Jazz With an Accent: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band; Horacio “Chivo” Borraro; Guerrilla Flamenco

By Fernando Gonzalez

 The Joy of Jazz

If their  recent show in Coral Gables, Florida, was any indication, and you love jazz, you need to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band live. You might dismiss it, as I once did, as just a repertory band, a sort of charming, rolling live museum act evoking what might-have-been. And there might be some of that. But with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band you also get the joy of jazz, smart, angst-free jazz, played with great professionalism but also with pleasure and a sense of humor (watching sousaphone player Ronell Johnson march in place, bob, weave and turn all the way through the performance was part of my enjoyment that night).

Preservation Hall Jazz Band

The music was soulful and swung forcefully yet with a casual grace of a conversation among old friends, counterlines seem to grow along, curling like vines around the main melody. It was both sturdy and lithe, complex yet appealing.  The ensemble played what it must, but the audience clearly felt invited in. I suspect jazz gained a few more believers that night. Having fun is an undervalued concept in jazz — and the music has paid dearly for it. But the Preservation Hall Jazz Band taught a master class in jazz disguised as a good-time show. That’s an art in itself — and jazz has had some great practitioners. (Dizzy is a prime example of the genius disguised as entertainer).

Obviously, not every style in jazz lends itself easily to this approach. But by definition, jazz will always live in that netherworld between art music and entertainment. It’s both a weakness and a source of strength. And to have a place in the cultural marketplace, jazz needs to connect with audiences, be it in the composition, the playing or the presentation.

It played out vividly before me at that show by The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a ensemble created 50 years ago precisely to evoke the very roots of jazz — in substance and form.

No, the challenge is not new, but the urgency is — or we can look at classical music and see the future of jazz.

Click HERE to read an iRoM review of a performance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Playboy Jazz Festival in the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, June 16.

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R.I.P. Horacio “Chivo” Borraro

It’s a shame that few outside Argentina knew of saxophonist and clarinetist Horacio “Chivo” Borraro, who died on May 31 at age 90 in Buenos Aires.

Horacio “Chico” Borraro

A player, composer and arranger, Borraro was a renaissance man. He was also an architect and worked, at different times, as a painter, designer, photographer and cartoonist. An early bebopper, Borraro was one of the founders of the Bop Club in Buenos Aires in the early 50s and a key figure in a small but sturdy scene that nurtured artists such as Lalo Schifrin and Leandro “Gato” Barbieri.

El “Chivo” Borraro was an active player from the 1930´s to the 1990´s — and by the time he stopped he had tried his hand at nearly every jazz style, all the way to free jazz. He had a Coltranean, brawny sound on the tenor, but quit when he “started to realize I didn´t have the will to play I always had.”

“I was having trouble reaching the upper octave of the saxophone, so I wasn´t able to do what I wanted to do with the horn anymore,” he told Miguel Bronfman for a story in The Buenos Aires Herald in 2005. “So I stopped playing, and I didn´t lament it, everything begins and everything ends. So I sold the saxophone and I bought a keyboard instead, with which I make arrangements for friends. I was getting frustrated with the sax, so I decided to retire myself with the championship belt, before I got knocked out.”

Much of Borraro’s music has become available through reissues in recent years and it’s worth exploring. Here’s a sample:

“Half & half”

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Guerrilla Flamenco

The European colleagues of the greedy geniuses at Wall Street who almost destroyed the world economy  a few years ago are working hard in their own countries to give it another try. In a globalized economy, don’t think it’s someone else’s problem.

Spain is the latest casualty and as it’s the norm, the banks are in line to be saved. The people are to fend for themselves. (Stop me if you heard this before.)

One form of Spanish protest has been guerrilla flamenco performances in the banks.  It is in Spanish, but the message is clear. Maybe we can have a blues version of this in some JP Morgan branch?

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Photo of Preservation Hall Jazz Band by Bonnie Perkinson.

Jazz With an Accent: Music, the Brain and the Internet

Twitter Music

By Fernando Gonzalez

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to hear the David Sanchez Quartet with Stefon Harris in concert. It was, by any reasonable jazz standard, a beautiful performance. The music, for the most part originals, was compelling and nicely designed. The group worked like a chamber ensemble, eschewing look-at-me posturing to actually listen to each other and maintain the music front and center. And when the players did solo, they did it with imagination and eloquence.

