Gonzalo Rubalcaba

Pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba was already a young phenom with a budding career in his native Cuba when he was discovered by Dizzy Gillespie in 1985. Since then, Piano & Keyboard Magazine selected him in 1999 as one of the great pianists of the 20th century, alongside figures such as Glenn Gould and Bill Evans. To date, Rubalcaba has won five Grammy Awards (for a total of 21 Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations) and four Latin Grammys. At this writing he has also been nominated for a 2026 Best Latin Jazz Album of the Year Grammy Award for his recent release: A Tribute to Benny Moré and Nat King Cole. Rubalcaba was born in 1963 in a musical family in Havana. His father, pianist, composer and bandleader Guillermo Rubalcaba, had also played in the orchestra of Enrique Jorrín, the creator of cha-cha-cha; his grandfather Jacobo Rubalcaba was the composer of classic danzones, and his two brothers are also musicians. Gonzalo, a child prodigy who by the age of 6 was playing drums in his father’s orchestra, started his formal training two years later, with piano as his main instrument. He graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in Havana, and by his mid–teens he was working steadily in Havana. Following graduation he stepped right into the life of the popular musician, touring Cuba, Europe, Africa and Asia with the fabled Orquesta Aragón and also as a sideman in jazz groups and, beginning in 1984, leading his own Afro-Cuban jazz rock fusion band, Grupo Proyecto. Encounters with Dizzy Gillespie and, in 1986, with Charlie Haden and then Blue Note Records president, Bruce Lundvall, set the stage for him to perform and record in the United States and Europe. Rubalcaba moved to the Dominican Republic in 1991 and settled in Miami in 1996. Rubalcaba joined the faculty of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in 2015. In 2020, he founded his own academy Rubalcademy, offering remote Masterclasses to musicians across the world.