Imagine: you're a world class concert pianist, the conservatory-educated heir of an eminent musical family, celebrated world-wide as a virtuosic, daring, innovative bandleader since your late teens. Having turned 30, you've become acclaimed as an ever-more accomplished composer and rhapsodic improviser. But you can't visit, much less perform, in the United States of America.

You're Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette and your native Cuba's most renown musicians are your mentors. Your recordings--thrilling live sets from the great European and Japanese jazz festivals and artful studio sessions--have been embraced by enthusiastic listeners and respected critics alike. Your only enemy is the U.S. economic blockade, enforced against your country as the result of a political feud dating from before you were born.

Imagine intense lobbying on your behalf of the U.S. State Department by Dizzy's widow Lorraine, respected American recording industry executives and artists led by Wynton Marsalis, who among his other activities is artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center--and that you've suddenly scheduled to present an evening-long concert with your regular ensemble and special guests to end the season of New York City's most prestigious jazz series. Tickets for Lincoln Center's jewelbox Alice Tully Hall sell out.

You begin your concert at the grand piano, alone and pressing gently as the wind stirs a harp, somehow evoking delicate belltones from your keyboard. "Imagine," John Lennon's utopian reverie, emerges. Jericho's wall falls.

Rubalcaba's dream came true on May 14, 1993, the date of his professional U.S. concert debut. It's all documented and relived on Imagine: Gonzalo Rubalcaba In the USA, his seventh album for Blue Note Records.

Starting with his unaccompanied "Imagine" (deja vu, as this rendition was recorded before an invited audience in Capitol Records' Hollywood Studios in June 1994), on with "First Song," from the historic Lincoln Center concert itself, featuring Rubalcaba, bassist Haden and drummer DeJohnette absorbed in the level of musical empathy that transcends barriers rather than being blocked by them, and continuing with Rubalcaba's boldly brilliant "Contagio," which his compatriots Reynaldo Melian (trumpet), Felipe Carbera (electric bass) and Julio Barreto (drums) tore through both at Lincoln Center and the next year at UCLA's Wadsworth Theatre--here's proof that after Rubalcaba's American debut the walls did tumble. In 1994, Rubalcaba--still a Cuban citizen but identified as a legal resident of the Dominican Republic--was "unblocked" by the U.S. State Department, so he can visit and perform stateside by application of conventional immigrantion procedures.

This is to all music lovers' benefit because Rubalcaba demonstrates on Imagine, as he has on all his recorded productions since 1990's Blue Note debut Discovery: Live at Montreux, an incomparable personal and modern jazz sensibility. His music is rooted in Afro/Euro-Caribbean culture and links the 19th century romantic pianism of Chopin and Liszt with son montuno and the cha-cha, stretching beyond Latin jazz as pronounced by Diz, Chano Pozo, Machito, Irakere and Chico Hamilton, embracing the sophisticated influences of McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and iconoclasts on the order of Miles Davis.

Whether approaching bebop or pop ballads, free modalism or electro-acoustic world music, Rubalcaba is a stunning artist who makes every melody he touches his own. Among his hallmarks are an incomparable dynamic sensitivity, imaginatively dramatic recastings of songs' structures, and the harmonic security to linger over a single pitch, probing it percussively, as well as spilling out immeasurably long phrases that resolve with a sigh. Rubalcaba's ensemble scores are often complex and his own statements may seem expansive to abstraction, yet his music is always rhythmical, grounded and compelling. He's a generous, attentive accompanist; in solos such as "Circuito II," he brings his dimensions of subtle thought to light; and he consistently invests such standard Latin repertoire as "Perfidia" with credible fresh feeling.

Born May 27, 1963 in Havana, Gonzalo Julio Gonzales Ponseca Rubalcaba is the son of Guilhermo Rubalcaba, who was pianist in Enrique Jorrin's Orchestra and elsewhere, and grandson of trombonist-composer Jacobo Gonzalez Rubalcaba, whose immortal danzones include "El Cadete Constitucional" and "Linda Mercedes." Originally drawn to the drums, Rubalcaba commenced formal piano studies at age 9, studied both and percussion at the Amadeo Roldan Conservatory, and earned his degree in music composition from Havana's Institute of Fine Arts.

A protégé of Frank Emilio, Chucho Valdez and Paquito D'Rivera, among those musicians who made the scene at the Havana night club Johnny Drink, Rubalcaba played at dances, parties and recitals organized by the Cuban Ministry of Culture during his mid-teens, touring France and Africa with Orquesta Aragon in 1980. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie discovered him at the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival of February 1985 (their subsequent album on Engrem Records has not been released outside Cuba, but Rubalcaba was a pall-bearer at Gillespie's funeral in 1993). In 1985, Gonzalo introduced Grupo Projecto (with Melian and Carbero of his current band) at Holland's North Sea Jazz Festival, the Berlin Jazz Festival and the London club Ronnie Scotts.

His international profile gained a considerable boost from his surprise appearance with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian at the 1990 Montreux Jazz Festival, issued on record by Blue Note as Discovery. Rubalcaba followed that up with The Blessing, studio sessions in trio with Haden and DeJohnette recorded in Toronto; Images, with DeJohnette and bassist John Pattituci from the Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival of 1991; Suite 4 y 20, from spring 1992 studio sessions in Madrid, Spain; Rapsodia, recorded in Woodstock Karnizawa studio in Japan during November '92; and Diz, a dedication to the bebop founder featuring bassist Ron Carter and drummer Julio Barreto, released in 1994. Rubalcaba enjoyed his first New York club stand of a week with bassist Carter and drummer Idris Muhammad at the Blue Note in Spring '95. Rubalcaba was invited to give a solo performance on the world-wide telecast of the Grammy Awards, in support of his Best Jazz Small Group Album nomination for Rapsodia.

"It's very important for me to have a connection with musicians in the States," Rubalcaba has said. "I want to learn from them. I also want to present myself there, and perhaps create a level of integration within my music and the music of jazz." Imagine--what Gonzalo Rubalcaba has dared to dream and achieve by age 34. Realize: he's still on his way.

Blue Note Records