What troubled me about the performance had to do with technology, the Internet and my brain.

The Internet

As a music journalist/critic, I am a sort of professional listener. Moreover, I was educated as a musician. I was once a professional player and composer. And yet that Saturday evening, at times, I found myself lost. Worse yet, I found myself getting impatient with the length of a piece or a particular solo. The concert had a break (at the request of the promoter, explained Sanchez) and yet it felt to me like a marathon.

The audience — I’d estimate the average age in the mid-50s — listened politely and applauded at the expected moments, neither particularly engaged, nor actively disapproving.

Perhaps most, if not all, of my issues that night might be chalked up to my own deficiencies and that’s that. Then again, if it didn’t engage me, well, it didn’t engage me. Perhaps the concert was not as good as I thought. Perhaps.

But the experience was also a personal reminder of how technology is rewiring our brains.

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in his seminal Understanding Media.

Instruments such as Google, tablets and smart phones are profoundly affecting the way we read, look, listen, think and even use our memory. And they do it in ways we are not even aware of. (Quick, write down the phone numbers of three close friends or family members. I thought so.)

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore. I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even blog posts of more than three or four paragraphs are too much to absorb. I skim it,” says a pathologist on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School and blogger on Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, a book on the effects of the Internet on our brains.

What similar impact might our new tools might have upon our listening habits and, inevitably as a result, on the creation, performance, presentation and consuming of music?

Because, after all, as much as many look at the development of jazz with a Great Man Theory of history (say Armstrong to Ellington to Parker to Miles to Coltrane….), other, more mundane factors have played significant roles in shaping the music.

The advent of the long playing disc granted composers, arrangers and improvisers possibilities up to then unthinkable. The size of the clubs in 52^nd St. might have played a greater role in the music going from big bands to small groups (and thus spurring on the development of bebop) than the talent of any one particular musician.

We should anticipate that the changes that technology continues to make to the way we process information will also have consequences.

I am not saying anything startlingly new or particularly astute here. In fact others have said it better. (The subject is brilliantly addressed by Carr in The Shallows.)

If there is a (modest) contribution to the discussion here, it is in asking how these changes are affecting our listening to music in general and jazz in particular – and how, in turn, this will shape the way music is created, designed and presented.

After all, music is an art form that happens in time and depends on memory. In the specific case of jazz, even in its most conventional format, to appreciate the reinterpretation and commentary suggested by the improvisation, the listener must be able to have some recall of the original material. Otherwise, it’s gibberish or some form of musical gymnastics.

In other words, as our memory withers, replaced by gadgets, and our attention span gets shorter and shorter, will there be in a few years an audience capable of remembering an eight-bar-theme that happened five, 10 minutes earlier? And if the listeners are not able to recall even the most basic theme, or lack the patience and discipline to connect the dots over a simple musical form, what could they then make of an improvisation?  (Or in classical music: What happens with Bruckner or Mahler?)

And as audiences inevitably get increasingly lost and frustrated and impatient, go looking for something shorter and simpler, what can the composers, improvisers and presenters do?  In all fairness, is there anything they should do?

On that Saturday night, a couple of weeks ago, David Sanchez and his group played a concert that at times had me baffled and irritated because, well, it had no hyperlinks, no keywords, no way to skim over and get faster to the good parts.

What did they expect?

Come to think of it, what do we expect?

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To read more posts from Fernando Gonzalez and “Jazz With An Accent” click HERE.

Jazz with an Accent: New CDs from e.s.t., Tania Maria and Eddie Gomez, Alfredo Rodriguez, Diego Schissi, and Christian Escoude

By Fernando Gonzalez

The music business might be not much of a business these days, but the quantity, variety and quality of the music being released is quite astonishing. No, not every recording is great or even merely necessary. Few would argue against democratizing the production and delivery process in music – but on the other hand, not everybody who can make a recording should. That said, trying to stay up to date with worthy new releases has become a frustrating proposition. Rather than “Jazz with an Accent” these notes might soon be titled “Running after the Bus.”

Here are some notable new releases.

 e.s.t.

