If you’re hungry for some Latin jazz, you won’t find any better than the tango inflected big band sound of Handmade from the Grammy winning Emilio Solla & La Inestable de Brooklyn.
Solla is a pianist and composer born in Argentina and now based in New York, and Handmade is his 15th album. This time the emphasis is on just what the title says, music made by hand, as Solla explains in the liner notes.
“Handmade is an apologia of the tactile. We are moving further away from the act of grabbing a pencil to write music, a brush to paint, a book to read. I celebrate the lives of the artists, my peers, who spend endless hours in search of their own sound by playing, blowing, hitting. This is the life of the shoemaker, the farmer, the dancer, a midwife, an oarsman. We are what we do, and what we make.”
The big team making this music by hand brings together the elements necessary to craft a solid jazz recording that incorporates not just tango but a bunch of other South American forms into a beautiful unified whole. In addition to Solla they are Tim Armacost (tenor sax, clarinet, bass clarinet), Alejandro Avilés (soprano and alto sax, flute, piccolo), David Smith (trumpet, flugelhorn), Mike Fahie (trombone), Sara Caswell (violin), Rodolfo Zanetti (bandoneon), Edward Perez (bass), and Rogério Boccato (drums, percussion).
The album pivots around the three-part “Suite de los Abrazos” (A Hugging Suite), Solla’s reflection on the pandemic. The album opens with the third movement “Bodegón Caníbal,” a playful percussion-driven piece. There’s lots of low horn work here, making Armacost’s bass clarinet the first horn we hear, but featuring a stirring solo on tenor by Armacost, and a section of joropo, an archaic dance related to the fandango. Good choice to open with this one. The somber middle movement “The Loss” is focused on Solla’s evocative piano montuno and a horn choir, with a lengthy and moving bass solo from Perez. The upbeat first movement of the suite, “Milonga Mutante” evokes the chaos of emergency rooms in New York in the early days of the pandemic; it is inspired by 12 tone music but also draws on the milonga style, considered to be a transitional dance between the habanera and the tango; this one has some remarkable trombone soloing from Fahie.
There’s much more. Take in lots of Solla’s inspired piano playing that blends jazz and classical on the pastoral “Para el agua,” which also features bandoneon and violin. Grammy nominated violinist Sara Caswell evokes a bird in “Bird Song,” built around an Argentine folk dance called chacarera. The lyrical tribute “Joni Mitchell” draws on some of the same kinds of colors and textures the Canadian singer songwriter employed, with the horns echoing phrases introduced by the piano and bandoneon. Likewise “Miles Tango” plays with that dance’s rhythmic patterns in a cool jazz framework, David Smith employing a muted trumpet that evokes Davis throughout.
There’s one song, the closing track, “De Viento y de Sal.” This tango like tune is sung by Sofia Tosello, accompanied by Zanetti’s bandoneon, and of course the rest of the orquesta.
This is such a lovely album from start to finish, and the three parts of the suite are especially notable.
(Club del Disco, 2026)
| website | Facebook | Insta | YouTube |
