Epic, Spine-Tingling Spanish Dances and a Queens Show by Fiery Violinist Maureen Choi
Violinst Maureen Choi found her muse when she immersed herself in Spanish music. She likes epics and big, explosive crescendos: her music is not for the timid or people with ADD. Her new kick-ass album Theia is streaming at her music page – and it’s one of the most unselfconsciously adrenalizing records of the year. Her slashing, often Romany and Arabic-tinged compositions rise and fall and leap all over the place, and the fun her band has with them is contagious. She’s playing Terraza 7 on June 29 at 9 PM; cover is $15.
Choi flurries and flares over drummer Michael Olivera’s suspenseful flickers throughout the dramatic intro to the album’s first cut, Dear Paco (Cepa Andaluza); then bassist Mario Carrillo joins the party, pianist Daniel Garcia Diego firing off fiery, Middle Eastern-tinged chromatics.
Phoenix Borealis is a diptych of sorts, hushed luminosity bookending a ferocious flamenco dance with a big explosion of drums and some of the most savagely bowed bass in recent memory. Choi follows the same trajectory in Dance of the Fallen, painting plaintively resonatn lines over Garcia Diego’s elegant chromatic ripples and graceful chordal work.
Canto Salamanchino is a cheery number that shifts in and out of waltz time, between major and minor, with a deliciously pointillistic, chromatic piano solo midway through and an unexpected detour into Chinese pastoralia afterward. Silverio O. Garcia has a hushed, elegaic quality, violin and piano echoing each other’s plaintive riffs. Steady pitchblende menace gives way to acerbic Andalucian flair and a series of crashing crescendos in Sinner’s Prayer
Love Is the Answer is a somewhat muted, almost wrenchingly bittersweet ballad: imagine Chano Dominguez taking a crack at Schubert. Choi kicks off Bok Choi Pajarillo with a big solo that shifts cleverly between Romany intensity and the baroque; from there, it’s a flamenco rollercoaster.
The album closes with its two most towering epics. Septenber the First, the album’s most haunting number, has a persistently uneasy late-summer haziness, part Palestinian-flavored dirge and anguished string-jazz lament. Choi closes the record with Danza Ritual Del Fuego: from an allusive intro that could be Dave Brubeck, through a long Afro-Cuban-inflected interlude, it’s more simmer than fullscale inferno, with a coy false ending. Count this as one of the best albums of 2019 in any style of music.
Lush, Lively, Inventive Cuban String Sounds From the Toomai String Quintet
Last night at Symphony Space, the Toomai String Quintet played an irrepressibly dancing album release show for their new one, Cuerdas Cubanas, which would have made Ernesto Lecuona proud. The “Cuban Gershwin,” as bandleader and bassist Andrew Roitstein aptly characterized him, is well represented on the record and likewise in the concert program, a mix of elegantly serpentine themes with the Cuban composer’s signature blend of European classical, flamenco, Romany and indigenous sounds.
Cellist Hamilton Berry grinningly told the crowd that Roitstein’s new arrangements, many of them based on material originally written for piano or orchestra, were pretty awesome, and he wasn’t kidding. Roitstein has an obvious affinity for Lecuona’s work, and his bandmates – who also include violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Fortes and violist Erin Wight – reveled in his nifty exchanges of phrases and contrapuntal voicings.
You might not think that a singer who’s made a career in opera, as Roitstein’s sister Alina has, would necessarily be suited to singing salsa, but she also obviously gravitates toward this music. A magnetic presence in front of the band, swinging her hips and negotiating the lyrics in impressively fluent Spanish, she delivered cheery and frequently coy versions of hits made famous by Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and others.
A slinky, loopy bass and cello interweave set up Gendron’s plaintive vibrato in the night’s lilting, opening instrumental, La Comparsa. True to its title, Zamba Gitana had emphatic Romany riffage and some neat handoffs between the two violinists. The exchanges between band members were even more incisive in the phantasmagorical Gitanerias, which the group began as a real danse macabre.
