Charlie Haden and
Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Tokyo Adagio

When the Shenandoah-born bassist Charlie Haden was in Cuba with the Liberation Music Orchestra in 1986, performing at the Havana Jazz Festival, he found himself playing at the same concert as a young, classically trained Havana-born pianist called Gonzalo Rubalcaba, who had just returned from touring the Soviet Union.

Haden introduced himself to the young prodigy, and they began a friendship which lasted until the great bassist’s death in July 2014. The US ban on Cuban musicians meant that any performances on recordings with Rubalcaba had to be made outside the US frontiers, and Hayden overcame this obstacle by inviting the Cuban to 1989 Montreal Jazz Festival as his guest, and in 1990 he recorded his first studio album outside Cuba, Discovery, in Montreal for Blue Note Records, followed by The Blessing in 1991 with Hayden and the drummer Paul Motian.

“For me, just beginning my career, the way Charlie went about opening the path for me made all the difference,” Rubalcaba later explained. “Despite the gap in our ages, he never treated me as an inferior in any sense. We had each other’s confidence. We could talk about politics, life, family, business. Spending so much time with him, I learned not only about music but also about being. Our connection was about love for the music and for our families, for each other.”

The empathy and brilliance that cuts across cultural isolation and political embargo is also beautifully expressed in the album that the duo made in Japan at a live performance in 2005, Tokyo Adagio. The title suggests slow movement (Haden often called himself “an adagio guy”), and throughout his powerful and profound throb moves below Rubalcaba’s keys with a slow grace, a heartsblood of human hope and passion which also runs through into his companero’s notes — hear the pianist’s Transparence for a sublime expression of this.

The album’s opening track is the Cuban guitarist and songwriter Rojas Martin’s tune En la Orilla del Mundo (The Edge of the World). Slowly wrought and ponderous, Haden’s heartbeat thickens Rubalcaba’s sharply etched notes and gives them a deeper message of love’s vulnerability.

The weaving between Cuban and US songs and their essential musical unity marks the comradeship of two musicians overcoming division and forced discord. In Johnny Mercer and David Raksin’s US ballad My Love and I, it is Haden’s deep and reverberating notes which mark out the melodic theme. Rubalcaba replies with ringing phrases as if the colloquy means everything.

Haden first came to jazz prominence as bassist of the Ornette Coleman Quartet on the 1959 revolutionary albums The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century and This is Our Music. So Ornette’s tune When Will the Blues Leave, first recorded with a quintet without Haden on the 1958 album Something Else, and then with him on the Live at the Hillcrest Club session in Los Angeles in the same year, is apt and full of memory. Haden and Rubalcaba move out of the adagio mood with a sudden zest and pace, and Haden’s solo bounces trampoline-like along the Tokyo streets.

Haden first recorded his tribute to the Nicaraguan revolutionary Sandino on the 1989 Liberation Music Orchestra album recorded at the Montreal Jazz Festival. He had written it as part of the soundtrack to the film about the Sandinista revolution, Fire from the Mountain, during an era when US forces were directly collaborating with the Nicaraguan “contras.” It is an open-hearted, forward-thrusting melody, not “adagio” at all, and Rubalcaba picks out its phrases with an inspired sense of communal movement, above Haden’s volcanic and quasi-subterranean beat.

Solamente una Vez (You Belong to My Heart) is a love song by the Mexican singer and songwriter Agustin Lara Agustin which the duo had recorded as part of a larger band on the 2004 album of Mexican tunes Land of the Sun.

It has been sung and recorded over the years by people as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, but Rubalcaba and Hayden express the simple truth and beauty of its message of love and union as it applies to musicians and their peoples across partitions and frontiers as, of course, it did for them.