es que la llevo de chiquito ni lo sueñe
yo no imito esto es porque yo tengo calle

The chain of events that led to the formation of El Pikete was set in motion in the early 90s by José Luis Cortés when he decided to champion the career of a young singer-songwriter for whom he coined the apodo "Manolín, el médico de la salsa". For five years, "El médico" was arguably the most popular act in the history of Cuba, filling 90,000 seat sports stadiums and staying at the top of the charts month after month.

El Médico's young band included four future members of El Pikete: Alexis "Mipa" Cuesta, Victoriano Nápoles, Dileivys "El Niche" Romero and Jeáns Valdés. The band was like a family -- working, rehearsing and traveling together -- even living together in Colombia for a period of months. Like all the best timba, Manolín's now-classic repertoire was a deeply collaborative process, involving many of the band's musicians, but only one song ever listed a composer other than Manolín: Un tipo loco (source), written by today's featured Piketero, Jeáns Valdés. An 11-minute 1995 performance of that song inspired Ilán Greenfield to write one of timba.com's best articles -- a great place to start to get a sense "El Médico-manía".

Manolín's band also included four other giants of the timba movement: Luis Bu, Chaka Nápoles, and the "Pututi" brothers, Angel and Alexis Arce. Together, this family of musicians produced an astounding body of work that continues to profoundly influence the music of every other important timba band. In 1999, they moved en masse to Miami, where they discovered that neither they nor any of the other expatriate timberos were able to rekindle the magical collaborative chemistry that came so effortlessly in the challenging but nurturing ambience of the Havana lifestyle. The pages of La última chronicle a series of promising combinations of these musicians, and others, as they attempted to cater to the North American market and live the inherently-counterproductive lifestyle of North American musicians. Their frustration can be measured by the decline in Manolín's output. He and his band produced 4 historic albums between 1995 and 1998. Since arriving in Miami, he's written two great songs and a handful of promising coros. Timba fans can amuse themselves for hours speculating on the reasons, but I can explain it all with one word ... collaboration ... or the lack thereof.

By 2006, the future Piketeros had finally ... ¡por fin! ... suffered through enough of the "timba graveyard" approach to try a bold new experiment -- to put together a family of musicians and patiently create a new repertoire -- together -- from scratch -- the way they did it in Havana. The result of that experiment, El Pikete, can rightly be called the most Cuban band ever to be formed outside of Cuba. They finally stopped trying to play other genres and please other people and returned to playing the music that pleased them. At first it was simply spirited versions of their favorite cover tunes, like Pupy's De Timba a Pogolotti and Manolito's Locos por mi Habana. Even in those early days they quickly developed a buzz and a following -- a rare phenomenon in "the graveyard" -- and as they began to add original material, the Pikete experiment grew from a buzz to a revelation. They now have over a dozen original songs -- all arranged and rehearsed in the collaborative fashion that worked so well for them in Cuba -- and all bursting with the kind of creative hooks and intricate nuances that marked the brilliant work of their Havana period.

Today we'll take a look at one of the group's principal creative forces - saxophonist, composer and arranger, Jeáns Valdés.

Any study of El Pikete's style must of course start with their work with Manolín. Among Jeáns Valdés' other arrangements for that group are such classics as Si te vas conmigo (he also wrote the song) and Ella no vale nada (source), but the Valdés/Manolín collaboration with the strongest connection to El Pikete's new style is Todo fue mental from the 1997 masterpiece De buena fe. Manolín never used strings in concert, opting for the 2-trumpet, 2-sax instrumentation of his mentor, El Tosco, but on the studio recording of Todo fue mental, the band experimented with the idea of borrowing the string guajeo from the charanga format, an approach which was later much more fully developed in El Pikete's new sound.