301 (ACT)

Just about as it was gaining recognition as one of the most promising groups in 21^st century jazz the Esbjorn Svensson Trio, or e.s.t., came to a brutally abrupt, tragic end when its pianist and leader died in a scuba diving accident in June, 2008.  The sound of the trio, which included drummer Magnus Öström and bassist Dan Berglund, was an intriguing mix. It could play as cooly lyrical jazz one moment, informed by European classical music and Nordic sensibilities, and blow up as drum’n’bass, with bits of noise and electronics and a ferocious rock energy the next.

Culled from the material developed in two days of jamming in a studio in Sydney, Australia, in 2007 in the off days of an Asia and Australia tour, 301 plays as a terrific summation of the group’s power and music. It is actually the second posthumous recording from those sessions. According to the promotional information, Svensson had edited the material from those sessions down to two albums. Only one was released — Leucocyte (ACT 2008). Edited by Öström, Berglund and the band’s regular sound engineer Ake Linton, 301 (the name refers to Sydney’s Studio 301 where it was recorded) shows a mature, confident group working as a unit, listening hard, paying attention to dynamics and generally pushing and chasing each other down unexpected rabbit holes.  It’s tempting, But pointless, to hear 301 and wonder what might have been. What it is, is remarkable.

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Tania Maria with Eddie Gomez

Tempo (Naïve)

France-based Brazilian pianist and vocalist Tania Maria’s first album of new music in nearly six years is a surprising, small pleasure. A capable pianist who also was once nominated for a Grammy as a jazz vocalist (at one point in time her label promoted her as sounding  “sometimes” like a “Brazilian Aretha Franklin”), Tania Maria gained an international following as a fiery, high-energy performer. But in Tempo, a duet recording featuring bassist Eddie Gomez, her approach, while still full of verve, is pared down to essentials — and made better for it.

Tania Maria’s originals are all instrumentals, none particularly memorable but all well constructed. She draws from Brazilian music, blues and jazz and frames the mix with a pop sensibility.  She sings here, very effectively, in both Italian (“Estate,” an Italian pop hit since turned standard by artists as disparate as Joao Gilberto and Shirley Horn), and Portuguese (“Sentado A Beira Do Camino,” “A Chuva Caiu,” and “Bronzes e Cristais”).

Gomez is an invaluable partner throughout, laying down a solid foundation with a percussive edge, smartly letting the music breathe but also forceful and active when needed. And, no news here, Gomez is an effective soloist,  including  a beautifully bowed performance in Tania Maria’s “Senso Unico.”

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 In short …

 Alfredo Rodriguez: Sounds of Space (Mack Avenue)

The debut recording of LA-based Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez plays like a sampler  –  all original pieces in a variety of styles, both traditional and his own, showcasing his technical breadth and depth.  Consider the opening “Qbafrica,” with its baroque Hermeto Pascoal references, leading into the elegant bolero “Sueño de Paseo,” and back up again to the burner “Silence.” Rodriguez is featured here leading two ensembles, one from Cuba, the other one based on the United States.

 Diego Schissi Quinteto: Tongos (Sunnyside)

Argentine pianist and composer calls his music “not tango, but close.” In fact, his post-Piazzolla tango features a similar instrumentation to that of the maestro’s (violin, guitar, bandoneón, bass and piano) and shares references (Bartok and Stravinsky as well as tango tradition) before going its own way. Not much improvisation here, but smart writing, beautifully shaded, and paced playing and a path to the tango for the 21^st century – or something close to it.

Christian Escoudé Plays Brassens (Sunnyside)

How much you may enjoy this release by French guitarist Christian Escoudé does not depends on how much you know about the great poet and songwriter George Brassens. Originally mostly voice-and-guitar songs, Escoudé treats them as standards and arranges them for various sextets. If you know these songs, you´ll appreciate the humor and affection in Escoudé´s versions. But even if you don´t, the pleasures in these well-constructed songs and the unhurried swing and modestly displayed virtuosity of Escoudé and his ensemble (which includes guitarist Birelli Lagrene on one track) need no translation. A delight.

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To read more posts from Fernando Gonzalez and “Jazz With An Accent” click HERE.

Jazz With an Accent: New CDs From Arturo Sandoval and Leni Stern

 By Fernando Gonzalez

There might be a crisis in the business of music, but judging by recent releases, not on the making of music. There is a lot to catch up with. Here are two worthy new records.

