In his seminal work “From the Drum to the Synthesizer” Leonardo Acosta emphasized Cuban musicians’ aptitude at combining the use of electronic instruments with the musical practices of Cuban classical and popular music. In his essay Acosta singles out Irakere as the exemplary ensemble that successfully combines two approaches: the use of modern electronic instruments and technology and the incorporation of “ancestral Afro-Cuban rhythms.” In this presentation I focus on the figure of Cuban pianist, composer, and arranger Chucho Valdés and his activities prior to the foundation of Irakere, to demonstrate that Valdés’s musical experimentation predated his work in Irakere thanks to a network of musicians and institutions that cultivated artistic experimentation. I examine his work at the Teatro Musical de La Habana, where he collaborated with Leo Brouwer and Federico Smith, his interactions with Juan Blanco, who introduced him to the world of electronic synthesizers, and his participation in the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna and the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). I analyze “Sonidos siderales” from his 1970 combo album Chucho Valdés as a prototype of the musical experimentation with electronic instruments he would further develop after founding Irakere in 1973. Through this study I demonstrate how porous the boundaries between classical, electronic, and popular music were and still are for Cuban musicians, and I trouble the categorization of Valdés as a ‘Cuban jazz’ artist, encouraging us to push against industry-determined labels and locate artists within the broader artistic contexts in which they circulate.

In Cuba, a new generation of women instrumentalists and bandleaders are emerging from Cuba’s elite Revolutionary art schools, intervening into male-dominated jazz and fusion (fusión) scenes and commanding audiences as bandleaders. Composers and vocalists Daymé Arocena and Haydée Milanés; batá percussionists Brenda Navarrete and Magdelys Savigne; set drummer Yissy García; violinists Elizabeth Rodríguez and Yilian Cañizares; pianists Camilla Cortina Bello, Melvis Santa, and others have formed experimental collectives that are transforming Cuba’s increasingly audible and transnational jazz scenes. Amid the heightening economic, artistic, and political crises afflicting Cuba since the global pandemic, these women also represent an entire generation of artists who have fled Cuba en masse to the United States and elsewhere, a historic migration representing a “wartime”-level displacement of an estimated twenty percent of the island’s population since 2022. Here, I explore this new generation of women in Cuban jazz and fusión. I trace how their increasing visibility since the 2010s builds, in part, on their proper performance of ideals of Cuban jazz masculinity that helped canonize their male peers on the island beginning in the 1980s. At the same time, I explore divergences in these women’s performances, excavating novel forms of experimentalism and gendered audibility and visibility enacted through ritual critique, the centering of the batá ritual drums, and queer aesthetics and visions. Ultimately, I interrogate how these women’s performances trouble the gendered and sexual frames — as well as definitional terrain — of so-called “Cuban,” “Latin,” and U.S. American “jazz.”

In pianist and composer David Virelles's view, politically and commercially motivated attempts to commodify music and uproot it from its cultural, social, and historical contexts have perpetuated centuries of violence against and erasure of minoritized communities in his native Cuba and around the world. In contrast Virelles grounds his artistic projects by simultaneously honoring the cultural traditions he invokes (and the generations of artists who have nurtured them) and innovating on them. Drawing examples from three projects—Antenna (2016), Transformación del arcoiris (2017), and Igbo Alákorin, v.3 (2025)—my presentation illustrates how Virelles composes, performs, and records music that crosses genres, eras, instrumentations, media, the analog/digital divide, and existential planes. Virelles augments the sonic environments he creates for these projects with history lessons, storytelling, visual art and animation, and even fictional characters like Santiago Slim (the cartoon alligator trickster from Igbo Alákorin v.3 who quips and cajoles on Virelles's Instagram profile) and Los Seres (the imaginary drum ensemble performing the tracks Virelles programmed on Antenna). Operating in a music industry that labels him a “Cuban jazz pianist,” Virelles resists all three descriptors and the boundaries that institutions and industry actors have imposed on him and his work throughout his career. Through a range of sound production, recording, and processing technologies, historically-informed artistic concepts, scholarly research, immersive multimedia presentations, and social and political commentary, Virelles curates alternative spaces into which he welcomes audiences to join in what I characterize as critical archiving, speculative Indigeneity, and imaginative, deconstructive play.