Chucho Valdés bringing a Cuban sound to Philadelphia

Chucho Valdés!

You're coming with your Afro-Cuban Messengers to the Merriam Theater at the Kimmel Center on Thursday. You're a son of Cuban music royalty: Your dad, Bebo, now 93, is a pianist-god of the Cuban golden age. You're a driving force behind Irakere, the jazz band that woke the world to Afro-Cuban jazz. You've made music with many stars in the jazz cosmos, and your 2010 album, Chucho's Steps, won the Grammy last year for best Latino jazz album. The thing truly smokes.

You may be playing better - at 70 - than you ever have before. What do you think?

"I've noticed it," he says by phone from Havana. Not arrogant or prideful. Just matter-of-fact. "Look, I have a band of marvelous young guys. These musicians know everything and can play anything. Someday each one of them will have his own band. They set a high standard, and I have to measure up."

That high standard just leaps out of Chucho's Steps, an explosive blend of jazz styles, from '70s fusion to funk to Africana. The monumental opener, "Zawinul's Mambo," is a tribute to Joe Zawinul, the pianist/composer of Weather Report. Quotes from "Birdland" mix with trad-Cuban outbursts and breakneck bebop. "Danzón" starts out as a standard jazz ballad and flows into a true danzón, the courtly yet sexy Cuban national dance. It's a bubbling stew served up with irresistible delight by Valdés and his astonishing band.

"Hey, I study all this music very hard," Valdés says. "I love all the genres, all the musicians, of all eras, and I have studied my Cuban roots to get it all combined, Cecil Taylor, Herbie [Hancock], Bud Powell, Zawinul. The more you know, a profound change occurs. It's something American, something Cuban. The result is the history of the music and history of Cuba."

The title of Chucho's Steps refers to John Coltrane's Giant Steps. The title of "Julian" is for jazz sax stalwart Julian "Cannonball" Adderley. And "New Orleans," which breaks from Cubanism to 1920s rag, is dedicated to the Marsalis family (patriarch Ellis Marsalis and Valdés are good buddies).

With all these influences, how do you keep it Cuban?

"This is a very, very hard thing to do," he says. "It's a matter of the mix of the musicians. And constant rehearsals and a lot of hard work."

Valdés says his Philadelphia show - which opens with Panamanian piano man Danilo Pérez - will feature Chucho's Steps, plus Valdés' Missa Negra (The Black Mass) and new music. "But always we'll look back at the roots of the music, too."