Editor’s Picks – Best CDs of 2011
Some of my Favorite Recordings of 2011
by Danilo Navas – Editor
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Afro Bop Alliance – Una Más
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Poncho Sanchez & Terence Blanchard
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Chilcano – Madera Corazón
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Daniel López Infanzón Quinteto
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David Murray Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole en Español (Motéma Music – USA)Nat King Cole’s Latin influenced recordings of 1958 and 1962 were performed in both Spanish and Portuguese. Cole spoke neither, but sang the lyrics phonetically, maintaining his signature phrasing style. Although it sounded odd to native Spanish and Portuguese speakers, his obvious affection for the songs beloved world-wide by Latinos was accepted as it opened the door to a new audience. |
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Jovino Santos Neto – Currents
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Mario Adnet – More Jobim Jazz
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Miguel Zenón – Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (Marsalis Music – USA)Being a recipient of the coveted MacArthur Fellowship has given Miguel Zenón the freedom to pursue great projects. Alma Adentro is an extraordinary exploration of the Puerto Rican Songbook. The true soul of a nation reflected in its musical creations. The result has invaluable quality. Variations on a theme that are rooted in the tradition, elevating the standards to new musical heights. |
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Paquito D’Rivera & The Madrid Big Band – Clazz, Continental Latin Jazz (WEA – Spain)Todo esto ocurría en Febrero de 2011 de forma simultánea en Madrid y Barcelona. En el escenario uno de los más grandes músicos del mundo. Paquito D’Rivera, un genial saxofonista y clarinetista que nos encandiló a todos con su impresionante directo acompañado por La Madrid Big Band de 18 músicos que sonó con la espectacularidad que requería el momento… chumanceralatinjazz.blogspot.com |
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Sebastian Schunke – Life and Death
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Celebrating Emiliano Salvador and his Musical Legacy
NMC of US: 2011 American Eagle Awards
The National Music Council of the United States will be honoring Paquito D’Rivera, Nile Rodgers, and Peter Yarrow with its coveted American Eagle Award for lifetime contribution to the musical culture of our nation. The noontime luncheon ceremony will take place on June 8th at New York City’s Edison Ballroom. The public is invited. For ticket information, contact David Sanders at sandersd@montclair.edu or visit MusicCouncil.org for details.
The American music community will come together to honor Paquito D’Rivera, Nile Rodgers, and Peter Yarrow at the National Music Council’s 30th annual American Eagle Awards luncheon at New York’s Edison Ballroom on Wednesday, June 8th. The Council’s coveted American Eagle Award is presented each year in celebration of an individual’s or an organization’s long term contribution to the nation’s musical culture and heritage. The presentations will include tributes to the honorees by a host of musical greats and special guests.
Dr. David Sanders, director of the National Music Council, highlights the fact that the individual recipients are being honored “not just for the incredible gifts they have given generations of music lovers throughout the world with their creative output… but also for their dedication in encouraging young musicians – and potential musicians – through their great support and commitment to education. The Council also honors the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation this year with a special American Eagle Award in recognition of its extraordinary dedication to cultural and charitable endeavors designed to further the preservation, celebration and enhancement of American musical creativity and education. As in past years, the Council will present its annual “Leadership in Music” symposium prior to the luncheon. This year’s program will feature an interview with the honorees.
Past American Eagle Award recipients include Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock, Clive Davis, Van Cliburn, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Morton Gould, Dave Brubeck, Marian Anderson, Max Roach, Lena Horne, Roy Clark, Elliott Carter, Roberta Peters, Odetta, Leonard Slatkin, Stephen Sondheim, Sesame Street, and VH1 Save the Music Foundation.
The National Music Council is celebrating its 70th Anniversary as a forum for the free discussion of this country’s national music affairs and problems. It was founded in 1940 to act as a clearinghouse for the joint opinion and decision of its members and to work to strengthen the importance of music in our life and culture. The Council’s initial membership of 13 has grown to almost 50 national music organizations, encompassing every important form of professional and commercial musical activity.