There were also plenty of lighthearted moments in the set, including but hardly limited to a jaunty santeria dance, an animated thicket of pizzicato in Lecuona’s En Tres Por Cuatro, and the balmy nocturnal ambience of Manuel Ponce’s Plenilunio. There was also an interlude where a small battalion of young string players who’d been workshopping Cuban music with the quintet joined them and added extra ballast to the Israel “Cachao” Lopez hit A Gozar Con Mi Combo. Solos are still a work in progress for these kids, but when they played along with the rest of the band, the music was absolutely seamless.
The quintet encored with Lecuona’s Andalucia, shifting from uneasily acerbic Arabic-flavored chromatics to an indomitable, triumphant sway. It’s hard to think of a more perfect way to close such an eclectically enjoyable show. The Toomai String Quintet have a weekly Saturday 6 PM residency at Barbes coming up this September, where you will undoubtedly get many opportunities to hear a lot of this material.
A Blue Note Stand and a Tour From Perennially Fiery Latin Jazz Icon Eddie Palmieri
At this point in his career, latin jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri has nothing left to prove. Is he a NEA Jazz Master yet? If not, let’s get those wheels in motion before Trump and his minions get rid of the NEA altogether. In the meantime, Palmieri has just released a new album, Sabiduria (“wisdom” in Spanish), his first since 2006, streaming at Bandcamp. He’s celebrating that, and his eightieth birthday, with a week at the Blue Note leading a septet starting tonight, Oct 10 through the 15th, with sets at 8 and 10:30 PM. You can get in for thirty bucks – and if you’re not in New York, you can catch him on US tour right afterward if you’re in the right place.
The core of the band on the new album is Joe Locke on vibes, Luques Curtis on bass, Anthony Carrillo on bongos and cowbell, Little Johnny Rivero on congas and Luisito Quintero on timbales, with a long list of special guests – as usual, everybody wants to play with the guy.
It opens with the aptly titled Cuerdas Y Tumbao, a mighty largescale take on a classic, whirlingly celebratory charanga sound. After the string section develops some pretty otherworldly textures, there’s an Alfredo de la Fe violin solo and then a chuggingly energetic one that Palmieri builds to a pretty far-out interlude himself, grinningly half-masked behind the orchestra.
Palmieri famously wanted to be a percussionist but switched to the piano because the competition wasn’t so intense, and the rest is history. That backstory vividly informs Wise Bata Blues, with its punchy, tumbling rhythmic riffage and a similarly kinetic, dancing exchange of solos from trumpet and alto sax, the bandleader choosing his spots with a tongue-in-cheek suspense and a lefthand that hasn’t lost any power over the decades.
Marcus Miller’s snappy bass kicks off the album’s title track, a bizarrely catchy retro 70s mashup of latin soul and psychedelic rock, fueled by Ronnie Cuber’s deliciously acidic baritone sax and David Spinozza’s sunbaked guitar riffage over Palmieri’s dancing incisions. Then the band flips the script with the serpentine guaguanco groove of La Cancha, Locke’s wryly chosen spots contrasting with de la Fe’s stark, insistent solo as the charanga blaze caches fire.
Donald Harrison’s modal sax spirals uneasily in Augustine Parish, a bracingly salsafied blues, up to a hypnotic streetcorner interlude from the percussion crew. Then Palmieri goes solo with Life, a pensively energetic, neoromantically-tinged prelude. The group follows that with the slinky, noir-tinged Samba Do Suenho, Locke’s lingering lines contrasting with Palmieri’s gritty drive – it might be the album’s best track.
Spinal Volt rises from a balmy intro to a blaze of brass and and an energetic exchange of horn solos throughout the band. The Uprising switches back and forth between a casual vocal-and-percussion descarga and a mighty anthem that brings to mind McCoy Tyner’s 70s catalog, with dueling saxes to wind it up.
