Havana cool time: Cuban pianist Ramon Valle has relocated to Amsterdam and is really finding the sex in music.(Jazz)

Local identity is everything in jazz. It is a genre in which the ability to distinguish Asian from European and Caribbean from American players within the filet few bars of any given piece of music is pretty essential. Creating a sound that reflects your cultural specifies is essential, and maybe expatriation makes it even more so.

Cuban pianist Ramon Valle has been living in Amsterdam since the late Nineties and is intent on retaining a piece of his old home in his new home.

"I try to play jazz, for sure, but I don't want to lose lily accent," he says. "You hear me talking in English and you know straightaway that I might be Hispanic or Latin American.

"Then again I don't want people to like just that, because I try to also bring the flavour of my environment in my music. I want people to come into my world and find the real me."

European audiences have embraced the real Valle most heartily. No Escape, his latest album for the distinguished German independent ACT, home to Esbjorn Svensson among others, has met with nothing but glowing critical acclaim, as did its predecessor 2002's Danza Negra. Even the ubersenor of Cuban jazz himself, Chucho Valdes, described Valle as "perhaps the greatest talent among our young pianists."

Born in the small, but musically rich city of Holquin, trained at the prestigious Escuela Nacional in Havana and blooded in the ensemble Brujala, Valle has consciously dispensed with the characteristics readily associated with standard Latin-jazz. That means no congas, no clave, no coro.

The essence of his writing pertains largely to the jazz-classical continuum crafted by such ...