James Galway and members of Tiempo Libre

AN Irishman and seven Cubans walk into a bar. That’s no joke and there’s no punchline but there is a new album. The Irishman is virtuoso flautist James Galway and the Cubans are the members of Tiempo Libre, the hot Florida-based band that plays timba, an exuberant fusion of Latin jazz and Cuban son.

Their collaboration, O’Reilly Street, is released next week, and it includes Latin, jazz and classical music. Claude Bolling’s Jazz Suites and Baroque and Blue get the Afro-Cuban treatment, there’s a new arrangement of Bach’s Badinerie, plus new compositions by Tiempo Libre’s musical director and pianist, Jorge Gomez.

How did a 67-year-old Irish flautist come to be mixing it up with these young Cubans? Galway, speaking from his home in Switzerland, says it came about when his manager put him on the Tiempo Libre mailing list.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this is a great band and the piano player is particularly good,’ so last April I was in Florida and I got together with these guys.”

They bonded quickly, recorded a number and sent it to Sony, the label Galway had recently joined. With Galway’s 30 million sales behind him, Sony was happy to oblige. “They said, ‘OK, you guys are on, but we want it out by September,”’ says Galway, whose soft voice retains his Irish brogue, although Switzerland has been home since the 1970s.

It was already June the next time they got together, when Galway was performing with the Minnesota Orchestra in the US. “There’s a very famous jazz club right opposite (the concert hall in St Paul) there, and we played a set in there and got a standing ovation,” says Galway, still sounding fired up.

The musicians went straight to Canada to begin recording. “And we’d finished by the end of June. It’s the quickest turnaround I’d ever done on a recording,” he says.

“These guys are so good, the ensemble was so tight, it was just like playing with a really great string quartet. The difference is a lot of the things they do are improvised, and every time something was improvised it was always different and it was always amazing.”

The members of Tiempo Libre have known each other since childhood. They are classically trained musicians who studied at Cuba’s conservatories when listening to American songs on the radio was banned.

They formed the band in Miami in 2001, quickly became one of the hottest Latin groups in the US, were acclaimed in Europe and Asia and received Grammy nominations for their first two albums, Arroz con Mango in 2005 and Lo Que Esperabas in 2006.

Along with Gomez, Tiempo Libre’s members are singer Joaquin Diaz, trumpeter Raul Rodriguez Hernandez, Leandro Gonzalez on congas, Tebelio “Tony” Fonte on bass, Luis Beltran Castillo on saxophone and flute, and drummer Hilario Bell.

“I didn’t have any trouble jumping in with them. It’s a funny thing, it was an instant success,” Galway says. That’s probably down to his enthusiasm: “I still get a real kick out of performing, especially when things go all right, when things come together. I still enjoy performing, oh yeah, sure,” he says with alaugh.

Galway’s schedule of concerts, recordings, masterclasses, work for UNICEF and other humanitarian agencies and charities would break a lesser man. His concerts and more than 60 recordings are mainly classical, and many new flute works are commissioned by him and for him, including a concerto by Lowell Liebermann. There are some albums of popular music and in 1987 one of his most successful collaborations was with Irish folk band the Chieftains, James Galway and the Chieftains in Ireland.

“It was nice to play with a lot of Irish musicians and do the things that we all grew up doing, you know what I mean?” he says.

Galway was born in Belfast, but his background wasn’t Angela’s Ashes, all damp and gloom. “My mum played the piano and my dad played the accordion, and he also played the flute, and grandad also played the flute. And my grandad taught my Uncle Joe to play the flute and my Uncle Joe taught me,” he says, reeling it off like a ditty.

“There was a lot of music around in our street and in our district there were a lot who played amateur shows. There’s a perception of the Irish as singing, dancing and generally carousing, but it wasn’t like that, no. People did drink, but not to excess. My mum, for example, played Friday night at a women’s guild and there was no drinking there. And then Saturday and Sunday she played gigs around the place. Saturday it might have been like a social club for working-class people. So we’d get dragged along and we’d get an orange juice and think, ‘It can’t get better than this.”’

From a young age, the talented musician wanted to be a soloist, but was told “that only happens to violin players, or piano players or cello players”. (Galway doesn’t like the terms violinist, pianist and cellist. He especially doesn’t like flautist.)

“So I ended up going into an orchestra, and got an orchestra life up and running, culminating with the Berlin Philharmonic, but during all that time I was renting concert halls with a few colleagues and we would rent places like the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which is an 800-seater, and do all the Bach sonatas and things like that, very classy programs, and they were always sold out, so I was a sort of secret love of all the music buffs there.”

Galway says this not to big-note himself but to show that audiences for classical music are as strong as ever: “Most of my concerts are straightforward classical concerts. And they all sold out. My flute and piano recitals in England completely sell out. And the press, and the people who have the loudest voice on microphones, they’re always tearing classical music down. But wherever I go, there seems to be a whole horde of secret children bowing and scraping away, you know what I mean.

“And if you saw the happiness of these kids when they play together as an ensemble, it is a social thing. Not everybody wants to be Mick Jagger. There’s a lot of kids who do play piano, flute, clarinet.”

Two new recording projects are on the boil, he says. “My next recording is James Galway and friends, which involves me calling up people I know and asking if they’ll play on my record,” he says with quiet mischief. “A couple of heads like Eric Clapton and Elton John would do. I would play their music because they can’t play mine.”

And will the Irish-Cuban connection continue? “What I want to do with them is a tango album,” Galway says. “Because they would be really into it, more so than other musicians. You get a lot of people doing tango, but here are five people whose fathers were dancing the tango when they were courting their mothers. It’s in the blood.”

O’Reilly Street will be released on September 16.

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