Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Freddie Hubbard, Trumpet Player dies at 70


Freddie was a straight ahead Jazz player but several of his tunes lent themselves perfectly to the Latin Jazz genre. In fact most LJ groups in NY count Little Sunflower in their repetoire. We pay homage to this most innovative, powerful musician. May he rest in peace

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Its been a nice ride so far, and I know Willie would agree in saying that its definitely better to give than recieve, so I hope everyone has enjoyed our humble offerings so far. Much more to come.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Miguel Zenon with Paoli Mejias

Paoli Mejia's latest release, Jazzambia, features Miguel Zenon. It is some of the best Latin Jazz to be played here in the USA in years IMHO. So in keeping with Ralph's insightful article about Miguel check him out on this CD. You will not be disappointed.

Here is the lineup:

Hans Glawischnig Bass
Antonio Sanchez Drums
Jaleel Shaw Saxes
Luis Perdomo Piano
Miguel Zenón Alto sax
Tony Escapa Drums
Chris Cheek Saxes
Christian Nieves Cuatro
Rafael Tito De Gracia Timbal
Ricardo Pons Alto sax
Yan Carlos Artime Coro

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Wayne Gorbea Y Salsa Picante @ Bryant Pk. 6/23/00

The Salsa Romantica (or as some of us referred to it, the Salsa Monga) craze sparked a desire among many to return to the straight up, in your face Salsa Dura we had known in the 70s. Where the sidemen were more then just stage props with an instrument and their soloing contributions would be appreciated. Where the band consisted of more then some pretty face up front with everyone else struggling to read their charts in the dark. Wayne took up the challenge and Salsa Picante is one of the results. A "AAA" video.

Timbalaye.....need I say any more?

Bryant Park, NYC 6/23/00, a AAA video.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Miguel Zenon - Article

(Miguel Zenon Project, Photo Credit: NY Times)

In one of our early posts we highlighted the fact that Miguel was one of the winners of the prestigious MacArthur Grant. Miguel being one of the young lions tearing it up nowadays has been working on his own Latin Jazz project with an emphasis on the rhythms of Puerto Rico, or more specifically, "Plena". If you look at the picture above in the right behind Miguel is another young lion, Obanilu Ire Allende (son of Papiro Allende) and percussionist extraordinaire.

Check out this article I found on the times:

When the jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón visits his native Puerto Rico to see his mother and other relatives every year around Christmastime, he rarely hears any jazz. Instead he’s surrounded by plena, a century-old Afro-Caribbean musical tradition, a kind of movable street-corner folksong.

Plena is made with three different-size panderos (like tambourines without the cymbals) and voices singing about island myths and scandals, cultural identity, political reality, love and plena itself.

“It’s really common,” he said in an interview last week in Washington Heights, where Mr. Zenón, 31, now lives with his wife, Elga Castro, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the New School. “And it’s so simple that you find it at a basketball game, at church — anywhere.”
Panderos are easily portable, as opposed to the barrel-shaped drums used in bomba, another island music. And the four-beat plena rhythm has also been part of the holiday-season ritual of parranda, which is akin to Christmas caroling: surprise late-night musical visits to the neighbors.
Part of the jazz tradition is using whatever’s in front of you, and Mr. Zenón, a New Yorker since 1999, has done this before. His album “Jíbaro” (Marsalis Music), from 2005, dealt with the song form of Puerto Rican back-country troubadours, and it had a preoccupation with numbers, particularly in the décima, a 10-line stanza with specific rhyme schemes.

"Jíbaro” threads Puerto Rican folklore through small-group jazz played at a high level, led by Mr. Zenón’s limpid and graceful alto saxophone sound. The album helped establish Mr. Zenón as one of the important contemporary revisers of Latin jazz and spread his reputation for delivering excellent music from a complicated premise, a reputation that reached the secret committees of the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded him one of its $500,000 “genius” grants in September.
This year Mr. Zenón also received a Guggenheim research grant and took a long fact-finding trip back to Puerto Rico. To ask for introductions to the living plena masters, he sought out Hector (Tito) Matos, a plena practitioner who has played with the long-running New York band Los Pleneros de la 21, as well as his own group, Viento de Agua.
Mr. Matos pointed him toward historians and older musicians like Modesto Cepeda and Ismael (Cocolai) Rivera so that Mr. Zenón could understand the music’s origins and functions. He learned about the subtle differences, for instance, between the San Juan-style use of the open hand on the pandero and the slower-tempo “punta de clavo” fingertip style of Mayagüez.
An insight from Ramón López, an ethnomusicologist who has written about plena, helped Mr. Zenón with his work. “He said something to me about how the moment you put plena onstage, it’s not the real thing anymore,” Mr. Zenón said. “So he told me not to worry about it, because it’s already different from what it’s supposed to be.”
Mr. Matos said: “That he decided to focus on plena for a whole recording and a whole research project, that surprised me right away. It’s very important what Miguel is doing, to open the music we play to more ears around the world.”
Mr. Zenón used his research for his composition “Esta Plena,” a work in 10 parts: half instrumental, half with singing. (He wrote his own lyrics too: about the nature of plena, about an all-night New Year’s party at Mr. Matos’s house, about political corruption and the disappearance of cultural tradition.) It will be performed for the first time this week, Thursday through Sunday, at the Jazz Gallery in the South Village. The performances feature his working quartet — Mr. Zenón, the pianist Luis Perdomo, the bassist Hans Glawischnig and the drummer Henry Cole — as well as three extra musicians playing plena rhythms and singing: Mr. Matos, Juan Gutiérrez and Obanilu Allende.
Again in “Esta Plena” Mr. Zenón used numbers as an organizing principle. “There are three panderos in plena,” he said. “So I dealt with the number three. In terms of form I wrote a lot of phrases in three or six. Harmonically I started thinking in terms of major-third intervals and augmented triads, and from there I built melodies and chord progressions.”
That the basic plena rhythm is always in four — with the biggest drum accenting the one and three, the middle one accenting the three and four, and the smallest providing improvised accents — didn’t deter Mr. Zenón. Through “Esta Plena” he has kept the four-beat percussive plena rhythm steady, while writing melodic cycles for the rest of the band in three or nine.
If you think that sounds complex, you’re right. (Mr. Zenón graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1998 and had no formal math training beyond high school. Still, he has a math-and-science way of thinking.) Yet his compositions are always clear and organized, and when they’re making references to folklore, they keep the feeling of dance in them.
The number three, incidentally, has no other significance than the three panderos. Mr. Zenón laughed at the notion that it could signify the trinity. “When I write anything, I need something concrete to help me, something outside of music,” he explained. “On another project it might be letters.”
After the shows at the Jazz Gallery Mr. Zenón will record “Esta Plena” for his next album. And — given the financial freedom of the MacArthur award — then what?
He has an idea. Recently, he said, he was watching the documentary “Heima,” about how the Icelandic rock band Sigur Ros thanked the fans in its home country by playing an unusual series of free concerts: in factories, small-town community centers and even in fields and caves. Mr. Zenón said he got the urge to do something similar in Puerto Rico, particularly in small towns and mountainside areas where jazz is almost never heard.
It could make a difference, he said, to play jazz of the sturdiest sort; not his own, but music by
Charlie Parker or John Coltrane or Miles Davis. He might also talk to audiences about improvising, play them records, offer clinics.