The steady, Monk-like Coast to Coast slowly brings the sun from behind the clouds, Palmieri and Harrison leading the charge down and then back from a trippy tropical bass-and-percussion break. Driven by Curtis and the bandleader’s relentless attack, the mighty blues shuffle Locked In is the album’s hardest-hitting number. It winds up with the epic Jibarita Y Su Son, shifting from a thicket of percussion to a classic salsa dura groove lit up with a fast-forward history of Afro-Cuban beats from the percussion. It’s inspiring to say the least to see a guy Palmieri’s age putting on as wild a party as this one with a group which also includes drummers Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and Obed Calvaire, percussionists Xavier Rivera, Iwao Sado and Camilo Molina, saxophonists Louis Fouché and Jeremy Powell, and trumpeters John Walsh and Jonathan Powell.
A Latin Music Legend Up Close and Personal at Lincoln Center
Tuesday night at the Lincoln Center atrium space just south of 63rd Streeet, an adoring, sold-out crowd got to hear Ruben Blades think on his feet and entertain the house with philosophical insights and some hilarious yarns from a career full of surprises. In a one-on-one discussion with NYU professor Carlos Chirinos, the iconic Panamanian-born salsero was in a characteristically expansive mood. Which makes sense, considering that Blades is one of the greatest lyricists and musical storytellers to emerge in the 20th century.
Blades has a sense of irony as sharp as his name (his grandfather was British; it’s pronounced that way). One of the night’s funniest moments was when Blades recalled how, as a teenage law student in Panama City, he got called in to the dean’s office after being spotted crooning at an after-hours spot. Forced to choose between music and school, he chose…drum roll…school! But after the 1968 coup d’etat there, Blades’ mom – a fine singer in her own right and a major musical influence – sent him packing to New York, to help him “stay out of trouble,” as he put it.
There he reconnected with Fania Records honcho Jerry Masucci, who’d heard Blades jamming one night at Panama City’s lone professsional studio and invited him to record at an unspecified future date. The date almost didn’t happen; when it did, Blades revealed with the hint of a sardonic grin, he didn’t consider it a success – neither the album cover nor the tracks on it have stood the test of time, he averred. Then the opening number played over the atrium’s PA, Blades intoning a disclaimer right from the first few bars: “Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.” As usual, Blades was looking to the future, in this case, to explaining away this gangster tale as a work of fiction so as to sidestep the attentions of the authoritarian regime in power at home.
Blades relished recounting how many influential DJs thought that his monster hit Pedro Navaja was destined for commercial failure. But more than taking pride in how the over-seven-minute song paved the way for longer songs on latin radio – just as Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone had helped transform the AM rock format – Blades recounted how it was arguably the first salsa hit to feature a heroine who kills in self-defense rather than being cast as villain or victim. Blades also couldn’t resist getting a dig or two in at the critics who assailed arranger Luis Ortiz – “who’d only written charts for about two thousand songs,” Blades recalled – for taking Blades’ advice to break the clave and bring down the rhythm in a crucial moment of suspense.
And in the context of 2017, it was something of a shock to hear how relatively freely Blades was given the green light to record his pioneering song cycle Buscando America, which is esssentially an album-length short story. That a large record conglomerate would allow one of their top-selling artists to have any creative control at all, let alone put out a defiantly populist avant garde suite without a hit single was almost as much of a pipe dream in 1984 as it would be now. Again, Blades had the last word over the critics and the naysayers.
Otherwise, Blades momentarily touched on but didn’t go into much detail about his acting – a side gig he fell into, more or less, which snowballed from there. He also didn’t expand on his political work, including his Panamanian Presidential campaign or his job as Minister of Tourism there, which put his music on ice for six years. What is the future for latin music? Chirinos wanted to know. Bright, and cross-pollinated, was Blades’ answer. He’s got a grand total of six separate albums currently in the works, as well as a theatre piece and another possible run at politics on his home turf. Now well into his sixties, Blades hardly looks the part of an eminence grise: there’s plenty of fight left in him.
