Lois Gilbert
March-14th-2004, 03:42 AM
Taking Off From Tito Puente
March 13, 2004
By BEN RATLIFF
It's great to see an idea seized upon and made even better
than it might have been. Thursday night's concert at Alice
Tully Hall offered further proof that Lincoln Center's
Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, now in its second year, is on
the right course.
The band, led by the pianist Arturo O'Farrill, follows
essentially the same guidelines as the Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra: it puts great works before the public and plays
them well. It's also creating a canon as it goes along,
which in Latin music is not so much a thorny issue as a
novelty; this canon looks wide and inclusive from the
outset.
The orchestra is commissioning new works, at this point
mostly from its own members, but the scope will surely
expand. And the enterprise has an intellectual base that
should end up enlarging most people's idea of what Latin
jazz is.
To start and finish Thursday's concert, the 18-piece
orchestra went straight to the epitome of Latin jazz in the
popular imagination: three old pieces from the 1950's by
Tito Puente. They were "Mambo Birdland," "Picadillo" and
"Ti Mon Bo," and the musicians played this orchestral mambo
as if they owned it, adding and subtracting dynamics as if
moving around blocks of sound. With an elegant and nicely
audible mixture of percussion from trap drums (played by
Phoenix Rivera), conga (Milton Cardona) and bongo (Joe
Gonzalez), the montuno sections had imposing power. The
soloists were superb, including the trombonist Noah Bless
and the alto saxophonist Erica Von Kleist, who used
repetitive single-note figures in "Mambo Birdland" to drive
up the tension of the clave rhythm.
The best music of the night was in a commission from the
trombonist Papo Vazquez, who has realized a modern
orchestral jazz that incorporates the bomba and plena
rhythms of traditional Puerto Rican music. His piece, "Iron
Jungle," with Roberto Cepeda as a guest percussionist on
the bomba drum, was relentlessly fast and driving. It was
like a thicket of percussion, with Mr. O'Farrill's fourths
on the piano and his own jabbing trombone lines as added
percussive elements. The piece ended with a sense of
concision. It was ferociously alive and resisted the common
tendency of commissioned pieces to be overstudied or
contrived.
Paquito D'Rivera gave off a lovely clarinet sound, even and
strong and soft, on his "I Remember Dizzy," a tune shifting
between Latin rhythm and four-four swing. The group also
played his "Samba for Carmen" and "A Lo Tristano," but all
three used a little too much precise homage in the game of
combining Latin and jazz music. ("A Lo Tristano" was
diverting: Mr. D'Rivera and Mario Rivera on alto and tenor
saxophones effortlessly replicated the sounds of two fast
saxophone lines melting into each other on the old Lennie
Tristano records.)
And there was a commissioned work by Mr. O'Farrill, an
elegiac piece called "So Much Love," dedicated to the
saxophonist Sam Furnace, who died in January. It had a
long, brooding introduction with brass fanfares and ended
before it got much of a chance to develop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/arts/music/13CUBA.html?ex=1080208741&ei=1&en=9d1c8c00de3b1883
March 13, 2004
By BEN RATLIFF
It's great to see an idea seized upon and made even better
than it might have been. Thursday night's concert at Alice
Tully Hall offered further proof that Lincoln Center's
Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, now in its second year, is on
the right course.
The band, led by the pianist Arturo O'Farrill, follows
essentially the same guidelines as the Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra: it puts great works before the public and plays
them well. It's also creating a canon as it goes along,
which in Latin music is not so much a thorny issue as a
novelty; this canon looks wide and inclusive from the
outset.
The orchestra is commissioning new works, at this point
mostly from its own members, but the scope will surely
expand. And the enterprise has an intellectual base that
should end up enlarging most people's idea of what Latin
jazz is.
To start and finish Thursday's concert, the 18-piece
orchestra went straight to the epitome of Latin jazz in the
popular imagination: three old pieces from the 1950's by
Tito Puente. They were "Mambo Birdland," "Picadillo" and
"Ti Mon Bo," and the musicians played this orchestral mambo
as if they owned it, adding and subtracting dynamics as if
moving around blocks of sound. With an elegant and nicely
audible mixture of percussion from trap drums (played by
Phoenix Rivera), conga (Milton Cardona) and bongo (Joe
Gonzalez), the montuno sections had imposing power. The
soloists were superb, including the trombonist Noah Bless
and the alto saxophonist Erica Von Kleist, who used
repetitive single-note figures in "Mambo Birdland" to drive
up the tension of the clave rhythm.
The best music of the night was in a commission from the
trombonist Papo Vazquez, who has realized a modern
orchestral jazz that incorporates the bomba and plena
rhythms of traditional Puerto Rican music. His piece, "Iron
Jungle," with Roberto Cepeda as a guest percussionist on
the bomba drum, was relentlessly fast and driving. It was
like a thicket of percussion, with Mr. O'Farrill's fourths
on the piano and his own jabbing trombone lines as added
percussive elements. The piece ended with a sense of
concision. It was ferociously alive and resisted the common
tendency of commissioned pieces to be overstudied or
contrived.
Paquito D'Rivera gave off a lovely clarinet sound, even and
strong and soft, on his "I Remember Dizzy," a tune shifting
between Latin rhythm and four-four swing. The group also
played his "Samba for Carmen" and "A Lo Tristano," but all
three used a little too much precise homage in the game of
combining Latin and jazz music. ("A Lo Tristano" was
diverting: Mr. D'Rivera and Mario Rivera on alto and tenor
saxophones effortlessly replicated the sounds of two fast
saxophone lines melting into each other on the old Lennie
Tristano records.)
And there was a commissioned work by Mr. O'Farrill, an
elegiac piece called "So Much Love," dedicated to the
saxophonist Sam Furnace, who died in January. It had a
long, brooding introduction with brass fanfares and ended
before it got much of a chance to develop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/arts/music/13CUBA.html?ex=1080208741&ei=1&en=9d1c8c00de3b1883