David Virelles

Though still only 32 years old, David Virelles has enjoyed a jazz career that many of his contemporaries would envy. Indeed, the “New York Times” has picked him out as one of the up-and-coming jazz pianists and composers of his generation.

Born in Cuba, he grew up in a family for whom music and life were indivisible. His father, José Aquiles, was well-known on his island home as a song-writer of the Nueva Trova-a politicized musical movement which flourished on Cuba in the nineteen seventies, while his mother played the flute in the Santiago de Cuba Symphony Orchestra. Immersed in sounds from day one, David Virelles started classical piano lessons when he was seven, but kept one ear tuned in to the musical traditions of his homeland. When he discovered his grandfather’s record collection, he fell in love with improvisation and caught the jazz bug.

Meeting the Canadian soprano saxophonist Jane Bunnett, a lover of Afro-Cuban melodies, in 2001 at the age of 18 proved to be a turning point in his career. The two would collaborate on numerous projects, tour together and record a number of albums, two of which would be short-listed for a Grammy. His apprenticeship at the side of the great American composer, saxophonist and flautist, Henry Threadgill, would help shape his personal philosophy on jazz in the years that followed.

Virelles’ compositions epitomize sensuality and mysticism. Ritualistic and exotic in nature, it is as though they are worshipping at the altar of sound itself. His orchestrations are often unconventional, while his music borrows from the Afro-Cuban idiom of his childhood, which he incorporates into contemporary jazz. The results defy categorization and reveal the powerful, multifaceted talent which makes David Virelles one of the most luminous rising stars in jazz.