“When I grew up there,” he said, “there wasn’t really any live jazz. It was usually background music, and it was always the same eight or nine guys in San Juan. So I saw this movie, and I started thinking: man, if I could do that, just play the music, without having to worry about the business part — tickets, publicity, who’s going to pay the guys, are enough people going to show up — it would be incredible.”

Friday, December 5, 2008

How's this for a Friday night......

As I have mentioned on these pages before, a group of us who had become buddies while attending a class at City College all shared this passion for Afro-Caribbean music in its many forms. The great thing about this group, which included Mike Mena, Alfie Alvarado and myself as the main stalwarts, was the research each would do in finding new venues to explore. Around 97-98 a little Cuban spark plug of a woman had begun a Latin Jazz/Folkloric live music series at a place called the Taller Latino Americano. Her name is Mappy Torres and you will see her in action in future videos. The facility for this non-for-profit organization located on the South East corner of 104th St and Broadway in Manhattan, rapidly became the in place to go to hear the cutting edge Latin Jazz musicians, many of which had recently arrived from Cuba. Stellar performers such as Yosvanny Terry and Dafnis Prieto were seen by American audiences for the first time in that humble space provided by the Taller. The concerts were held in a room perhaps 400-500 square feet in size. One corner was dedicated to the stage area for the performance. There were an assortment of couches, chairs and stools to sit on. Nothing matched and that was the best part. It was like being in your living room and having a great live band playing for you and your family and friends.

Soon after the Taller got rolling, the newly renovated Planetarium, part of the American Museum of Natural History, opened to rave reviews for its design. Dubbed the Rose Center, the Museum began a Jazz series called Starry Nights in which some of the true luminaries in Jazz were featured in this wonderful setting. It was common to find people like Ray Barretto, Dave Valentin or Danilo Perez playing the room. So here we were, Friday night in NY....Starry Nights, two sets of music between 5:30PM and 7:30PM and Mappy's kicking off about 10PM. What to do with those extra 2 1/2 hours; El Malecon! Now the Rose Center is on 81 St. and Amsterdam and the Taller, 104th and B'way. El Malecon is on 97th St and Amsterdam Ave. Now we never use these pages to really plug any establishments, but for the sake of this tale, I'm going to plug the Malecon. It is perhaps one of the finest restaurants, featuring Caribbean cuisine, in the city. The place is small but lively, the service is great, the food is even better and a wonderful time is always had by all.

Several videos, one featuring Ray at the Rose Center and another featuring Mark Weinstein at the Taller have already been posted in the blog. Expect much more in the future. These Friday night outings of ours lasted for several years and we were thrilled by many spectacular performances by a myriad of artists of the highest caliber. The Taller has long since ceased their series and Starry Nights continues in an abbreviated form. We were lucky to catch it in its hey days. Willie

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Timbalaye @ Bryant Park 6/23/00

Another video from the Bryant Park performance, courtesy of the Alfie Alvarado Archives.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Ray Barretto @ the Rose Center 6/1/01

Already in his early 70s at the time of this performance, Ray was completeing his 360. A career more then five decades in the making. From his Jazz beginnings, through rock and pop and some of the very best Latin music ever recorded, he had returned to his Jazz roots in a big way. His last several recordings with his Latin Jazz septet are among some of the most prized items in my collection. This video comes to us courtesy of the Alfie Alvarado Archives. This is a two parter, almost 18 minutes long.

Timbalaye @ Bryant Park 6/23/00

This is the first contribution by Documentarian/Archivist Alfie Alvarado who has generously added to the blogs treasure trove of videos. Alfie has been in the forefront of documenting the Latin/Rumba music scene since 1997. Many of these are rare, one of a kind videos. We are overjoyed to be able to share them with you.