Most people define Latin Jazz by the two broad strokes that brought the music into existence – the combination of aesthetics from jazz and Afro-Cuban music – but in reality, there’s so much more to the story. The genre initially arose from these two influences, but as the music developed into a modern style, it absorbed everything that entered its path. When Brazilian music stepped into the public eye of the United States, it became undeniably linked to the Latin Jazz world. As jazz musicians experimented with rock and funk in the sixties, Latin Jazz artists found a way to combine their rhythmic world with these emerging influences. The jazz world dived headfirst into fusion during the seventies, and Latin musicians sat steadily in the mix, becoming an irreplaceable piece of bands like Return To Forever, Weather Report, and more. In return, Latin Jazz musicians started incorporating fusion elements into their music, experimenting with new harmonic sonorities and structures. The eighties saw a rise in technology and electronic sounds in music, which bled into Latin Jazz albums from artists like Dave Valentin, Giovanni Hidalgo, and more. The history of Latin Jazz has been characterized by a constant evolution as musicians incorporated new ideas from the culture around them.
In the sixties, the Latin music world had happily brought a funky groove into the mix, producing a blend called boogaloo. Latin dance musicians like Ray Barretto led the way with steady combinations of Afro-Cuban rhythms and funky bass lines, producing hits like “El Watussi.” This new soulful hybrid not only took the New York dancers by storm, but it turned heads across the country. As Latin dance music became popular among the greater public, more musicians grabbed onto the new sound. The Fania label took charge of this direction, supporting musicians like Willie Colon and Larry Harlow. While Latin dance musicians benefited from the popularity of funky Latin mixtures, jazz musicians stood and took notice. Popular artists started to incorporated Latinized versions of contemporary pop songs, tinged with authentic Cuban rhythms and jazz improvisation. At the same time, musicians began to write original instrumental Latin Jazz pieces that drew upon the soulful sound coming from New York dance music. As a result, the sixties gave us a number of great Latin Jazz albums filled with influences from soul, pop music, funk, jazz, and Cuban music.
These recordings have met mixed reviews over the years – some people love them and some view them as shallow attempts at commercial appeal – still, the fact remains that they are important pieces of Latin Jazz history. I’ve gathered three albums that represent the funky side of Latin Jazz that took hold during the sixties, hoping to paint a picture of this approach. While more examples of this style exist, these three albums serve as starting points to a larger exploration – take a listen and then check out more albums from these artists. Enjoy!
———- Soul Bag, Mongo Santamaria Legendary conguero Mongo Santamaria reigns as the undisputed champion of funky Latin Jazz with a huge catalogue of albums to back his claim. A well-respected percussionist that arrived to New York in the 1950s, Santamaria made his mark upon the Latin dance and jazz worlds through work with Tito Puente, Cal Tjader and more. He established himself as a bandleader in the late fifties with several albums for Fantasy Records, but didn’t hit the mainstream until the early sixties, when a funky version of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” hit big. From that point, Santamaria steadily kept one foot in the pop music world, re-interpreting modern hits through Latin rhythms and creating bluesy descargas over chunky backbeats. He touched upon modern rock with versions of Beatles tunes, connected with soul through Motown covers, and stayed up-to-date with Credence Clearwater Revival tunes. Along the way, Santamaria never lost his Latin Jazz roots, placing most of these songs in an instrumental context and providing plenty of room for improvisation. He made sure that his music included the best of both worlds with funky masters like drummer Bernard Purdie and great jazz soloists like saxophonist Sonny Fortune. At the root of Santamaria’s sound, arranger Marty Sheller made sure that the music oozed with greasy funk, creating amazing contexts for the drummer to excel. As Santamaria moved into the seventies, he incorporated disco and more aggressive funk sounds, while his work in the eighties and nineties signaled a shift back to a more traditional Latin Jazz approach. Santamaria’s full collection of work represents an important piece of the Latin Jazz world, but his boogaloo charged work in the sixties remains a trademark of his sound.
