In 1997 Ry Cooder caused a sensation with a CD that he called Buena Vista Social Club. The whole world hailed Cooder’s best-selling “rediscovery” of a generation of Cuban musicians, some in their 70s or even 80s, who had been eclipsed as Cuba, under the U.S. boycott, remained cut off from the longstanding links between its own “Afro-Cuban” musical traditions and mainstream North American jazz and popular music. (Cooder himself was fined by the U.S. authorities for his pains and needed a special authorization from President Clinton to return to Havana for his later Cuban venture, Mambo Sinuendo.)
Cuba’s is not the only Latin tradition to have cross-fertilized with American jazz. In 2004, a year after two of Cooder’s veterans, Francisco Repilado (better known as Compay Segundo) and Ruben González, died after tasting a few brief years of renewed fame, these three CDs remind us of the scope and attraction of what is commonly called “Latin jazz,” a term that covers not only Cuban-influenced music, important though it is, but also fusions of jazz with sounds from other parts of Latin America. The rumba, mambo, cha-cha, Brazilian samba and its 1960s new wave (“bossa nova”), all have played a part in the evolution of this multicultural music.
Latin jazz began long before Ry Cooder’s historic trip to Cuba. Puerto Ricans brought Afro-Cuban rhythms to the USA as early as the 1920s, and an early hit in the “son” style that dominates Buena Vista Social Club was Don Azpiazu’s 1930s recording of “The Peanut Vendor,” which marked public acceptance of slightly refined Latin-flavored bands — the one led by Xavier Cugat was even more successful — just as, thirty years later, Perez Prado’s popularized mambo records entered the charts. Numerous jazz performers had their Latin moments. Examples are Duke Ellington’s “Caravan,” featuring the Hispanic trombonist Juan Tizol, and, in the following jazz generation, Stan Kenton’s strident version of the same old 
“Peanut Vendor,” based on a Havana street-vendor’s chant. There must be few jazz musicians today who have not tried their hand at some Latin-tinged music.
The first conscious reference to “Afro-Cuban” music that I have found was in a band-name: Machito and his Afro-Cubans hit North America in 1940 and triggered a boom in mambo-based Latin jazz. Although much of the popularity of this southward-looking music resulted from its adoption by “respectable” dance bands, it was taken up as early as 1947 by an out-and-out bebopper, Dizzy Gillespie, in a concert at Carnegie Hall that gave the mambo jazz credentials. From that time on, a whole crowd of Hispanic musicians — Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, etc. — hung around the fringes of the jazz scene, making their own music or guesting with mainstream jazz musicians and pushing their music in a Latin direction. The three CDs reviewed here reflect various facets of the continuing force that is Latin jazz.
The classically trained Paquito d’Rivera, who hails from Havana, has played with Dizzy Gillespie and numerous other eminences of the U.S. modern jazz scene. Although he doubles on saxophone, he is a virtuoso of the clarinet, not a very common instrument in Latin jazz, and his style sometimes echoes the clarinettists of the swing era such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, in whose music he is unquestionably steeped. Indeed, at times, such as on Big Band Time‘s opening track “To Brenda with Love,” one is briefly reminded of a 1940s big band. But Rivera’s performances are set in a framework of modern jazz, and this same piece includes uncompromisingly cool solos on flugelhorn and piano, as well as post-modernist borrowing from the work of that well known jazzer, J. S. Bach. Oddly, when Rivera switches to alto sax such as on his own composition “Basstronaut,” he changes styles and plays like a bopper. Incidentally, this piece also features trumpeter Claudio Roditi quoting a 
Miles Davis solo, although I cannot remember from which of Davis’s recordings: a prize for the first reader to tell me.
