Herrera first set eyes on Minnesota when ¡Cubanismo! played the Ordway in 1998. It was a fateful gig. The Minnesota History Theatre invited him to serve as musical director for an original production called Los Rumbaleros, a tribute to the Rangels, a Mexican family of musicians who settled on St. Paul’s West Side. Herrera loved doing the show. But things took a nasty turn.
A local salsa group (which Herrera asks not be identified because of continuing bad blood) induced Herrera—who at the time could read and speak very little English—to sign a contract that, in his words, turned him into “their slave.” Under the terms of the agreement,
Herrera could not perform on his own or with any other group, and the P3 visa the band had arranged for him severely limited how much he could earn and where he could live. The terms of the visa also made it all but impossible for him to bring his family, for whom he pined, to the U.S. In the end, the former child prodigy and rising star of the Cuban jazz scene found himself sleeping on a couch and performing at less-than-glamorous venues.
It was at one such gig that Herrera came to the attention of Lowell Pickett. “I had kind of heard him,” Pickett admits, “but his career was not something I tracked consciously.”
That state of affairs changed dramatically in June 2001, when Pickett attended a wedding reception featuring the salsa band that was holding Herrera in thrall. There was, to Pickett’s mind, nothing particularly noteworthy about the group until the first extended instrumental break. Then something startling occurred.
“It was almost like seeing a caged tiger released, watching this pianist explode during the break,” he recalls. “Here was this amazing talent boxed in by these tight salsa arrangements.”
Pickett made some inquiries into Herrera’s plight, invited him to perform at the Dakota, and arranged for an old friend, Laura Danielson—an immigration lawyer specializing in representing artists and entertainers—to take on his case. Things between Herrera and Pickett, on the one hand, and the salsa group on the other, “got very ugly at one point—strangely ugly,” Pickett says. Ultimately, Danielson and her legal team were able to secure an O1 visa for Herrera (a category limited to foreign artists of “exceptional ability”) with the aid of a petition that included testimonials and accolades from organizations and individuals from around Cuba and the United States. Early in 2003, an ecstatic Nachito Herrera, who hadn’t seen his wife and kids for five years, met his family at the airport.
“It had been a really hard time for me,” Herrera says of his years in the visa wilderness. “Sometimes I thought I might never see my family again. Now, I don’t want to think about it too much anymore. I want to look to the future instead.”
House afire
Today, Nachito Herrera is still acclimating himself to Minnesota but has no plans to live elsewhere in the U.S. (or to return to his native Cuba), even though he would undoubtedly be better known if he lived in, say, Chicago or New York. Besides his regular gig at the Dakota, he makes frequent appearances elsewhere, performing at this year’s Sommerfest and staging a concert of classical Cuban piano music at Orchestra Hall. Meanwhile, he’s released three critically acclaimed albums, Live at the Dakota (2002), Bembé En Mi Casa (2005), and Live at the Dakota 2 (2006). The feeling among knowledgeable observers is that it’s only a matter of time, and not much time, before Herrera breaks into the larger mainstream and becomes as much a byword in the Latin jazz scene as Chucho Valdés or Rubén González or the Buena Vista Social Club. The reason’s not hard to understand. He isn’t just a great pianist, he’s a charismatic stage presence as well.
In private, Herrera is surprisingly soft-spoken, almost reticent. With his stocky frame and heavily accented English, he could be the owner-operator of some out-of–the-way bodega in Little Havana. But he’s transformed into a roaring dynamo the instant he steps into the lights. His Dakota sets, scheduled to last an hour to ninety minutes, invariably feature two hours or more of almost unbearably passionate, high-octane jazz improvisation, interrupted only briefly when Herrera calls on the audience to give it up for members of his ensemble. When the set finally does come to an end, Herrera departs the stage soaked in sweat but with a spring in his step, like a winning boxer eager to go another ten rounds.
“He knocked everybody out,” avers Carol Janowicz, an official at Michigan’s Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. Herrera appeared at the fest, held at the Kalamazoo Civic Auditorium, for the first time last spring. “You couldn’t see his hands move—they were just a blur! He was totally in command of the keyboard and had everyone absolutely mesmerized.”
Or as the headline in the next day’s Kalamazoo Gazette concisely summed it up: “Cuban jazz pianist Nachito Herrera and band set Civic afire.”
NOTE: Nachito will play this weekend at the Dakota.
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