Many 1960s Santamaria albums could demonstrate his connection to a funky boogaloo approach; the 1969 release Soul Bag finds the master in full form. While Santamaria often mixed soulful instrumentals fueled by Cuban rhythms with more straight-ahead Latin Jazz tracks, the percussionist dives straight into his funky side here without apologies. Most of the tracks emanate from soul recordings of the day, drawing liberally upon the Motown and Stax libraries. Fortune inserts bluesy bends and slides into “In The Midnight Hour,” while a driving cha cha cha blends with a funk beat behind the saxophonist. Flautist Hubert Laws breezes through the melody on “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay,” interjecting soulful flights of improvisation between a clever horn arrangement. The James Brown classic “Cold Sweat” seems comfortably natural in a cha cha cha setting, providing ample room for greasy improvisations from Fortune and aggressive conga solos from Santamaria. The arrangement stands as the centerpiece of the group’s version of The Temptations’ “My Girl,” as a down tempo cha cha cha subtly pushes the wind players. Laws overdubs multiple flutes over a light samba rhythm on “Up, Up And Away,” finding quick spots to engage in improvisational embellishments. A 6/8 rhythm from Santamaria explodes into a stuttering shuffle rhythm behind “Green Onions,” providing one of the album’s most interesting solo sections, that includes a classic Santamaria statement. Santamaria pulls all the pieces of his sixties sound together here – Latin versions of contemporary pop songs, a funky undertone, and a preference for jazz improvisation – into a classic representation of his Latin Jazz boogaloo.
Juicy, Willie Bobo Only one musician came close to Santamaria’s place as king of funky Latin Jazz – his frequent collaborator percussionist Willie Bobo. Only a teenager when Santamaria arrived in New York, Bobo became the conguero’s translator in exchange for percussion lessons. Santamaria helped the young musician, but his innate talent and feel led Bobo to a full schedule of gigs with Tjader, Puente, and a cast of jazz musicians. Bobo’s ability to double on Latin percussion and drum kit made him a natural selection for jazz musicians interested in a Latin tinge, but it also kept him close to the modern funky pop world. From his 1963 debut Do That Thing!, his work as a bandleader always included a boogaloo edge, infused with a strong dose of jazz authenticity. Once he moved to Verve, he adopted a formula similar to Santamaria’s successful albums, including a mix of Latinized pop covers, bluesy originals, and some touches of jazz standards. While much of his work focused upon instrumental performances, Bobo utilized another one of his strong musical talents, performing as a featured singer. Sometimes singing repeated coros and other times working through full songs, Bobo’s vocals added another soulful layer to his thick funky soup. As Bobo moved into the seventies, he spent ample time focusing upon sideman work and his recordings as a bandleader increasingly incorporated a harder edged funk and disco sound – a fact evidenced on the 1979 release Bobo. In a career filled with associations with some of the most important musicians in the Latin Jazz world, his sixties releases remain memorable moments in the popular consciousness.
Much like Santamaria, Bobo left a large legacy of funky Latin Jazz albums, but one gem often sits in the background of his career – the boogaloo filled recording Juicy. The album cover sets the vibe before the music even starts, with a wide-open orange surrounding a scantily clad young woman. Once the music begins, the sixties are in full effect, starting with an up-tempo cha cha cha version of “Knock On Wood.” Bobo’s arrangements are clean and tight, upping the funk ante with a swinging rhythm section. The percussionist revisits a funk jazz classic, as his group slithers through a slow cha cha cha version of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” stocked with a tasty guitar solo from Sonny Henry. The title track, “Juicy,” steps outside the pop music cover theme, but it keeps the boogaloo bubbling with a catchy arrangement and constant coros. Bobo’s recordings as a bandleader usually rejected the standard Latin Jazz usage of piano in favor of the timelier guitar sound. Henry holds his own confidently throughout the album; his performance on the Motown standard “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” keeps the song alive through thick chords, bold melodies, and a soulful improvisation. Bobo and his group charges through a quick bolero behind Bob Crewe’s “Music To Watch Girls Go By” making short spaces for improvisatory flourishes from saxophonist Bobby Brown. There’s a greasy swing to the son montuno groove behind “Shing-A-Ling Baby,” made all the more memorable by Bobo’s vocals and Henry’s bluesy guitar licks. There’s a couple of purely great Latin Jazz moments on the album too – the energetic “La Descarga Del Bobo” gives the band a chance to stretch out. The bulk of album relies upon the funky soul that fueled most of Bobo’s albums as a bandleader in the sixties, providing some classic Latin Jazz boogaloo.
