Bobby Carcassés, More than Music for Jazz Plaza 2024

Since he dreamed and founded it in 1980, the music of Bobby Carcassés has not been missing at the Jazz Plaza Festival, one of the most prestigious events on the Cuban music scene, but in the next edition his plastic work will also be present.

It has become customary for the Jazz Plaza poster to recreate a piece by a visual artist. This time it’s Meditation, a work by the creator of the event himself.

«I’ve been practicing yoga for 50 years. Our beliefs include reincarnation, and I’m sure that I have been related to music, drawing, and painting since I was a child. That means that there are years of craft, years of working on drawing and painting, so, I have been perfecting the talent with which I came from other lives and, at this moment, I understand perfectly what my life has been like through music, and through drawing and painting," commented the showman about the talents he has developed.

As for the work chosen, he explained: «there’s a woman meditating in it, and the man who appears playing the trumpet is also immersed in a dream world, in a spiritual world.

«It’s related to a book I just wrote and published and it’s about to be premiered right before the beginning of the Jazz Plaza. It's called Improvisation in Jazz and Cuban Music. The super objective of the book, the leitmotiv, the core of the story is the comparison between a jazz musician who is improvising, with his eyes closed, concentrated and synchronized with space, with the cosmos, and a yogi who meditates, concentrated , possibly in a Nirvana, in a state of ecstasy. It’s parallel, because when a jazz player improvises, he is connected to another dimension.

Maestro Bobby Carcassés confesses his satisfaction with the course the Festival has taken: «That this jazz festival has evolved to this moment, where, despite domestic difficulties, those abroad in the world, which is also complicated, and all the implications that carries an event like this, and that it continues to grow—we have guests from Holland, from Canada, from the United States, from different countries, who continue to insist on coming to Cuba at any cost—that makes us feel happy; continue supporting jazz for the mystery, the greatness it entails; continue doing this festival so that Cuba, through music, continues to soar higher and higher."

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff