Top Stop Music is thrilled to announce the September 15th, 2023 release of Borrowed Roses, the new release from GRAMMY Award-winning master pianist and song interpreter Gonzalo Rubalcaba.

The latest in his expansive discography, Borrowed Roses is an evocative solo venture, with Rubalcaba offering his distinctive take on twelve standards and popular songs.

Borrowed Roses is Rubalcaba’s third solo piano album, and his first-ever devoted entirely to the canons of the Great American and Great Jazz Songbooks.

Not that he’s unfamiliar with either idiom: Rubalcaba’s very first album, recorded in Havana in 1986 with his pioneering Grupo Proyecto, included an intense arrangement of “Green Dolphin Street” while his Blue Note/Somethin’ Else discography of the 1990s includes a vertiginous cross-cultural homage to bebop with Ron Carter and Julio Barreto (Diz), and virtuosic interpretations of signpost songs like “All The Things You Are,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” “Yesterdays,” “Caravan,” “Giant Steps” and, most famously, an “Autumn Leaves” with John Patitucci and Jack DeJohnette at the 1991 Mount Fuji Jazz Festival.

1. Chelsea Bridge
2. Summertime
3. Someone To Watch Over Me
4. Take Five
5. Here There and Everywhere
6. Windows
7. Lush Life
8. Night and Day
9. In a Sentimental Mood
10. Very Early
11. Do It Again
12. Shape of My Heart

With the idea for this new album having been first conceived in 2019, but was put on hold due to the pandemic, it opens here on the low slung Chelsea Bridge and the languishing Summertime and then proceeds to bring us the ornate Someone To Watch Over Me, the quietly fervent Take Five and then we get some pure, unadulterated gossamer found within Here There and Everywhere.

Along next is the softly sparkling Windows and the late night soiree of Lush Life and they are backed seamlessly by the playful Night and Day, a clutched stillness now found within In a Sentimental Mood, the album rounding out on the perky Very Early, the impassioned Do It Again, closing on the exquisite Shape of My Heart.

Now, with the evocatively titled Borrowed Roses, Rubalcaba has created a masterpiece in response to a well-conceived proposition. It came from Gregory Elias, the proprietor of Top Stop Music, who recruited Rubalcaba to play on Aymée Nuviola’s Best Tropical Grammy-winning 2019 release Journey Through Cuban Music and, in 2020, released their kinetic, Grammy-nominated Viento Y Tiempo: Live at Blue Note Tokyo collaboration, which preceded their sublime voice-piano duo, Live in Marciac, issued by Rubalcaba on his imprint label 5Passion, which won the 2022 Latin Grammy.

“I have followed Gonzalo for many years,” says Elias, a drummer and lyricist as a young man, before he entered the worlds of law and finance. “There are other piano players from Cuba who are immensely talented, but he is one of a kind. Perhaps because he’s lived for so long in America, he’s absorbed and assimilated a lot of genres from abroad and combined them with his Cuban education. I wanted him to do something with songs that are evergreens, that matter to the American public, whether it’s jazz or not.”

Spotify Purchase Link

www.gonzalorubalcaba.com