At times during his monthly performances at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, Cuban-born Nachito Herrera seems less intent on playing the piano than on consuming it—greedily, octave after octave—his thick, muscular fingers tenderizing the keys under a barrage of powerful yet precise blows, his stocky frame bouncing up and down on the bench like a little boy waiting to rip open presents on Christmas morning. This is the Nachito described as “Explosive. Crowd pleasing … Jaw-droppingly good” by music critic Tom Surowicz in the Minneapolis StarTribune.
But there’s another side to Herrera’s playing, a dimension that reflects decades of formal training in classical music. The delicate lyricism and sensitivity he brings to the passages of, say, Bach or Chopin, he weaves unexpectedly into jazz medleys, as he did in a recent show dedicated to the music of Duke Ellington. This is the Nachito Herrera whose virtuoso riffs moved Latin Beat Magazine’s Jesse “Chuy” Varela to marvel at Herrera’s “unbridled freedom,” at the “solos that can melt snow off the sidewalk.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Varela declares, that Herrera’s music is “coming from St. Paul, Minnesota, and not La Habana, Cuba.
Hard indeed.
Long day’s journey to White Bear Lake
Herrera’s story has a fairy-tale quality to it—a gifted protagonist rescued from the grip of some dark force by a fairy godmother. Only in this case, the fairy godmother was a fairy godfather: Lowell Pickett, owner and founder of the Dakota. It wasn’t Pickett who first brought Herrera to Minnesota, but he’s largely responsible for the fact that this Latin jazz prodigy now resides among stolid, northern European types in a modest ranch-style house in White Bear Lake.
Like the nineteenth-century graduates of the traditional atelier system in France, who went on to invent modern art, Herrera earned his chops the old-fashioned way, studying classical piano for 16 years before making his name in jazz.
The pianist was born Ignacio Herrera (“Nachito” is the diminutive of “Ignacio”) on May 31, 1966, in Santa Clara, his mother’s small Cuban hometown. His parents, Ignacio and Romelia, met in medical school but never became doctors. Both were pianists and outstanding musicians in their own right. As Nachito puts it, “My mother had very good ears.”
Like his son, Herrera’s father was a performer, who also conducted, arranged, and composed music. His father’s pursuit of a music career led to the family’s move, not long after Nachito was born, to a suburb of Havana offering many more performance venues and opportunities than Santa Clara. The family home was also Ignacio’s rehearsal space, and it was here that Nachito first encountered many of the greats of the Cuban jazz world.
“Through my father, I was exposed to all different styles of music,” Herrera recalls. “He had working relationships with Rubén González, Chucho Valdés, Joseito Gonzales, and the like. Watching them perform, I realized I would be able to play classical and Cuban music, too, if I wanted.”
At the age of five, Nachito was enrolled in one of Cuba’s top music schools. From there he went on to the National School of Art, a highly competitive institution, and then to the Superior Institute of Art, where he studied piano with a focus on classical training and technique. “Chopin, Liszt, Bach, Gershwin, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, you name it,” he says. “We were immersed in them all.” Even before he finished school, his prodigious talents stood out. Herrera’s first taste of fame came at the age of twelve, when he performed Rachmaninoff’s notoriously difficult “Piano Concerto No. 2” with the Havana Symphony Orchestra. Today, his extensive classical training is evident even when he’s playing jazz, in the extraordinary touch and precision he brings to the music’s quiet moments.
After graduation from the Superior Institute of Art, Herrera toured with a number of jazz groups and served as musical director of the Tropicana Club in Havana. His big break came in 1996, when the lead pianist of ¡Cubanismo!, Cuba’s foremost Latin jazz ensemble, fell ill; Herrera was asked to sit in for him at the Montréal Jazz Festival and on a subsequent two-week tour of Europe. A year or so later, he ended up as the troupe’s musical director, traveling around the world (the group performed in the U.S. two or three times a year) as well as arranging music for the ensemble. In the meantime, he met and married Aurora Gonzales, a law student at Havana University. The couple has two children—sixteen-year-old Mirdalys, a vocalist who regularly performs with her father, and David, age twelve.