Wild Thing, Armando Peraza Unlike his contemporaries Santamaria and Bobo, percussionist Armando Peraza spent the bulk of his career in Latin Jazz and Latin Rock; he only dipped into funky Latin Jazz. Originally coming to the New York from Mexico with his friend Mongo Santamaria, Peraza found work quickly, recording with Charlie Parker, Slim Gaillard, and more. The core of legacy began later though, when Peraza established himself in San Francisco, leading to years of work with Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, George Shearing, and Carlos Santana. His work on the West Coast spanned from traditional jazz to Afro-Cuban dance music, Latin Jazz, and Latin Rock; the percussionist happily lent his knowledge of Afro-Cuban rhythms to any context possible. His flexibility became a hallmark of his career, opening him to a variety of performance opportunities. In the long run though, he shied away from the funky side of Latin Jazz preferred by Santamaria and Bobo, leaning towards a more traditional take on Latin Jazz. He refined his skills as a composer during his time with Shearing, producing over twenty songs for the pianist. He continued writing during his time with the Santana band, infusing the group with a jazz flavor and a heavy dose of Afro-Cuban percussion. Through his high profile associations with Shearing and Santana, Peraza shared Afro-Cuban percussion with listeners around the world, spreading his passion for the music and inspiring other to follow his lead.
Peraza spent most of his career as a sideman in the Latin Jazz and Latin Rock worlds, so it’s an unusual anomaly that his one album as a bandleader, the 1968 release Wild Thing, delivers an addictive brand of funky Latin Jazz. Despite the lack of consistency with Peraza’s career, there’s no lack of conviction on this album; Peraza plays with full force soul with a combination of pop music covers and boogaloo tinged originals. The rhythm section sets up a head-swinging groove on the James Brown classic “Funky Broadway,” setting the stage for an impassioned and bluesy solo from saxophonist Sadao Watanabe. Peraza’s rock solid tumbao establishes the groove on “Mony Mony” while flautist Johnny Pacheco struts through the familiar melody and a catchy improvisation. Bassist Bobby Rodriguez lays down a virtuosic bass line beneath a dual flute melody from Watanabe and Pacheco on the Peraza original “Red Onions,” leading into a synthesizer solo from Mike Abene. Trombonist Garnett Brown slides into the familiar melody on “Wild Thing,” leaving plenty of room for percussion fills and an impressive solo from pianist Chick Corea. The group changes the pace with an up-tempo Brazilian groove on “Granny’s Samba,” presenting a jazzy texture for solos from Watanabe on sax and Peraza on conga. Electric bassist Chuck Rainey provides a steady line behind intertwining melodic lines on “Souled Out,” while funky vamps serve as interludes between improvisations from Pacheco and Watanabe. Peraza performs with class and style throughout Wild Thing, bringing his world-renowned sense of flexibility and musicality to a lively session that rounds out any collection of funky Latin Jazz.
Throughout its history, Latin Jazz has spread across the United States, evolving differently in the country’s various regions. The East Coast, and New York in particular, often sits in history as the music’s birthplace; it remains a vital spot for the growth and survival of Latin Jazz, but it’s not the end of the story. Latin Jazz spent years jumping all over the map, developing a significant presence on the West Coast in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Transplanted mentors in Afro-Cuban music helped solidify the knowledge base in these areas, with role models like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo, Francisco Aguabella, and Armando Peraza sharing their experience with local musicians. These musicians provided a firm understanding of the music’s Afro-Cuban foundations, but from there, local musicians helped it grow into a uniquely West Coast version of Latin Jazz. From that point, the East and West Coast Latin Jazz scenes shared a common heritage, but they created very different products. The West Coast’s version of Latin Jazz built a very authentic link to Cuban heritage but stepped away from New York tradition. The East Coast remained on the cutting edge of the music, thriving upon the the strength of history and innovation bred through the New York scene. As Latin Jazz moved into the twenty first century, both sides of the country held significant musical movements, and major opportunities for collaboration and shared knowledge.