Through the cooperative work of its member organizations, the National Music Council promotes and supports music and music education as an integral part of the curricula in the schools of our nation, and in the lives of its citizens. The Council provides for the exchange of information and coordination of efforts among its member organizations and speaks with one voice for the music community whenever an authoritative expression of opinion is desirable.
Learn more about the 2011 Honorees
Latin Jazz Network Radio – Jukebox – December 2010 Playlist
Click here to launch our audio player. See our playlist below.
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2010 Puerto Rico Heineken Jazz Festival
Photographer Carlos Haddock has been documenting the culture and music of New York and Puerto Rico for nearly three decades. His photographs have been exhibited at the Manners of Fine Art Gallery in New York and the Bienal de Fotografia in Puerto Rico. In addition, he was awarded a trophy by The Association of Photojournalists in Puerto Rico for his photographs of Festival de Jueyes, Maunabo (2002). Carlos is a member of The Association of Photojournalists in Puerto Rico and his work is registered with Non Stock Photographic Image House, an agent for independent photographers and images of fine art.
Though Carlos is essentially self taught, he attended The School of Visual Arts in New York and has conducted workshops at the Artes Plasticas Photography Workshop in Puerto Rico. More recently he has turned his attention to Puerto Rico’s music scene, where he’s been an official photographer for the Puerto Rico Heineken Jazz Festival. Carlos Haddock is a creative spirit who continues to draw his inspiration from the joy of life and the richness of all living things.
View slideshow: 2010 Puerto Rico Heineken Jazz Festival (this link will open in a new window)
Tiempo Libre – Bach in Havana (Sony Classical 2009)
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The title of this record – Bach in Havana – should not come as a surprise, after all there is a yet-to-be-fully-discovered European Baroque and Classical music tradition that bubbles and boils in conservatories just barely under the skin of Cuban life, nestling cheek-by jowl with Santeria worship. This culture is very real and continues to turn out a stunning number of brilliant musicians year after year. Still the title surprises. Before a single note can be heard that is. Put that together with the name of the band, Tiempo Libre, a title that itself suggests a very free, almost avant garde force and you have a delightful, but perplexing conundrum. Perhaps it is this very anomaly that gives superlative credence to the music on this record. But finally there is, of course, the fact that a so-called “Third Stream” – music that fused jazz and music from the Western classical, romantic and baroque traditions that was already established in the early 1950s by the legendary band, the Modern Jazz Quartet.
In the face of the myriad of records documenting the collision between two musical traditions – classical and jazz – would any new attempt to redefine a relationship between – now- Afro-Cuban music and classical baroque music and that too Johann Sebastian Bach create a destructive deconstruction of both musics. Or would it in fact elevate all music to a vastly different level? On the musical evidence from this record, the latter is true. This is a landmark recording in the sense that Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959) was approximately fifty years ago. What that Miles Davis record did for music was to establish beyond doubt that the hallmark of the high art of Afro-American music was its explosive creative spontaneity. This could make its mark even without the confines of written form, because its blues was form itself. Its emotion gave it form and raison d’etre. ‘Nuff said!
Now with Bach in Havana this is a vastly different challenge for the musicians on the session. Granted that by his own admission, Jorge Gomez, the Musical Director of Tiempo Libre, remembers often hearing his father play a Prelude or a Fugue from Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier,” what Robert Schumann called “this work of works’, the brilliant baroque exegesis. Granted… also that classical music is still de rigueur in the hallowed halls of Cuba’s conservatories… But to turn around and create an explosive meeting of the ancient Afro-Cuban music – that music which pulsates with Yoruban worship – and the secular or sacred music of Bach’s great music, both small and large landscape… This is nothing short of miraculous.
