Ahead of his turning 70 next month Dionisio Jesús Chucho Valdés Rodríguez – known to everyone as Chucho Valdés – is to play London club dates with his group the Afro-Cuban Messengers.

Dates are now confirmed for the Floridita restaurant venue on Wardour Street in Soho on Thursday 29 September, and for the two nights following at Docklands club Boisdale of Canary Wharf, playing there on Friday 30 September and Saturday 1 October. Floridita is on the site of the renowned Marquee club that opened on the street in 1964 having moved there from Oxford Street. The Boisdale restaurant and venue at Cabot Place, which opened in April and is a London Jazz Festival venue in November, is the third and biggest of founder Ranald MacDonald’s Boisdale restaurants, adding to the existing Belgravia and Bishopsgate premises that also host jazz.

The great Afro-Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés (pictured above) has been coming to the UK for many years as a leader of his own groups and with seminal latin-jazz band Irakere and these three pre-birthday shows mark a special return. The son of piano teacher/singer Pilar Rodríguez and bandleader Bebo Valdés, whose music last year was at the heart of the critically acclaimed animated film Chico and Rita, Chucho Valdés founded Irakere in 1972. During his career he has won five Grammy awards, and three Latin Grammys, most recently this year for the album Chucho’s Steps featuring 11-minute opener ‘Zawinul’s Mambo’, a tip of the hat to Weather Report’s ‘Birdland’.

Born in Quivicán near San Antonio de Los Banõs in Cuba, Valdés directed his father’s band as a teenager, studied at the Municipal Music Conservatory of Havana, and in the late-1950s worked as a pianist at the Havana Riviera Hotel and in theatres. In 1967 he played in the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna with trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and clarinettist Paquito d’Rivera six years later establishing Irakere, becoming musical director in 1974 and its leader in the early-1980s. During that decade Irakere were resident in Ronnie Scott’s for annual month-long hugely popular visits and also recorded at the club. In Cuba, Valdés has been chair of the organising committee of the International Jazz Plaza festival in Havana and his many compositions include ‘Estella a las Estrellas’ and ‘100 años de juventud' and solo albums such as Live At The Village Vanguard for Blue Note recorded at the end of the 1990s.

– Stephen Graham

For more info and to book go to www.floridita.co.uk/london and www.boisdale.co.uk