Arturo Sandoval

Dear Diz (Every Day I Think of You) (Concord)

Dear Diz (Every Day I Think of You), is trumpeter Arturo Sandoval’stribute to Dizzy Gillespie, his mentor and friend and a key player in his defection from Cuba in 1990.

The disc opens with Gillespie introducing Sandoval as “one of the young masters of the trumpet,” at a show in the 1980s, and the announcement flows smoothly into a smartly arranged version of “Be Bop” that sets the tone. The repertoire is made of Dizzy’s classics and considering Sandoval’s track record it might have been fair to expect a disc full of fireworks and loud, bright and shiny moments. Hard core Sandoval fans will not be disappointed — but Dear Diz is more than that. The music is center stage here, reframed in thoughtful arrangements for big band, such as those by Gordon Goodwin (“Be Bop,” “Salt Peanuts”), pianist Shelly Berg  (“Birk’s Works” evoking Henry Mancini’s style) and Wally Minko (“A Night in Tunisia”) but also Nan Schwartz’s “Con Alma,” which becomes here an elegy for string quartet and trumpet.

Moreover, Sandoval is surrounded by an all-star cast that includes vibist Gary Burton, saxophonists Bob Mintzer and Ed Calle, and organist Joey De Francesco. Actor and music-fan-turned-player-and-producer Andy Garcia, a friend of Sandoval who also starred on 2001’s HBO biopic, For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story, is credited on percussion.

The disc closes with a touching bookend: Sandoval singing and playing his ballad “Every Day I Think of You,” an unabashed love letter to Gillespie.

More often than not, tributes are barely more than marketing ploys covering for a lack of ideas. Well thought out and heartfelt, Dear Diz is a worthy exception.

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Leni Stern

Sabani (Leni Stern Recordings)

Guitarist Leni Stern has followed a circuitous path to Mali – beginning in Munich,  with stops in New York, Boston, the Peruvian rainforest and Benin, where she helped found a music school. Her recent recordings ( Africa, 2007; Alu Maye; 2007; and Sa Belle Belle Ba, 2010) not only have offered a very satisfying, beautifully crafted global musical fusion, but also have served to document her immersion in African culture. This is not an artist on a cultural safari. In those recordings, she draws much from the local music and musicians — but also allows herself to be changed by them.

Perhaps it’s only natural then than Sabani, her most recent project, features Stern playing the n’goni, a West African lute-like instrument referred by some as an ancestor of the banjo, in a stripped-down trio setting. (Sabani means three in the Bambara language spoken in Mali.)

Recorded at Malian pop superstar Salif Keita’s Mouffou Studios in Bamako, Sabani features Stern on electric and acoustic guitars, n’goni and vocals, along with two standout players from Keita’s band, Haruna Samake on string instruments, and Mamadou “Prince” Kone, percussion.

The patterns played by the plucked string instruments – there are several combinations throughout the recording – create a lattice effect that, floating over a subtle but definite groove, feels at once delicate and sturdy, ethereal and swinging, even urgent on its own terms (check “Sorcerer,” “I Was Born,” or “The Cat Stole The Moon”).

In other instances, such as “Like A Thief,” the music takes on an unexpectedly elegiac tone – a song Stern says was inspired by flamenco singer Diego El Cigala.

Stern’s singing (all in English) is an acquired taste, but even at its artless moments, it works well in context. It sounds real. And if it also sounds a bit rough-edged or inelegant (especially when compared to that of the Malian singers on the recording) so be it. It’s part of this album’s beauty.

Sabani sounds like what happens in a true encounter between people from different worlds who can both play and listen.

 

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To read more posts from Fernando Gonzalez and his “Jazz With An Accent” column, click HERE.

Jazz With an Accent: CDs by Rudresh Mahanthappa; Dino Saluzzi, Anja Lechner & Felix Saluzzi. And Further Thoughts

By Fernando Gonzalez

Catching up with a pair of worthy, recent releases: Indian fusion and Argentine bandoneones.

Rudresh Mahanthappa

Samdhi (ACT)

Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa has been methodically building his music out of blending South Indian Carnatic musical elements and contemporary jazz. In Samdhi, he takes it all a step further as he brings technology into the mix. The results are both substantive and fun. Ably supported by former M-Base guitarist Dave Gilmore; Rich Brown, on electric bass; Damion Reid, drums, and South Indian percussionist “Anand” Anantha Krishnan on mridangam (a two-headed drum) and kanjira (frame drum), Mahanthappa sets out a three way dialogue between jazz and South Indian music and electronics full of unexpected turns.

