Hugo Cruz and Caminos - Figure It Out (CD)

From Santa Clara To Havana To Pittsburgh, Hugo Cruz Figures It Out…

When Hugo Cruz first came on my radar in Havana nearly a decade ago, he was already a rising drummer – he had won a contest at Giraldo Piloto’s brutally competitive Fiesta del Tambor Guillermo Barreto en Memoriam, a sort of musical Thunderdome for percussionists, and he was playing with Sintesis, one of Cuba’s most important Afro Cuban fusion bands. So, we knew this young man who was born and raised in Santa Clara, a much smaller city in central Cuba, was impressive, we just had no idea yet how deep the river of compositions and arrangements also running through his head truly ran.

In all great music, fate can be as important as excellence, and Hugo’s encounters with Albertico Lescay, whose group FORMAS played a brief but important role in Cuba’s NuJazz scene, ultimately led to performances with Ben Barson’s Afro Yaqui Music Collective in Pittsburgh. What began as a couple of visits eventually turned into a sort of commuter lifestyle for Hugo, and the experience was also giving him new sources of inspiration. Finally, in 2018, he decided that relocating to Pittsburgh made sense (which he did the following year), but he never abandoned his ties with Cuba or his vast musical family there. His first album under his own name, Punto de Partida in 2022, was a superb, critically acclaimed Afro Cuban jazz album, but something even more expansive was yet to come.

Pittsburgh is a more fertile ground for what you are going to hear than one might think. Several important jazz figures came from there (Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Billy Strayhorn and Roy Eldridge are but a few of many examples), Gene Kelly came from there, the support system for the arts is vibrant (such as the Afro Yaqui Music Collective, and City of Asylum, which hosted the release concert for this album, is a loving bosom for arts from elsewhere; there is a healthy support system in area universities, and in the case of this album, Figure It Out, The Heinz Endowments made possible a project with a scope that many people in other cities might have considered impractical if not insane – 64 musicians, including some of Cuba’s musical elite, some of Pittsburgh’s underrecognized jazz artists and a couple of marquee names like Dave Weckl and Roger Humphries, bringing together serious Cuban music with serious North American jazz and funk. Multiple sessions, multiple studios, two countries, but one unifying concept –all of the compositions and arrangements are Hugo's (with collaborators on two of the tracks).
It’s fitting that Pittsburgh was the cradle of Billy Strayhorn, whose longtime “boss”, Duke Ellington, famously wrote “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind." Since marketers and critics won’t accept “Good Music” as a label, Latin Jazz probably works better than anything else, but it’s so much more, as Hugo himself would be the first to insist. You’ll just have to Figure It Out on your own while you listen.

Bill Tilford
From the Isle of Music and TIMBA (dot com)