This evening was part of a new collaboration between Lincoln Center and the NYU Music and Social Change Lab, launched last year.
Elio Villafranca Brings His Blazing Original Afro-Cuban Grooves Back to JALC
Eclectic, intense Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca & the Jass Syncopators have made Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center pretty much their home in NYC. They’ve got another weekend stand coming up June 13-15, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM. The lineup is pretty much the same as their last stand here, the notable change being Steve Turre on trombone and his signature conch shells in place of trumpeter Terrell Stafford. Which probably means more time in the spotlight for saxophonist Vincent Herring, always a good sign. Here’s what they sounded like in the room about eighteen months ago:
“You might think from their name that Elio Villafranca & the Jass Syncopators play New Orleans second-line marches, or hot jazz from the 20s. In actuality, that’s just how the word for their music is pronounced in Spanish. Last night at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Cuban pianist and his allstar lineup romped through an expert and exhilarating blend of salsa and hard bop with richly melodic interludes and the occasional plunge into third-stream sounds. That’s been a common trait among Cuban pianists practically since the days of Ernesto Lecuona – at least those evil conquistadors left one good thing on the island, the “classical tinge,” to twist a Jelly Roll Morton phrase. Much as that is one of Villafranca’s signature characteristics, this show was all about the party: watching the couples sit and sway rapturously with the lights of Manhattan glimmering from high across the park, it was surprising that there wasn’t anyone other than guest dancer Mara Garcia undulating up there with the band.
Throughout the night’s early set, Villafranca for the most part eschewed flashy soloing in lieu of an endless groove, whether that be a frequently polyrhythmic salsa slink – Villafranca is one of the most rhythmic pianists anywhere – with straight-ahead swing, a couple of detours into rumbling Puerto Rican bomba and a long, fiery mambo at the end. Locked in with the tumbling piano, tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy alternated between hard-driving flights and warm melodicism and a wryly smoky bourdoir jazz interlude toward the end of the bomba tune. Trumpeter Terrell Stafford blasted through bop grit with rapidfire glissandos and trills…and a descent into genial blues at the end of his last solo, when he’d taken it so high that there was nowhere else to go. Alto saxophonist Vincent Herring served as a powerful foil to all the goodnatured wailing, adding a biting, sometimes haunting, modally-fueled gravitas. Bassist Carlos Henriquez held to a purist, terse groove – and took one of the night’s most memorable solos, voicing a horn. Drummer Lewis Nash seemed to be having the most fun of anyone up there as he swung through conga riffs, artful clave variations that leaned on the off beat, and a jovial bounce that was all the more powerful for its simplicity.
Augmenting the rhythm was an excellent two-man team of congas and bongos, Puerto Rico’s Anthony Carrillo and the Dominican Republic’s Jonathan Troncoso. The attractively lyrical opening number, Incantations, had Villafranca staking his claim to nimble, hair-raising polyrhythms. The band bookended a brightly pouncing, riff-driven tune with dark streetcorner conga breaks, following with a song ‘dedicated to politics,’ A Great Debater, Villafranca driving its insistence to a clamoring crescendo followed by a playful Nash solo. They wound up by taking a new, untitled bomba tune and swinging it with bisected, lyrical/frenetic solos from the horns, and then the big mambo at the end where Villafranca finally took off for the upper registers with a breathtaking tumbao assault: as cruelly as he hit the keys, the groove never wavered. It was every bit as adrenalizing to watch as it must be to dance to.”
