MANUEL VALERA NEW CUBAN EXPRESS BIG BAND

José Martí en Nueva York

Greenleaf

Sometimes big lives require big bands. That’s what Cuban composer/pianist Manuel Valera discovered after he’d completed his 2013 Chamber Music Jazz Works commission for the project . Martí was the patron saint of Cuba, an activist/writer and fierce catalyst for the country’s independence from Spain, who martyred himself for the cause at age 42 at the Battle of Dos Rios in 1895. Four years earlier, exiled in New York, he completed , a book of poems regarded as his masterpiece. Valera composed music around nine of those poems and premiered the project with his New Cuban Express sextet in 2014. But he soon believed the material demanded a grander scope.