradanza, Irakere
So, this is the story of how, intending to pay a homage to the grace, dexterity, complexity and phrasing of latin pianists as composers, I ended listing another definitively more transcending homage.