The most surprising thing about this disc is that the backing band comes neither from Cuba nor from North America but from Cologne — it is in fact the WDR (German Radio) Big Band, albeit joined here by several American and Latin performers. The booklet reveals that this band has a long history of collaboration with famous jazz players, and indeed it is difficult to fault the precision and zest with which the band handles intricate orchestrations by Rivera himself and several American arrangers, including the band’s regular conductor, Bill Dobbins. Apart from Rivera himself, many of the solos are performed by the guests, Claudio Roditi (trumpet and flugelhorn), Mark Walker (drums), Pernell Saturnino (percussion) and Oscar Stagnaro (bass), but various members of the band, whose names suggest diverse national origins, also solo convincingly.
Insistent, pulsating, exciting rhythms are the defining feature of Latin jazz, and this music throbs along with the best of them. Nonetheless, the performances of Rivera’s “Song for Maura” and Ernesto Lecuana’s “Andalucia” show that it is possible to slow the pace and still keep up those irresistible and tricky Latin beats. I must mention the outstanding contribution of pianist Frank Chastenier, whose melodious, percussive style often carries the music to thrilling heights and is a source of understated latent strength on the slower numbers in particular.
I particularly enjoyed the blues-based “Y La Negra Bailaba,” which contains echoes of the Latin-bop classic “Cubano Chant” and features finger-defying electric bass from Peruvian Oscar Stagnaro, cutting it with the percussionists, as well as soaring clarinet from Rivera and unattributed trumpet and sax solos. On “Annette’s for Sure,” Rivera quotes “The Peanut Vendor” in his clarinet solo. Indeed, this whole recording is a mine of quotations, allusions and references to the jazz and Afro-Cuban repertoire. It is highly recommended, despite its potentially discouraging hybrid origins.
Pianist Elio Villafranca’s style on Encantaciones is more cerebral. Guest wind player Jane Bunnett describes him as “a thinking man’s Cuban jazz pianist,” yet his thoughtful music sacrifices none of the primitive rhythmic dynamics of Latin jazz and even includes occasional raw and audibly African vocal contributions, while Rivera’s CD is all instrumental. In the first number, “Oguere’s Cha,” percussionist Pedro Martínez’s religious chanting frames a medium-paced cha-cha featuring Jane Bunnett’s flute and Villafranca’s piano. His playing here is controlled but threatens to break loose from its restraint at any moment. Traditional religion is only one of the more surprising things found among Villafranca’s sources. For this album he has put together an eight-piece Latino and North American band of virtuosi who work through eight of the leader’s compositions, plus his own extended reworking of a tune by Colombian Lucho Bermúdez and one piece by the band’s guitarist, Pat Martino. The complex and outstanding Bermúdez number, “Negrita Prende la Vela,” is very African in mood and gives guest vocalist Giovana Guevara a chance to evoke primal Congolese chanting, contrasting strongly with complex instrumental parts and changing rhythms.
Villafranca, another Cuban émigré with an academic training, seldom chooses the hectic, even frenetic, speeds that often dominate Latin jazz, preferring a controlled pace that gives the percussionists (Dafnis Prieto on drums, Wilson Corniel on congas and tambores batá, and Pedro Martínez on tambores batá) and his own piano a chance to exploit intricate polyrhythms in a measured but tension-maintaining way. Nowhere is this more noticeable than on “Something Nice to Say about You,” a sensuous ballad where lyrical trumpet from Terell Stafford acts as a foil to the piano.
By contrast, the moderately fast “You Spoke Too Soon” is classic modern jazz, being a blues with bop-style ensemble framing solos by Bunnett on soprano sax (outstanding here as throughout the disc), by Stafford and by guitarist Pat Martino, whose potential I feel is not always fully utilized elsewhere in the recording, where he is often reduced to an excessively rhythmic role.