Mahanthappa is an intense player – there is a distinct force in his tone, dry and edgy, to the fast, relentless, baroque lines he unfurls at dizzying speed. But in Samdhi, he paces that intensity as if probing the edges of the music.  The opening “Parakram #1,” with Mahanthappa’s slow moving, mournful alto playing over a discreet cloud of synth strings in the background improbably suggests a Nordic ECM landscape in grays  –  which is exploded by the ferocious urgency of the following track, “Killer,” in which the band negotiates hairpin turns at a breathtaking speed. (Mahanthappa also for good measure runs his alto through a harmonizer.) Then again on “Parakram #2,” the sax plays over a loop of sax and electronic drums. But in sharp contrast, “Breakfastlunchanddinner,” which starts out as a stop-time conversation between sax, guitar and drums, becomes an almost conventional funk piece.

Mahanthappa has spoken in interviews about how his early influences were not straight ahead jazz but rather The Brecker Brothers, Yellowjackets and (1980s) Miles Davis. All is in play here – cutting edge fusion, funk grooves, post bop phrasing, jazz rock, South Indian rhythmic patterns, electronica and more. In lesser hands, this would be little more than pastiche. In Mahanthappa’s, the sum is greater than the parts. Jazz with an accent indeed.

Dino Saluzzi / Anja Lechner / Felix Saluzzi

Navidad de Los Andes (ECM)

Bandoneonist and composer Dino Saluzzi, cellist Anja Lechner, and saxophonist and clarinetist Felix Saluzzi, Dino’s younger brother, collaborated most recently in Dino Saluzzi’s orchestral El Encuentro (ECM) in 2009. But in this soulful deceptively simple sounding Navidad de Los Andes, the three work at suggesting, as much as enunciating, the possibilities in the music.

The bandoneón is a melancholy-sounding button squeezebox invented in Germany as a portable, poor man´s harmonium. It’s best known for its use in tango. Born in rural Salta in Argentina´s Northwest not in urban (and urbane) Buenos Aires, the capital of tango, Saluzzi has always had a distinctly personal approach to the instrument. Here he seems to nod as often to tango as to his own roots in folk music and, at times, even the bandoneón´s original religious function (listen to the evocative “Ronda de niños en la montaña”). Three of the tracks draw from the tango repertoire ( “Recuerdos de Bohemia,” “Soledad,” and “Variaciones sobre una melodia popular de José L. Padula”) while Saluzzi also celebrates the music of Argentina’s countryside by revisiting older pieces of his such as “Son Qo’ñati,” and “Gabriel Kondor.”

These are three superior musicians, smartly listening to each other and to the sounds and the silences between them, letting the pieces reveal themselves.  The music in Navidad de Los Andes emanates from the recording like a perfume.

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Further Thoughts: The Jazz Tweaker.

In a piece titled “The Tweaker” in The New Yorker issue of Nov 14, writer Malcolm Gladwell reviews Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.

Gladwell takes an intriguing tack. He starts by asking why the industrial revolution started in England and not, say, France or Germany — and he cites the explanation of a couple of economists. The answer: Britain had “tweakers.”

These were “…resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them, refined and perfected them, and made them work.”

“Such men … provided the ‘micro inventions necessary to make the macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

Jobs “borrowed,” to use Gladwell’s term, from the work of engineers at Xerox for his Macintosh, did not invent the portable digital music player or the smart phone.  But he did come up with improved versions in the iPod and the iPhone, and the idea for the iPad “came from an engineer at Microsoft.” By Issacson’s biography, Gladwell’s concludes, Jobs was more of a tweaker than the visionary and inventor celebrated in his eulogies.

Which brings us to Miles Davis.

From his beginnings in bop to his experiments in cool jazz and modal music to the electric fusion of the 70s, Davis had an uncanny feel for his time. (The long coda after his return in 1982 is a wholly different matter for another day.) And throughout his career, he surrounded himself with the best players for that moment, putting his imprint on the music, and the music-making, with such imagination and force as to make it his.

