Bebo Valdés is more than the ranking patriarch of Cuban pianists: he is a living archive of the piano literature of Cuba, as this eponymously titled release amply demonstrates. More than simply a solo album—amazingly, his first ever—this release is a comprehensive survey of the grand sweep of Cuba's piano canon, a rich and storied tradition to which Valdés is heir and guardian.

Valdés (b. 1918) has only recently garnered renown outside Cuba, largely as a result of his appearance in the Fernando Trueba film Calle 54 (Miramax, 2001). It was Trueba who instigated this recording, insisting to Valdés that every pianist who takes pride in his work should make at least one solo album. Valdés, a modest man, expressed some doubt about his ability to carry properly the music minus a rhythm section. Obviously it was a needless concern, given the seemingly effortless manner in which he handles the complex polyrhythms that are a hallmark of Cuban music.

"La Caridad," for example, calls for the left hand to play a 2/4 rhythm while the right hand plays in 3/4 time. Other songs display the independence of hands needed for a pianist to synthesize the Africanized counter-rhythms of the Cuban dance orchestra. In two guaguancós, "Consuélate" and "Cuba Linda," Valdés somehow manages convincingly to distill this format—which features three drummers, various lead vocalists and a responsive chorus—down to two hands on a keyboard.

Credited with playing a major role in the development of the mambo during the pre-Revolution years, Valdés is thought of as a jazz pianist and composer; he backed up Nat "King" Cole's best-selling 1958 album Cole Español, recorded in Havana, and was at one time the director of that city's famous Tropicana Club. However, there is little here that will be recognizable as Afro-Cuban jazz to most American ears.

Beginning with the mincing "La Caridad," which evokes an aristocratic French salon far more than a steamy Caribbean nightclub, this album is a survey of Cuba's classical music. In Calle 54, Valdés showed his grasp of the long view in Cuban music while discussing this French component, one little-recognized in the United States.

It's nothing new for prominent American and European jazz pianists to explore classical piano. However, when done from a Cuban perspective, the result is a unique confluence of the cultivated and the popular that might, for some, call George Gershwin to mind. This is no mere coincidence; Valdés recalls seeing him perform in Havana in 1932, a visit which inspired Gershwin to write the "Cuban Overture" (from which Valdés quotes four bars in "échale Sálsita"). This was the beginning of a period of tremendous ferment in Cuban music extending through the 1940s, when composers such as Valdés freed the mambo's syncopation from the danzón structure with innovative jazz arrangements.

Here, thirteen pieces exemplifying Cuba's major musical genres, starting with the emergence of a recognizably Cuban music in the mid-19th Century, are presented more or less chronologically—contradanza, danza, danzón, bolero, guaguancó. A patriarchy of composers is on display: Manuel Saumell Robredo, the "father of Cuban music"; Ignazio Cervantes, "father of the Cuban danza"; Sindo Garay, "a father of the bolero." Valdés' pianistic pantheon also includes José White, Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Jorge Anckerman, Guillermo Castillo, Antonio Romeu, Ernesto Lecuona, Ignacio Piñeiro, Moisés Simón, Silvestre Méndez and Virgilio Marti.

Just as this album cannot really be classified as jazz, neither can it be regarded as particularly joyous, either. Rather, it is a musical chronicle of old age and exile, longing and loss. "This album represents nostalgia for things, people and places that no longer exist, for lost youth, for lost loves, for a world that, if it has not already disappeared, is fast slipping away," writes Valdés in his liner notes, which are both scholarly and poignant. "It is an honour for me to represent my dear Cuba at the end of my life."

Valdés, who was married to Pilar Valdéz and is the father of pianist Chucho Valdés, left Cuba for Mexico in the early 1960s and briefly lived in the United States before moving to Sweden, where he has resided ever since with his second wife and two daughters. The penultimate track, "Oleaja," is the sole Valdés composition on the album, and he writes that it might well have been its finale. Instead, he decided to append what he describes as an epilogue, "Cuba Linda" by Marti, whom he terms one of the greatest rumba composers ever. The song's lyrics he quotes are heartbreaking to anyone familiar with homesickness: "Cuba, my life's beauty/I will always remember you, beautiful Cuba; How I would love to see you now ..."