By Daniel Chang. The Orange County Register, May 19, 2000
With all the music coming to us from Cuba, it is often easy to overlook American musicians who produce the same sound but do not fit into the romanticized image that record labels and marketers have conjured of the Caribbean island.
Indeed, Cuban musicians deserve the acclaim and record sales that have accompanied their renaissance in Europe and America. They are some of the most talented on the global Latin music scene and their virtuosity has been widely recognized of late, spurred particularly by the popularity of the "Buena
Vista Social Club" album of 1997.
Yet it's important not to ignore the quality of Cuban-derived music - from traditional rumba and danzon to innovative and percussive Latin jazz and fusion - that American musicians of all ethnic backgrounds have created and continue to create on our shores.
Sure, they don't carry the sympathetic stories of musicians-once-forgotten-now-redeemed that come with living on a quasi-isolated island like Cuba. But Latin music has thrived and even improved right here in the United States.
From the big bands who played New York's dancehalls in the 1940s to the rumba and mambo recordings of the 1950s and the salsa movement of the 1970s, the U.S., believe it or not, has been a powerhouse of Latin music in general and Cuban music in particular.
Two recordings recently released demonstrate innovation and tradition that rival, and in some ways exceed, the music coming from Cuba today.
The first is Eddie Bobe's "Central Park Rumba" on Piranha Records. The album's title takes its name from a musical pick-up session that reportedly has taken place in New York City's Central Park since the 1970s. Each Sunday, according to the album's liner notes, musicians -
particularly percussionists - meet to drum, sing and dance, much in the tradition of African religious ceremonies.
Think of this weekly musical jam session as a pick-up basketball game. It starts with one player shooting hoops on the blacktop. Other players trickle in and soon they have enough bodies for a game.
Listening to Bobe's "Central Park Rumba" - a collection of original and traditional drum-driven compositions - is a lot like watching this sort of scene unfold.
Bobe, a Nuyorican (New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent) percussionist, captures an easy, improvised feel on this recording. The tracks shift effortlessly from one to the next, emphasizing the spirit of an impromptu jam session in which each musician takes a turn leading the pack.
For instance, the transition from Bobe's "Al Parque Central" to flutist Jay Collins' "Respira Profundo" (Breathe Deep) takes the listener effortlessly from Bobe's heated rumba to Collins' melodic jazz, which gives way to a carretero rhythmic pattern that resembles a horse's
gait.
In many ways, Bobe's album is like a field recording. It takes the listener on an aural tour of New York's percussion scene, from religious Santeria ceremonies to the vibrant Central Park scene where the Cuban rumba has thrived and created an image independent from the island of its origin.
Another musician thriving in the United States is Cuban émigré Israel Lopez "Cachao," whose latest album, "Cuba Linda" on CineSon, was released in late March.
Seeing as how the bassist is considered a master musician, particularly of the descarga (a jam session of the highest order), one would expect little less than a masterpiece.
"Cuba Linda" sounds a lot like the maestro's Grammy-winning "Master Sessions, Vol. 1," a superb album of traditional Cuban song forms and jazz-influenced jam sessions. Now, it seems like Cachao is retracing a lot of the ground he covered the first time around.
Still, Cachao does enough digging to make it worthwhile, exploring more traditional African music than before and reinterpreting an American classic, "Rhapsody in Blue." And, truly, there is some exceptional talent on this album, and perhaps that, and if you love to dance to
traditional Cuban music, is its most redeeming quality.
Flutes dart in and out of the danzons like dragonflies dancing around a blade of grass. The tres, a traditional Cuban instrument made up of three pairs of strings that produce a slinky sound, drops in for a lead on "A Francisquita le Gusta el Cusube (Little Francisca Likes the Pudding)."
Few bandleaders command such a tight orchestra over such a varied terrain of musical styles, from the violins and flutes of the ballroom-like danzon on "Los Tres Aces (The Three Aces)" to the complex rhythms and choruses of a traditional African chant on "Otan Efo."Then
again, when you have musicians of the caliber of trombonist Jimmy Bosch, flutist Nestor Torres and conguero Luis Conte, it's easy to sound this good.
His descargas start slowly, as if waking from a night's sleep, and kick-start into a furiously paced polyphony of percussion, horns, winds and strings - accomplishing more on one track than many Cubaphiles do on an entire album.
Even on the covers, Cachao innovates and reinvents. A danzon arrangement on George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" reworks the song with a carretero rhythm while violin, cello and flute twist the blissful melody like a ribbon around a gift box.
Sadly, though, the musical gifts of "Cuba Linda" and "Central Park Rumba" probably will be overlooked - in sales and acclaim - by consumers and critics who believe that they have to look to Cuba for "authentic" music when the genuine article is made right here at
home.
Daniel Chang can be reached at (714) 796-3689 or DChang@notes.freedom.com.
Copyright 1999 The Orange County Register |