Davis wasn’t a distinguished composer. Put aside songs of disputed authorship and count his memorable pieces. In fact, he wasn’t actually the generator of some of the ideas behind the profound changes in music that he was given credit for. Rather he was, to put it in Gladwell’s terms, an exceptional tweaker, a ruthless, brilliant editor, both in the studio and on stage, when he prodded and cut on the fly, turning editing into a high-art improvisation.

Of course, none of this diminishes Miles’s contributions. It just places them, and our notions about creators and the creative process, under a different light.

Jazz With an Accent: CD Reviews

By Fernando Gonzalez

Catching up with some interesting/mind-expanding/beautiful/provocative (and by now not so) new releases …

Mario Adnet

More Jobim Jazz  (Adventure Music)

Brazilian guitarist Mario Adnet’s exquisite follow up to Jobim Jazz (Adventure Music, 2007) not only pays tribute to Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, but also composer and arranger Moacir Santos (whom Adnet and saxophonist Ze Nogueira celebrated in the terrific Ouro Negro) and, obliquely, to Gerry Mulligan who, as it turns out, was a great influence for a generation of Brazilian jazz musicians.

In fact, in a nod to Mulligan and Santos’ ensemble of choice, Adnet utilizes variations of Mulligan’s Tentet (originally bass, drums and eight winds) throughout the recording. The writing is smart, full of detail, and in places will, undoubtedly, evoke Santos’s sound (check “Takatanga,” or the opening of “O Homem”). And while Adnet intelligently stays away from the most obvious material (as he did in Jobim Jazz), he doesn’t entirely shy away from Jobim’s evergreens such as “Bonita,” “Wave,” and “Samba do Aviao” while finding something to say in his own voice, an achievement in itself.

Dori Caymmi

Poesia Musicada  (Music Taste)

It seems hard enough to find the words or the gestures to pay tribute to one’s late father. But if you are a singer and songwriter and your father happens to be one of the greatest composers in your country’s history, things can get mighty difficult. Which makes Poesia Musicada (Poetry to Music) — the tribute by Brazilian singer, guitarist and songwriter Dori Caymmi to the memory of his father, the great Dorival Caymmi, one of the foremost composers of Brazilian popular music, who died in 2008 — all the more touching and impressive.

The 13 songs here, all by Dori Caymmi and his long time writing partner, lyricist and poet Paulo Cesar Pinheiro, evoke elegantly and soulfully the themes, the moods, and the landscapes of Bahia, the northeastern state in Brazil on the Atlantic coast that was Dorival’s birthplace and a profound source of inspiration for his music.  The titles alone – “Velho do Mar,” “ Canto Praieiro,”  “Dona Iemanja,” – with their references to sea, the beach, and the characters that populate them, are a clear enough indication. But then, tracks such as the opening “Marinheiragem,” about lovers on a moonlit beach, or “Rede,” a jewel of a love song framed in sea imagery, could’ve been by the master himself.

Most of the songs feature Dori Caymmi singing, accompanying himself on guitar, but the arranging in the disc also includes, at different times, subtle uses of cavaquinho (a small four string, ukelele-like guitar), accordion, flutes and strings.  Caymmi has a deep, warm voice and an understated, almost conversational, delivery that draws the listener in, perfect for this deeply personal, and poetic, tribute.

To read other reviews and posts by Fernando Gonzalez, click HERE.

Jazz With An Accent: Miami Before the Sound Machine

By Fernando Gonzalez

DJ Le Spam, aka Andrew Yeomanson, led a fascinating listening session of Miami vinyl last night at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. Not sure how many people outside Miami are aware that back in the 1970s, and before, well before there was a Gloria and Emilio Estefan or a Miami Sound Machine, there was the legendary Henry Stone’s TK Records, and a soulful Miami sound.

DJ Le Spam (Andrew Yeomanson)

Yeomanson played some rare vinyl, both LPs and 45s, featuring music by artists such as Betty Wright, George McCrae, Timmy Thomas, and Clarence Reid, but also non TK artists such as The Spiritual Harmonizers and the, umm, idiosyncratic Lang Cook.

Stone, now in his 90s, once told me “TK was the Motown of the South. “  I was new in Miami and at first dismissed it as hype. He wasn’t braggin’.  As they say in baseball, you can look it up.

Or in this case, listen. For starters check the DJ Le Spam website.   And if you are, or plan to be, in the Miami area, check the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Moca By Moonlight.