Epic Majestic Grandeur at the Apollo Saturday Night
“I’ve played for Presidents and heads of state,” pianist/composer Arturo O’Farrill told the audience at his show uptown last night, “But headlining the Apollo on a Saturday night is the greatest honor of all.” In a torrential, towering performance of new material and reinvented classics, O’Farrill summoned the ghosts out of the rafters of the legendary Harlem jazz shrine and conjured up new ones in a blaze and rumble of sound true to his band’s name. The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra pulse and roar along on African beats, through melodies that transcend the typical Spanish Caribbean repertoire, a cast of some of New York’s best jazz players delivering the thundering majesty of a symphony orchestra. That’s their main gig; their other one, when they’re not winning Grammies or playing for Presidents, is supplying the New York public school system with instruments so that kids can grow up playing this music. How cool is that?
This concert had two centerpieces, O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Suite as well as the Afro Cuban Jazz Suite written by his dad Chico O’Farrill, a paradigm-shifting composer and bandleader from another era. With its gale-force swells, pregnant pauses and momentous force, the new one often referenced the old one, but overall was a lot more robust. The old one started out as a schmaltzy ballad but soon took on variations that revealed the intro as a not-so-subtle parody of north-of-the-border blandness, through permutations that ranged from the baroque to the absolutely noir, to close the concert on a surprisingly subdued note.
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Another centerpiece – this one the marauding, intense title track from the band’s forthcoming album The Offense of the Drum – began as a sarcastic faux military march and shifted artfully into a triumphant salsa jazz theme. No matter how much the powers that be try to contain the clave, it always wins. O’Farrill wrote it as an exploration of how the drum has been used throughout history as a weapon in the arsenals of both the oppressors and the freedom fighters – and in current New York history, to call attention to how drum circles in public places have been outlawed.
Otherwise, the blaze of the brass and the unexpected and very rewardingly ever-present, fat pulse of Gregg August’s bass fueled a mix of material that edged toward the noir. The orchestra reinvented Pablo Mayor’s Mercado en Domingo as a torrid cumbia, as psychedelic as anything you could imagine. The opening number, O’Farrill’s Vaca Frita, echoed Gil Evans with its dips from angst-ridden sunset burn to elegantly moody trumpet and alto sax solos over a spare, somber backdrop from just the rhythm section. Ageless piano sage Randy Weston led the band through a richly dynamic take of his African Sunrise, holding it down with the stygian lowest registers of the piano while guest Lewis Nash drove it with a clenched-teeth intensity from behind the drum kit, guest tenor saxophonist Billy Harper livening it with several expansive but steel-focused solos. The four-piece percussion section rose and fell from thunderous to suspenseful. And Chris “Chilo” Cajigas delivered a brilliantly excoriating, historically rich hip-hop lyric tracing hundreds of years of Latin American immigration, endless exploitation yet ultimately a distinctly Nuyorican-flavored triumph over all of it, set to the darkly jubilant backdrop of Jason Lindner’s They Came.
The only drawback was the addition of a guest turntablist on a handful of numbers, which created the kind of effect you get where one radio broadcast is competing with another. In this case, it was the jazz station plagued with interference from the hip-hop station just up the dial. This band swings like crazy, and the poor guy wasn’t able to keep up. Things like this happen when a nonmusician gets thrown up onstage with players of this caliber. Hip-hop and reggaeton have given the world thousands of brilliant lyricists, but, aside from maybe Yasiin Bey, not a single noteworthy musician.
David Buchbinder Draws a Straight Line Back to Andalucia
Medieval Andalucia was the musical mecca where the nobility of Europe sent their spoiled kids to learn how to play it. It was where Arabs, Jews and Spaniards traded riffs. The golden age of jazz was much the same. with its alchemy of African, European and Latino sounds. Trumpeter David Buchbinder‘s new album Walk to the Sea with his Odesssa/Havana group recalls those eras as well as Arturo O’Farrill and Steven Bernstein’s recent mashups of those sounds. It’s one of the best albums Tzadik has put out in recent years and one of the best of 2013.