Collaboration between East and West Coast musicians is always a cause for celebration, and this week the San Francisco Bay Area will be cheering as New York flautist Andrea Brachfeld brings her talents into the region. A long-time fixture on the New York Latin music scene, Brachfeld has an important history in the music. She found a love for Latin music during her developmental years, leading to a high profile gig with the influential salsa band Charanga ’76. As she developed her career, she performed with Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, Dave Valentin, and more. Now a band leader with an impressive catalogue of recordings, ranging from the 2000 release Remembered Dreams to the 2008 album Into the World: A Musical Offering, Brachfeld has become an important musician with knowledge to share. Brachfeld will be a guest artist with the Stanford Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble this week, holding a clinic on the origins and role of the flute in Afro-Cuban music, as well as working with the band. The clinic, held this Thursday April 1at 12:00 p.m., will be free and open to the public. In addition, Brachfeld will hold two performances with several of the area’s finest musicians, including pianist Murray Low, bassist Dave Belove, and drummer Paul van Wageningen. She’ll be covering a good deal of ground in her performances, with shows in both Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Brachfeld’s performances will highlight some important collaboration between the East and West Coast music scenes, creating a must-hear event for Bay Area Latin Jazz fans.
The Bay Area is in for a treat this week as Brachfeld shares her musical insights with several generations of musicians. In honor of Brachfeld’s musicality, we’re dedicating today’s Weekly Latin Jazz Video Fix to the flautist with several great clips. The first video finds Brachfeld recording with her New York based Latin Jazz ensemble, Phoenix Rising, performing an original composition. The second clip features Brachfeld performing in a club setting, showing some heavy flute chops. The last video places Brachfeld in a serious descarga with several other flautists, including the great Dave Valentin. There’s some notable music in Brachfeld – good news for Bay Area Latin Jazz fans this week. Enjoy!
———- Andrea Brachfeld & Phoenix Rising Performing “Four Corners”
Andrea Brachfeld Opening Up Over “Flor De Zampoña”
Andrea Brachfeld Performing In A Flute Descarga
———- BAY AREA LATIN JAZZ FOLKS – CATCH ANDREA BRACHFELD THIS WEEK!
Brachfeld will be making a rare Bay Area appearance this week, so don’t miss it! She’ll be giving a clinic as part of her work with the Stanford Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble entitled “The Origins and Role of the Flute in Afro-Cuban Music: 1900 – Present.” You can also catch her performing with an all-star Bay Area ensemble that will include Murray Low on piano, David Belove on bass, and Paul van Wageningen on drums. These are two must-see events; the info is below, put it on your calendar now!
ANDREA BRACHFELD
Clinic – The Origins and Role of the Flute in Afro-Cuban Music: 1900-Present WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Bolivar House – Stanford University
528 Alvarado Row
Stanford, CA TIME: 12:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Kuumbwa Jazz Center
320-2 Cedar Street
Santa Cruz, CA TIME: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS: $12 in advance; $15 at door
WHEN: Friday 4/2/10 WHERE:Yoga Society of San Francisco
2872 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
———-
Want to hear more from Andrea Brachfeld? Check out these albums: Back With Sweet Passion
———-
Do you have a video to contribute to satisfy our weekly Latin Jazz video fix? If so, send it in – it’s time to feed our addiction. I’m looking for live performances, from any context. I’ll most likely be posting one video per week, but if you’ve got another idea, let’s talk. So come on Latin Jazz videographers, musicians, and fans – let’s share some of our memorable videos! Get my contact info HERE.
Latin Jazz This Week will bring you a weekly look into news from the Latin Jazz world. You’ll find new releases, recommended performances, web finds, and more. You can check out some current sounds in the Listening Center tab at the top of the page. Performance dates will be kept in the Live Latin Jazz tab at the top of the page.