Jazz With An Accent: A New Release, Coming Attractions and Better-Late-Than-Never

By Fernando Gonzalez

A New Release

Silvano Monasterios

Unconditional (Savant)

It might strike as a paradox, but sometimes the brilliance of certain inventions can be measured by how obvious, how commonplace they seem.

The music of Venezuelan pianist Silvano Monasterios is so easy-on-the-ear, so elegantly structured, and has such a casual, lived-in feel that it takes a bit to catch on to how sophisticated his work truly is. It’s only after awhile that one  notices the harmonic turns, the storytelling soloing, or his rhythmic vocabulary, especially his discreet use of traditional Venezuelan styles.

Unconditional is Monasterios’ fourth album, and his choices suggest that he feels no need to accommodate any conventional expectations about how Latin jazz should sound. Whatever someone might argue to be some essence of “Latin,” is here integrated into the overall sound. To list the parts is to miss the whole – and, one suspects, Monasterios’ intentions.

Leading a limber, efficient quintet — Troy Roberts, sax; Jon Dadurka, bass; Rodolfo Zuñiga, drums; and José Gregorio Hernández, percussion – Monasterios offers fusion with an accent, richly detailed, lyrical, and remarkably cliché-free.  Often, he explicitly draws on Venezuelan folk rhythms as the basis of a piece.  In “Sno’ Peas,” for example, he uses gaita zuliana, a rhythm original of the Zulia state which is danced at Christmas time.  The slow swinging  “Black Saint” draws from the traditional drumming for San Benito, a black saint.  He just as easily sets up a passage of straight ahead, driving swing for release or uses a Fender Rhodes to evoke a certain era. Or he might go all in the other direction and set up a straight-ahead hard-driving blowing vehicle such “Forgotten Gods;” or, as in the title track, write a classic jazz ballad in which the melody unfurls unhurriedly before the soloists take over and elaborate, telling their own stories.

The eight pieces in Unconditional are originals by Monasterios and, throughout, there is an arranger’s ear at work in the attention to detail, be it regarding song forms, the structuring of the soloing or the use of unexpected rhythmic shifts. In Monasterios’ music, fun and beauty unfold with a purpose – and jazz becomes an inch wider and deeper.

Check out his website – Silvano Monasterios – to find out more about this remarkable artist.

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 Coming Attractions

 *            Trumpeter and conguero Jerry González debuts with his new Madrid-based quartet on the eponymous Jerry González y el Comando de la Clave (Sunnyside). The release date for is August 30th.

Miguel Zenon

*          The new recording by Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón, Alma Adentro (Marsalis Music)  features his update of ten classic songs, two by each Bobby Capó, Tite Curet Alonso, Pedro Flores, Rafael Hernandez, and Sylvia Rexach whom he aptly calls “the George Gershwins, Cole Porters and Jerome Kerns of Puerto Rican song.” It features his quartet plus a wind ensemble orchestrated by Argentine bandleader and long time friend Guillermo Klein. The release date is August 30^th.

*            Navidad de Los Andes (Andean Christmas, ECM) by bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi, cellist Anja Lechner, and saxophonist Felix Saluzzi will be released September 20^th. Lechner and Dino Saluzzi have been collaborating since the mid 1990s (Kultrum, Ojos Negros, El Encuentro).

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 Better-Late-Than–Never . . .

Released in the United States in April, Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick’s Skala (ECM) is a follow up of sorts to his 2008 release, The Door (ECM). It’s a larger ensemble and a broader palette, but size is not the point. What’s striking here is Eick’s pop approach in his writing (the sing-songy, catchy melodies often reinforce the notion of instrumental songs waiting for lyrics), the overall, often aggressive, driving energy, and the production (he gets co-producer credits).

The musical references in Skala are quite disparate. The beautiful, expansive title track, a wordless song that builds on Eick’s short, elegiac trumpet phrases and a muscular Jan Garbarek-influenced tenor solo by Tore Brunborg, turns out to have been influenced by Sting’s “Shape of My Heart.” And “Oslo,” which features two drummers churning a dense storm underneath, suggests Radiohead or late 70s Brian Eno exploding to a (sort of) go-go beat. And then Eick openly tips his hat to Joni Mitchell in the very un-Mitchell-like “Joni.”

Skala blurs the lines between jazz, the austere esthetics of ECM, and avant-pop – and each in its own way is better off for it.