Born and raised in Havana, where his father was renowned Afro-Cuban jazz trumpeter Fabian Gonzalez, he had an epiphany at 13 years of age while performing for his family. “I saw that if I played this,” he says, singing a melancholy, minor key phrase, “they would become quiet and reflective and kind of sad. And when I did this,” singing the same melodic line transposed to a major key and set to a spritely Afro-Cuban groove, “people would be dancing and smiling. I realized I could really develop my music to touch people’s honest emotions.”

Coming up on a Cuban scene rife with transcendent keyboard talent, he decided to carve his own path as a composer and arranger. “That saved my life, finding my voice through my writing and understanding what made me different,” Gonzalez says. “There are so many pianists out there. I understood if I wanted to be a leader, I also needed to be a creator.”

Including his father, he had the best role models such as his mentor vocalist/percussionist Oscar Valdés, a founding member of the seminal Cuban fusion band Irakere. Recognizing his prodigious talent, Valdés hired the 16-year-old Gonzalez for his groundbreaking new band Diakara. Winning first place for composition in 2005’s JoJazz Festival in Havana earned Gonzalez a record deal with Cuba’s national label Colibri, and his debut release Habana enTRANCE won three Cubadisco Awards (the nation’s equivalent of a GRAMMY Award).

He was deep into studies of classical composition and orchestration at Havana’s prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) when his rapidly rising reputation brought Gonzalez to the attention of piano legend Chucho Valdés – who helped him prepare for Berklee College of Music’s full-freight scholarship audition. Gonzalez won a highly coveted spot, becoming the first Cuban national to attend Berklee on a Presidential Scholarship. Valdés continued to keep a close eye on him, introducing Gonzalez to the New York scene in 2012 as part of Carnegie Hall’s “Voices From Latin America” series.