If you’re in SOUTH AMERICA this week . . . HECTOR MARTIGNON WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Thelonious Jazz Club
Jerónimo Salguero 1884
1425 Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina TIME: 9:30 p.m. TICKETS: $20
If you’re in CANADA this week . . . JANE BUNNETT WHEN: Saturday 4/3/10 WHERE:Beach United Church
140 Wineva Avenue
Toronto, ON TIME: 4:30 p.m.
If you’re on the EAST COAST this week . . . ADRIANO SANTOS BRAZILIAN JAZZ TRIO WHEN: Saturday 4/3/10 WHERE:The Bar Next Door
129 MacDougal St
New York, NY TIME: 7:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m., & 12:30 a.m. TICKETS: $12
ARTURO O’FARRILL
Solo Piano WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Puppet’s Jazz Bar
481 5th Avenue Park Slope
Brooklyn, NY TIME: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
BOBBY SANABRIA
Big Band WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Fonda Boricua Lounge
172 East 106th Street
New York, NY TIME: 7:30 p.m. & 9:30 p.m. TICKETS: $10
CHEMBO CORNIEL WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe
236 East 3rd Street
New York, NY TIME: 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: $7
CHICO O’FARRILL’S AFRO-CUBAN JAZZ ORCHESTRA WHEN: Sunday 4/4/10 WHERE:Birdland
315 W. 44th Street
Manhattan, NY TIME: 9:00 p.m. & 11:00 p.m. TICKETS: $30
CHRIS WASHBURNE & S.Y.O.T.O.S. WHEN: Sunday 4/4/10 WHERE:Smoke
2751 Broadway
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m. & 11:30 p.m. TICKETS: $20 minimum
EDWARD PEREZ TRIO WHEN: Tuesday 3/30/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
ERIC KURIMSKI WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Terraza Cafe
40-19 Gleane St
Elmhurst, NY TIME: 10:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
GABRIEL ALEGRIA WHEN: Friday 4/2/10 – Sunday 4/4/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: Friday & Saturday – 8;00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m.; Sunday – 7:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
GREG DIAMOND WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Flutebar – Gramercy
40 East 20th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m.
MARIA CANGIANO WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
PAPO VAZQUEZ WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Brooklyn Public Library
Grand Army Plaza
Brooklyn NY TIME: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
PAMELA RODRIGUEZ WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
If you’re in the MID-EAST this week . . . DARWIN NOGUERA EVOLUTION QUARTET WHEN: Tuesday 3/30/10 WHERE:Andy’s Jazz Club
11 E. Hubbard Street
Chicago, IL TIME: 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
LOS GATOS WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Live At PJ’s
102 S 1st St
Ann Arbor, MI TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 9:15 p.m. TICKETS: $7
PAULINHO GARCIA WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Piccolo Mondo
1642 E. 56th Street
Chicago, IL TIME: 6:00 p.m.
TUMBAO BRAVO WHEN: Sunday 4/4/10 WHERE:Sangria’s
401 South Lafayette Avenue
Royal Oak, MI TIME: 9:30 p.m. TICKETS: $5
If you’re on the WEST COAST this week . . . ANDREA BRACHFELD
Clinic – The Origins and Role of the Flute in Afro-Cuban Music: 1900-Present WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Bolivar House – Stanford University
528 Alvarado Row
Stanford, CA TIME: 12:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
WHEN: Thursday 4/1/10 WHERE:Kuumbwa Jazz Center
320-2 Cedar Street
Santa Cruz, CA TIME: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS: $12 in advance; $15 at door
WHEN: Friday 4/2/10 WHERE:Yoga Society of San Francisco
2872 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
ANNA ESTRADA WHEN: Tuesday 3/30/10 WHERE:Caffe Trieste
1667 Market Street
San Francisco, CA TIME: 6:00 p.m.
FRANCISCO AGUABELLA WHEN: Saturday 4/3/10 WHERE:Steamers
138 W. Commonwealth Avenue
Fullerton, CA TIME: 8:30 p.m. TICKETS: $8
JUAN ESCOVEDO WHEN: Wednesday 3/31/10 WHERE:Yoshi’s – Oakland
510 Embarcadero West
Jack London Square
Oakland, CA TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:00 p.m. TICKETS: 8:00 p.m. – $14; 10:00 p.m. – $10
KAT PARRA WHEN: Saturday 4/3/10 WHERE:Senzala Restaurant
250 East Java Drive
Sunnyvale, CA TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
———- Click here to have these posts delivered via email. Or, click here to subscribe to the full text RSS feed and never miss another post!
