Roberto Fonseca has always been surrounded by music, from his family influences to playing with the Buena Vista greats. His life is far from static, he tells Arminta Wallace
He wears a leather fedora made for him by the French designer Agnès B. He has had a finger in every imaginable musical pie, from hip-hop to Latin jazz. On a scale of one to 10 his stage presence is reputed to hit the 11 mark, with reviewers regularly describing his style as "flamboyant" and "fiery"; and his new album, Zamazu, has garnered him a fistful of critical acclaim.
Roberto Fonseca doesn't - to put it mildly - fit our standard picture of a pianist from Havana, all eighty-something feistiness and cha-cha-cha. He is, in fact, a thirty-something who's more tasty than feisty: think Thierry Henry in a sports vest. Yet he is Cuban to the core.
Which makes a conversation with him, on the phone from his home in Havana, something of a roller-coaster experience. Phone lines to Cuba are fragile, scratchy affairs straight out of a black-and-white CIA conspiracy movie. The fact that I get through on the first try is, apparently, something of a miracle. The fact that I can hear hardly anything of him - and that from his end, Fonseca seems to be able to hear little or nothing of me - is something of a drawback. But the very act of phoning Havana in a world where the US is once again rattling its anti-Castro sabres is in itself something of an act of defiance, so we persevere.
In an attempt to acclimatise to the hissing and spitting of static in my ear, I ask Fonseca what kind of weather they're having in downtown Havana at the moment. Well, his rumbling bass informs me, it's the rainy season. "So for now it's a sunny day - but after, it will be raining for sure." It's not, it transpires, a totally daft question. "I want to change the view of Cuban music in the world," Fonseca offers. "People think it's only about sunshine. A sunny day at the beach, you know? Everyone thinks Cuban people smoke cigars and drink mojitos all day. But Havana is a city which has a lot of colours. I want to show those colours in my music."
The album does exactly that. Though it's clearly rooted in a jazz idiom, it ranges across a wide variety of musical terrain. Aside from its eclecticism, what's most striking about Zamazuis its intensely personal quality. In a series of quirky liner notes Fonseca puts each piece of music in context, tracing the influences which led to its composition. And it's obvious that many of these influences are family ones. "Yeah," he says. "My family is the most important thing in my life - especially my mum. She's a choir singer and she was a dancer, and a guitar player."
Zamazuopens with the voice of Fonseca's mother, Mercedes Cortes Alfaro, singing a short excerpt from a popular folk Mass; it ends with a tune she helped him to compose. Another track, Así Baila Mi Madre, is a snapshot of spontaneous joy in which, as Fonseca explains, "the sound of the drums imitates the movement of my mother's hips and her happy spirit". As for the title track, it derives from a nonsense word attributed to Fonseca's niece Paola, who liked to use it to try and bamboozle people into thinking she could speak a foreign language. "I always want my music to have something of my loved ones," Fonseca writes. "They are the ones who animate me and enable my music to be a reflection of my life."
Theirs was, in truth, a house full of music. Fonseca's father was a drummer, as is his younger brother Emilio, who also guests on Zamazu; his older brother, Jesús, is a pianist. "Cuba," Fonseca observes wryly, "is a music factory." He himself began to play the drums at the age of four, only to switch to the piano when he was eight: but he has retained a distinctively robust style of pianism. "Playing the piano is like playing the drums," he insists. "I put the Afro-Cuban rhythms on the piano. That's why my playing is kind of percussive."
Zamazualso has its more contemplative side, reflecting Fonseca's training both as an academic - he is a qualified teacher with a degree in composition - and as a passionate believer in the Afro-Cuban Yoruba religion, which emphasises the healing power of music and the importance of spontaneity and playfulness. His love of melody stems from a childhood spent glued to the radio, listening to Beatles songs. As a teenager, his heroes were jazz pianists such as Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, while his brother turned him on to the world of American funk and soul. Clearly, it was an inspirational musical cocktail: in his first public performance, at Havana's prestigious Jazz Plaza festival, the 15-year-old Fonseca created a sensation.
He went on to form the group Temperamento with the saxophonist and clarinet player Javier Zalba, whose cool grooves provide several of the most delightful moments on Zamazu.As he experimented with various musical forms, Fonseca's career might have taken any number of turns. He composed the soundtrack for a French film, Black, and produced the album Un Montón De Cosasfor the hip-hop band Obsesión. His own album Elengocombined many of these influences, adding a touch of drum and bass and a large helping of Afro-Cuban dance music.
Shortly after it was recorded, however, a chance meeting in a recording studio turned Fonseca's life around. "I went to the studios to record Angá Díaz's album," he says, "and when I got there I saw many people who were legends to me. In two months my whole life changed." He was offered a position as support pianist to the great Ruben González, of Buena Vista Social Club fame. "Sharing the stage with him was a real dream," he says. "I'd just stay there, staring at him play, for hours." Fonseca was eventually to tour the world in various musical ensembles built around the Buena Vista stalwarts Omara Portuondo and Ibrahim Ferrer. He speaks fondly of the latter, who died in 2005, and with whom he developed a close musical and personal relationship. "It was wonderful because sometimes it felt like we were the one person, you know?" he says. "He was all the time helping me. I'm the first and last student of his school. And he taught me about life, too. The most important thing he taught me is that no matter how famous you are, you must never forget where you come from."
Ferrer is commemorated in the track El Nieto, in which the elderly songster's recorded voice provides the starting-point for an extended meditation with a dreamy, improvisatory feel. "The title mixes two words - el nino, the child, and el viejo, the old man," says Fonseca. "I really miss him," he adds. The last time Fonseca came to play in Ireland, it was with Ferrer. "So this time," he says, "I will try my best to . . ." A particularly vicious burst of static swallows his words. Nobody who interviews Fonseca by phone is likely to forget that where he comes from is Cuba. What will, though, be more interesting is to see where - musically - he goes from here. His blend of Afro-Cuban soul with Latin jazz artistry has already been hailed as the future of Cuban music. And it's a fair bet that when he's joined on stage by his band, they'll get the message across - loud and clear.
•The Roberto Fonseca Group play the Sugar Club, Dublin, on Wed, Nov 14