The opening track, Coffee Works, is a a diptych, juxtaposing a slinky klezmer-tinged stroll and then triumphantly picking up the pace with a salsa groove lit up by Aleksandar Gajic’s stark, resonant violin, and then a spiraling Hilario Duran piano solo A Duran arrangement of the traditional tune Landarico sets Maryem Hassan Tollar’s cool caramel vocals to a gorgeous minor-key jazz waltz, a blend of cutting-edge Fania era salsa, klezmer and jazz. Buchbinder’s chromatically bristling solo hands off to Roberto Occhipinti’s boomy bass, which gives John Johnson’s tenor and Duran’s piano a chance to conspire furtively as it goes doublespeed and then back.
The lone Duran composition here, Aventura Judia works variations on a similarly catchy chromatic salsa vamp with a lively exchange between Johnson and Buchbinder and a scampering piano solo, its web of percussion growing thicker as it pulses along. Somebody write some lyrics and give this to Earth Wind & Fire, or Spanglish Fly! La Roza Una follows with vocal variations on a stately minor-key martial riff.
The title track begins with a moody syncopation and builds to a blaze fueled by a two-horn attack from Johnson’s clarinet and Buchbinder’s trumpet, growing funkier as it bounces along. La Roza Dos goes in the opposite direction from a funky waltz to a wary, intense anthem, Tollar’s microtonal vocals enhancing the uneasy atmosphere. Valentin gives Buchbinder a chance to work dynamic magic against Duran’s flickering piano and Johnson’s pensive tenor sax, the percussion section pushing the ensemble through long upward and downward waves.
Calliope, another slinky salsa groove, gives Johnson a launching pad for a killer Middle Eastern tenor solo, Duran’s solo leading them through a brief doublespeed romp as it winds out. The final track rises from brooding, spacious neoromantic atmospherics to the closest thing to a straight-up salsa tune here, Tollar’s insistent vocals working a neat counterpoint with the resonant twin horns, Occhipinti, Duran and then Gajic trading incisive licks. Tuneful, edgy cross-pollination doesn’t get any more memorably anthemic than this.
Elio Villafranca: Blazing Original Afro-Cuban Grooves at JALC
You might think from their name that Elio Villafranca & the Jass Syncopators play New Orleans second-line marches, or hot jazz from the 20s. In actuality, that’s just how the word for their music is pronounced in Spanish. Last night at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Cuban pianist and his allstar lineup romped through an expert and exhilarating blend of salsa and hard bop with richly melodic interludes and the occasional plunge into third-stream sounds. That’s been a common trait among Cuban pianists practically since the days of Ernesto Lecuona – at least those evil conquistadors left one good thing on the island, the “classical tinge,” to twist a Jelly Roll Morton phrase. Much as that is one of Villafranca’s signature characteristics, this show was all about the party: watching the couples sit and sway rapturously with the lights of Manhattan glimmering from high across the park, it was surprising that there wasn’t anyone other than guest dancer Mara Garcia undulating up there with the band.
Throughout the night’s early set, Villafranca for the most part eschewed flashy soloing in lieu of an endless groove, whether that be a frequently polyrhythmic salsa slink – Villafranca is one of the most rhythmic pianists anywhere – with straight-ahead swing, a couple of detours into rumbling Puerto Rican bomba and a long, fiery mambo at the end. Locked in with the tumbling piano, tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy alternated between hard-driving flights and warm melodicism and a wryly smoky bourdoir jazz interlude toward the end of the bomba tune. Trumpeter Terrell Stafford blasted through bop grit with rapidfire glissandos and trills…and a descent into genial blues at the end of his last solo, when he’d taken it so high that there was nowhere else to go. Alto saxophonist Vincent Herring served as a powerful foil to all the goodnatured wailing, adding a biting, sometimes haunting, modally-fueled gravitas. Bassist Carlos Enrique held to a purist, terse groove – and took one of the night’s most memorable solos, voicing a horn. Drummer Lewis Nash seemed to be having the most fun of anyone up there as he swung through conga riffs, artful clave variations that leaned on the off beat, and a jovial bounce that was all the more powerful for its simplicity.