Latin Jazz Live reflects upon the most vital piece of the music’s existence – live performance. Recordings stand as historical milestones, but in a spontaneous and evolving art form like Latin Jazz, live performance in the standard by which musicians are measured. In this recurring series, LJC writers will provide their impressions about Latin Jazz concerts and share the evening’s proceedings with the Latin Jazz community. Comments are welcomed and discussion encouraged as we dig into the live music experience.
———- Latin Jazz Live
Bobby Carcasses And Afrojazz The Jazz Gallery
Thursday, March 11, 2010
By Tomas Peña
———-
Afro Cuban Jazz guru Bobby Carcasses made a rare New York appearance at The Jazz Gallery, an international cultural center and performance space located in downtown Manhattan. The elder statesman is celebrating 50 years (plus) in the music business and visited the Big Apple as part of a promotional tour for his most recent recording, De La Habana a Nueva York (Vero Records, 2010), which was recorded in Brooklyn, New York.
A consummate showman with a flair for the dramatic, Bobby sings, dances, plays the piano, bass, percussion and flugelhorn. In addition, he is a visual artist and an avid practitioner of yoga and meditation.
Bobby kicked off the evening’s festivities with a unique a cappella interpretation of “Son de La Loma,” integrating elements of bebop, scat, Yoruba chants and rhythms. He then turned to the keyboard and accompanied himself on the bolero, “No Sera De Mi.” Midway through the tune, pianist Manuel Varela, bassist Yunior Terry, drummer Dafnis Prieto, saxophonist Yosvany Terry and percussionist Marvin Diz joined him onstage (followed by flutist Andrea Brachfeld who joined the band onstage later). Bobby‘s passion for American jazz was most apparent during his interpretations of “On Green Dolphin Street” (sung in Spanish) and “Sometimes I’m Happy” (sung in English). He also paid tribute to two Cuban icons, Miguelito Valdes (“Babalu“) and Chano Pozo (“Blues Para Chano”), which evolved into an all out descarga (jam session). Lastly he performed “De La Habana a Nueva York” and a heartfelt bolero titled “Veronica,” which he dedicated to his daughter.
I can‘t say enough about the band, all of whom are Cuban expatriates, Bobby’s “apprentices” and formidable musicians in their own right. From the outset it was apparent that they were there to make a joyous noise and demonstrate their love and respect for an icon and father figure who has had a major impact on their lives.
Bobby was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1938. At the age of four, his family moved to Villa Clara, Cuba, where he was surrounded by the sounds of Beny More, Conjunto Casino and Roberto Faz as well as the music of Enrico Carusso, Sarah Vaughan, and others. During the 1950’s he became involved with some of the best vocal groups in Cuba and began to experiment with bebop and scat vocals. During the 1960,’s he traveled to Europe and spent a year in Paris where he performed with the legendary Kenny Clarke and Bud Powell among others. Upon his return to Cuba, he worked in the Teatro Musical where he encountered the future founders of Irakere. Throughout the next decade, he performed in the best nightclubs in Havana, appeared in films and formed his own group, Afrojazz. During the 1980’s he organized the first Jazz Plaza Festival in Havana. Since then he has traveled to Canada, England, France and the U.S. where he has performed with Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Mario Bauza, Chucho Valdes and Patato Valdez among others. Bobby, who is 71 years young, resides in Cuba, where he continues to perform, teach and inspire young musicians, care for his mother (who is 96) and fight the good fight.
Once a musician has spent years developing their fundamental skills, they reach the true starting point of their career. The endless practicing and study is simply a precursor, not a launching point; it’s the materials that you need to build something wonderful. A musician’s honest artistic statements start when they have the tools to make a meaningful statement about their background, culture, and beliefs. From there, they can experiment intelligently with a relationship to history, offering their own perspective on a genre or style. They can develop a unique improvisational approach that draws upon technique, style, and a relationship to a musical lineage on their instrument. They have the opportunity to step into the forefront of their genre and promote true change, helping the music evolve into its next permutation. This is an exciting time, full of inspiration and enthusiasm – in a sense, the fun really begins here.