In other places, Villafranca’s education breaks through. This is what he says about the track “Cacique,” which again features changes of rhythm and Bunnett’s soprano sax sounding at times as wild as Ornette Coleman:
“Cacique” is a multi-faceted composition. The melody comes from an element based on a dodecaphonic system created by a XX Century composer, Arnold Schoenberg. What really motivated me to compose this number, nonetheless, was John Coltrane’s composition “Miles Mood.” It is based on the same Schoenberg principle. While composing this number, I always asked myself what would Coltrane or Mingus have done if they had visited Cuba.*
Well, presumably they would not have started talking about Arnold Schoenberg! Despite his occasional pretensions, some of which also appear in the CD booklet, Villafranca’s music can be enjoyed viscerally, too — like all real Latin jazz, you can dance to it without necessarily being an expert on Viennese twelve-tone music or wishing to second-guess what Trane and Mingus would have produced after a visit to Cuba. Compared with the half-dozen or so Latin jazz discs in my personal collection, Encantaciones certainly strays further from the Buena Vista school, but the challenge that its classical and votive influences pose is one that the sheer energy of the playing helps the listener to meet.
For anyone who wants a grand tour of Latin jazz, the Rough Guide CD, with twelve tracks by twelve different bands, ought to offer a bit of everything, although I have reservations about how well it does this. There are none of Villafranca’s intellectual pretensions here: most pieces blare along gaily to frantic percussion. The first track, “Es Solo Musica,” (meaning “it’s only music”) by the self-confessed “just-for-the-joy-of-playing-Afro-Cuban-music project” Mamborama, sets a defiantly good-time mood that is sustained by piece after piece, with not a trace of Schoenberg. There are veterans of the U.S. Latin scene, like Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria, but also relative outsiders, such as the British-based Snowboy and the Latin Section and some ad hoc formations: Flautist Jane Bunnnett reappears here, again brilliantly, in one such band, the Havana Flute Summit.
With no information about how the twelve cuts were selected, I do not know whether the compiler, Mike Chadwick, consciously chose to stress the direct links to contemporary U.S. jazz, but the compositions played by the various performers include two by Wayne Shorter, as well as one each from Chick Corea and Freddie Hubbard, demonstrating that American jazz influences the Latins as well as vice versa. Jimmy Bosch’s reading of Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” includes a soaring and diving tenor sax solo that the composer himself might have been proud of. Unfortunately, there are no details of who plays on the various tracks, only the names of the respective bandleaders, so that one can guess that the trombone soloist is Bosch himself. Bosch is one of the minority of bandleaders represented here who are not percussionists. Roland Vazquez, who plays Shorter’s “Palladium,” and is yet another drummer, fails to hit the same level of jazz excitement as Bosch.
As a sampler, this CD seems to me to lack somewhat in variety of texture. Unlike the other two, it has none of those slow-burning fuse pieces whose rhythmic restraint threatens to explode at any moment. Every piece is up-tempo, leading to a certain monotony. Moreover, whereas Cooder’s Buena Vista recording, to come back yet again to this benchmark, was a pretty varied collection with a variety of featured instruments and including several vocal pieces, on this CD only the track by William Cepeda’s Afrorican Jazz, led by a Puerto-Rican trombonist, includes any vocals, and these merely take the form of a chorus providing backing vocals to the instrumental music. The dominant sound, apart from the Havana Flute Summit, is of strident brass: there is precious little guitar or piano, and it is once again the William Cepeda track, his own composition “Ponte Pa’l Monte,” that gives greatest scope to both these instruments. Thus, in the end, Buena Vista Social Club (which I am not reviewing here, whatever your impression may be) actually succeeds in being more diverse than Chadwick’s dozen choices. I consider this CD a bit of a wasted opportunity. It demonstrates that there are numerous musicians playing Latin jazz, but fails to illustrate the full variety of guises in which this musical genre comes. It would be a good CD to put on at a party for energetic dancing, but towards the end of the evening guests might appreciate some of the slower and more seductive pieces found on Rivera’s and Villafranca’s excellent discs.
(Pimienta Records, 2003)
(Pimienta Records, 2003)
(World Music Network/Rough Guide Music, 2003)
Richard Condon
* Quotations about Elio Villafranca are taken from an article on the All About Jazz Web site.