Augmenting the rhythm was an excellent two-man team of congas and bongos, Puerto Rico’s Anthony Carrillo and the Dominican Republic’s Jonathan Troncoso. The attractively lyrical opening number, Incantations, had Villafranca staking his claim to nimble, hair-raising polyrhythms. The band bookended a brightly pouncing, riff-driven tune with dark streetcorner conga breaks, following with a song “dedicated to politics,” A Great Debater, Villafranca driving its insistence to a clamoring crescendo followed by a playful Nash solo. They wound up by taking a new, untitled bomba tune and swinging it with bisected, lyrical/frenetic solos from the horns, and then the big mambo at the end where Villafranca finally took off for the upper registers with a breathtaking tumbao assault: as cruelly as he hit the keys, the groove never wavered. It was every bit as adrenalizing to watch as it must be to dance to. Villafranca and his “jass” band are back at Dizzy’s Club tonight and tomorrow if you’re in the mood.
Eddie Palmieri Sets SoHo on Fire
In this era’s maze of weird tempos and microtones, sometimes some of us forget that jazz was the world’s default pop and dance music not for years but for decades. The crowd that packed SOB’s Friday night to see Eddie Palmieri hadn’t forgotten, though. It was as if it was 1965 all over again, in the best possible way. El gente were an eclectic mix of dancers, but just as many of them had come out for a concert experience, to listen and be blown away by the intensity of the music. Even the pianist at least partially responsible for the invention of salsa jazz was impressed by his 14-piece orchestra’s raw, feral power. There was a point where after Palmieri had wrung all the apprehension he could find out of a gleefully cautionary, Monkish riff, trombonist Chris Washburne grabbed a mean handful of low chromatics, ran with them and headed straight to the rafters, the band close behind. Would they ever back away and let it breathe for a minute? No way, Jose! The band’s stampeding ferocity could not be stopped, and at age 75, Palmieri is every bit as vital as he’s ever been, maybe better than ever.
He looked out at the crowd, remarked that the ambience was the same as it had been way back in day at the Palladium, then dedicated an expansively crescendoing version of Azucar Para Ti to Barry Rogers, the trombonist on that landmark album. The band had begun on an improvisationally-charged note – probably a good idea to tweak individual sound levels right off the bat considering how loud it was in the club, with the occasional howl of feedback bleeding from the PA early on – and as the heat rose, eventually took a turn into more hypnotic, two-chord-vamp Afro-Cuban grooves for the sake of the dancers. Crooner Herman Olivera held suave and resolute while the percussionists went deeper into a thicket of tropical polyrhythms punctuated by the incisions and roars of the horns, ablaze with minor-key fury. Palmieri is a generous leader, to a fault, playing to the strengths of the band and doling out solos throughout the orchestra. One particular star was the absolutely brilliant tres player Nelson Gonzalez, who was running his guitar through a watery, flanged effect that gave him almost as much volume as the trombones, making his way matter-of-factly through several slinky, unstoppably crescendoing solos, moving from fluid, sinuous melody lines to frenetic chord-chopping way up the fretboard. It looked as if he was about to break a string at any second, but he never did.
When Palmieri did take a solo, he was probably the most adventurous of everyone, slowly uncoiling from swinging broken chords, to insistent pedal motifs, to outright menace as he fired off several series of resonant atonal clusters anchored by his powerful low lefthand attack. Avant garde as it may have been, it made sense: this is a guy who’s been pushing the envelope all his life. And that was just the first set. Palmieri – who’s just been made a NEA Jazz Master – is off on world tour, with a return engagement at the New York Salsa Congress on September 2 at the Hilton at 6th Ave. and 53rd St. You have to wonder if the rest of the world is anywhere near ready for the kind of energy that the crowd here seemed to take for granted.
Lucid Culture 