First, Bach: It is now legion that he enriched the prevailing German Style of music with robust contrapuntal technique an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organization in composition for diverse instrumentation. He also adapted rhythms and textures from foreign music – notably Italy and France. And, of course, Bach’s works were revered for their intellectual depth, technical depth and artistic beauty. Now what about the Afro-Cuban tradition? Probably born at the dawn of time it is primal, rocks with the vitality of life itself. At its bedrock is a tantalizingly complex polyrhythmic structure that is sometimes so mesmerizing that its musicians swear that there are rhythms even within melodies. Over the years this music evolved into a complex tradition bombarded with influences from the western Caribbean, from Jazz from the North of America, formal dance forms of Spain and France and above everything else – all of this melded in a cauldron boiling over with the batá rhythms that invoked the names of the saints in a battery of invocations… Santeria!
Thus, Bach in Havana is more than just a collision of two ancient-modern traditions. It is a coming together of what appears to be kindred spirits that no one would have known existed. It is a reinvention of musical idioms in a confluence of form. Among the easier and more accessible ones is “Air on a G String,” (Orchestral Suite in D Minor), which becomes a motivically a bolero , but where idiomatic phrases and sonic metaphors are gleefully intertwined and sewn together with superlative percussion under the “Air” itself, and then of course the wild cadenza from the incredible Paquito D’Rivera. There is plenty more of this kind of cultural collision that produces the most exquisite examples of Bach in Clave, so to speak. Not the least is a Gavotte (Bach’s French Suite in C Minor) that reincarnates into a Son with Paquito dazzling on alto saxophone yet again. And also the Minuet in G re-cast as a Guaguancó, this time featuring the amazing Yosvany Terry on alto saxophone.
But nothing compares with the daring re-interpretation of Bach’s majestic “French Suite in C Minor” and its appearance as the shape-shifting “Mi Orisha” virtually a spiritual communion as Yosvany Terry achieves near spiritual bliss with his shuffling, shuttering invocations on the shekere. Similarly, “Olas de Yemayá” brings the batá gracefully onto the Bach “Prelude in C Major “and there is much more in “Timbach” an exegesis on “Prelude in D Minor”. Finally the crowning moments are in the gloriously edifying “Kyrie,” where Tiempo Libre brings an inspired Bata and its rag-a-tag-a-tag to the most revered of spiritual masterpieces – Bach’s Mass in B Minor.
Does all this extraordinary work on the record work? Does it really work? This is going to be debated for a while. In the end, the real truth will prevail. Bach in Havana is going to be held up as one that made an enormous creative leap just as Miles Davis’ did when he, Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley blew those choruses on Kind of Blue.
Track listing: Tu Conga Bach – Conga (Fugue in C Minor); Fuga – Cha-cha-cha (Sonata in D Minor); Air on a G String – Bolero (Orchestral Suite in D Major); Clave in C Minor – Guaguancó (Prelude in C Minor); Gavotte – Son (French Suite in G Major); Mi Orisha – 6/8 Bata (French Suite in C Minor); Minuet in G – Guaguancó; Olas de Yemayá – Batá (Prelude in C Major); Baqueteo Con Bajo – Danzon (Cello Suite No.1); Timbach – Timba (Prelude in D Major); Kyrie – Batá (Mass in B Minor).
Personnel: Jorge Gomez: keyboards, background vocals, Music Director and arranger; Joaquin “El Kid” Diaz: lead vocals, batá; Leandro Gonzalez: congas, percussion, batá, background vocals; Tebelio “Tony” Fonte: electric bass, chapman stick, background vocals; Cristobal Ferrer Garcia: trumpet, trombone, background vocals; Hilario Bell: percussion, timbales, batá, background voice; Luis “Rosca” Beltran Castillo: tenor saxophone, guiro, background vocals.
Featuring: Paquito D’Rivera: alto saxophone on tracks 3, 5 and clarinet on track 9; Yosvany Terry: shekeré on track 6, alto saxophone on track 7.
Tiempo Libre on the web: www.tiempolibremusic.com
Review written by: Raul da Gama
