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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.

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.