The story that gets told about Rubalcaba usually starts with Charlie Haden and Dizzy Gillespie hearing him in Havana and losing their minds a little. This was the early 1980s, Cuba was still mostly closed off from American jazz audiences, and here was this kid playing piano with a level of control that made seasoned musicians sit up straight. Haden in particular became a champion and later a close collaborator, which mattered a lot given the political headaches involved in getting a Cuban musician any kind of visibility in the States.

What makes Rubalcaba worth your time isn't just the speed of his hands, though that's real and it's considerable. It's how he uses that technique. He came up steeped in Afro-Cuban rhythm — the clave is in his bones — but he also spent years in classical training, and you can hear both things arguing and agreeing with each other constantly. He'll drop into a passage that sounds like McCoy Tyner rebuilding a chord from the inside out, then pivot into something with the rhythmic complexity of a rumba, then land somewhere that sounds almost like Chopin got lost on his way to a Havana nightclub. It's dense music sometimes. It rewards patience.

His family gave him no other option, really. His father Guillermo Rubalcaba led dance bands, his grandfather Jacobo was a respected danzón composer, and Gonzalo grew up around musicians the way other kids grow up around uncles who fix cars. He trained on percussion before piano, which probably explains why his left hand does things that most pianists' left hands don't bother attempting.

Once he left Cuba — first for the Dominican Republic, later settling in South Florida in the mid-1990s — his recording career picked up real momentum. Discovery: Live at Montreux (1990) and The Blessing (1991) on Blue Note introduced him properly to American listeners, and the Haden connection kept paying off: their duo record Nocturne (2001) won a Grammy, and Land of the Sun (2006), another Haden collaboration built around Mexican and Cuban songs, picked one up too. He's made plenty of records that lean more toward straight solo piano exploration, and those are worth seeking out if you want to hear him without the rhythm section pulling him back toward the dance floor.

I wouldn't call him a revolutionary — he didn't invent a new language the way some pianists did. What he did was take two traditions that don't always talk to each other, Cuban popular music and American jazz harmony, and refuse to pick a side. Put on The Blessing (1991) some night when you want piano playing that's technically stunning but never cold. That's the whole appeal, really — control without stiffness, fire without mess.