expectations early, for sooner or later they will be made irrelevant.

And if afterwards in the daze your consciousness has become, you're not quite sure what you have just experienced, trust the throbbing in your soul. It will have just returned elated from an astonishing encounter.

Chucho Valdes is a towering genius. If the gods have lavished a prodigiously huge gift of talent upon him then he no less has responded with humility, humour, astonishing inventiveness and an encyclopaedic awareness of everything a piano can do.

At the end of Friday night's Bermuda Festival concert the audience is on it's feet demanding and receiving two encore pieces. It is a triumph over somewhat deflated expectations, language barriers, and bureaucratic niggardliness.

A lone giant of a man approaches a new Steinway piano on a stage lit by a red spot and makes magic. He begins with the Gershwin tune `Embraceable You'. He is a big man and you expect strength, and when he hits the pedal octave B flat near the end of the first chorus you hear it. What surprises is the incremental crescendo that gets him there after a quiet beginning in the middle range of the piano, played with assured mastery of touch.

In the subsequent choruses you hear what will be the hallmarks of his performance writ small; cantabile playing, balance and elegant harmonic solution. Grace. Feeling. Rippling arpeggiated passages in contrary motion, shapely scalic passages that end in sumptuous open voiced chords. The sound is simply ravishing.

`Caravan' is next in a bright quirky tempo. Against an accompanying bass figure he pours out liquid chromatic tropes of astonishing rapidity. Then there is an exquisitely felt `Besame Mucho'. This is becoming a searching examination of both the instrument and its player. A notion enters this listener's mind -- of a curious boy playing with sand, letting it fall in a stream from his fingers and the stream turning suddenly to jewels at a whim, and back to sand again. It is as if the sand itself is astonished at its own transformation. So it must be for the sound streaming from the hands of this magician.

Next an Ellington/Strayhorn blues gets turned inside out, with references to different stylists; Basie, Fatha Hines. `Guantanamera', a sabor cubana, and `Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' affectingly played, getting into an angry torrent of layers of sound and a profusion of notes, only to have the melody emerge as from a furnace, refined into a filigreed thread of gold. The drama. `Somewhere over the Rainbow' with fresh altered harmonies that lead you astray until you come to a cadence by a new harmonic way, feeling as a lost wonderer might, coming upon a familiar corner just when he is sure he's well and truly lost.

You feel the old song is refreshed by this treatment.

This set ends with `Yesterdays' begun with a touch as light a souffle. Then Valdes is playing with it, inventing modulating sequences as a bridge to a hefty quote from Beethoven's `Pathetique' Sonata, then a substantial quote of a Bach fugue.

Valdes opens the second set with `Blue Monk', his bow tie appropriately askew for a Thelonius Monk composition. He qoutes Monk with aural mimetic certitude, before going on the play a history of the blues. In the course of this part of the programme he refers to Debussey's `Claire du Lune', a Bach two-part invention, the opening motif of Schumman's Piano Concerto in A, The Flight of Rimsky-Karsakov's `Flight of the Bumble Bee' among others I no doubt miss.

There is a magical tour de force on Cole Porter's `Just One of Those Things' is which he plays in several pianitic styles -- including `Swing' and 'Salsa' -- and inhuman tempi, exulting in the pyrotechnic brilliance. Showboating for fun. The audience loves it. There is a crystalline interpretation of `Over The Rainbow', that takes you down reharmonised musical avenues until you come suddenly upon a cadence, as a confused pedestrian might unexpectedly happen upon a familiar corner in wonder and relief. The song itself seems refreshed.Then follows Gerswin's Liz,s a gem of rapid stride playing with witty nods to past masters. He ends a Cuban folk song, appropriately, since Bach transformed this folk song with -- Jesu Joy of man's Desiring. You wonder if the pianist is punning, musically, on his own name -- Jesus. He certainly is a joy to listen to.

Valdes says often in interviews these days that he wants to spend less time composing and arranging and more time just playing the piano, especially solo.

The manner in which he gets his wish tonight leaves some patrons disappointed, one can surmise from the few empty seats. Fans who know his solo work by recording won't have been phased my his having to do the gig solo. They will have expected something extraordinary to happen.

Something has. A prodigy of improvisation has allowed us in on the moments of instant and constant creation that is jazz, and astonished us. We are profoundly grateful.

Ron Lightbourne