After spending years building his musicianship and developing a strong understanding of tango, Pablo Aslan began his artistic adventure in New York. At the time, New York’s music scene held a sparse representation of tango, but Aslan connected with the available musicians. He found an equally committed tango musician in bandoneon player Raul Juarena, and the two artists quickly organized a group and found work. Their first effort, the New York-Buenos Aires Connection, leaned heavily upon the Nuevo Tango repertoire and while they reach high artistic standards, they turned away the dance crowd. Anxious to win the tango dancers’ favor, Aslan and Juarena formed the New York Tango Trio, a more traditional group that performed for the straight-ahead tango audience. While looking for an ideal pianist for the trio, Aslan and Juarena hired jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, who began to push them in new directions. Inspired by possible combinations of tango and improvisation, Aslan formed another group, Avantango, which utilized Iverson and a group of young jazz musicians. The band evolved over the next decade, shrinking into a trio and then expanding back into a large group full of Argentinean musicians. Avantango helped establish Aslan as an artistic force in New York, but the balance between audience expectations and artistry soon tired the bassist. Aslan gathered his family and spent a year in Buenos Aires, digging into the local music scene. He collaborated with a number of local musicians, creating an ingenious blend of jazz and tango on his second album, Buenos Aires Tango Standards. This recording continued to make waves for Aslan, as he kept moving forward with his musical interests.
Aslan continues to push his combination of jazz and tango into new directions with his new album Tango Grill. It builds upon the ideas established in Buenos Aires Tango Standards, explores tradition, and integrates improvisation seamlessly; in many ways, it represents the next step in Aslan’s evolution. In part one of our interview with Aslan, we dug into his early musical development, his move to the States, and his discovery of tango. The second piece of our interview looked at Aslan’s move to New York, his groups with Juarena, the creation of Avantango, and Buenos Aires Tango Standards. In the last bit of our three-part interview, we discuss Tango Grill and Aslan’s concept of improvisation in tango.
———- LATIN JAZZ CORNER:Tango Grill seems to lean towards the traditional side of tango a little more. When you were recording it, did you approach it in the same way or was the aesthetic different?
PABLO ASLAN: By the time that we got to that session, I had gone done to Buenos Aires and played with my jazz guys a few times. The “traditional guys” on the album had worked with Nicolas Ledesma and Néstor Marconi had worked with Lalo Schifrin. I had met violinist Ramiro Gallo over the years, but I had never played with him. On the session, we played standards and I just basically said, “Let’s play these pieces.” I didn’t have to explain a whole lot because of that – we all knew how to play. It was really, let’s just play. It’s unusual in a way, because everybody tends to want to arrange it. It was scary. You’re going into the studio spending all this money and you’re calling all these players – then you show up and you got nothing? A couple weeks before the recording I was like, “I’m going to show up and I’m just going to put this lead sheet in front of them and they’re going to think I’m a flake.” All I could do was practice and make sure that as a bass player I arrived at the sessions in shape. You know how it is with the bass – you stop playing because you’re writing and then you get to the gig and you can’t play! So I did the opposite – I made lead sheets and I practiced. Of course, I said, “Let’s play this tune” and it was like, “O.K., let’s play this tune.” I had to quiet my mind from saying, “These guys are thinking – this guy is making a record out of this?!? We’re just jamming on these tunes”
With the traditional stuff, it was a question of tune selection. I think that I picked out a lot of little nuggets and things that don’t get recorded as much, just from knowing the tunes. Others I thought, this will be a breeze to do. When I was done listening to the playback, I thought, “Were did this music come from?” I didn’t write this, and I didn’t tell them to do this. It just came from all these years of being on the bandstand and knowing these tunes. I think it’s wonderful – that’s what it’s about. It was scary – I thought, “They’ll read the melody literally and then they’ll ask what to do next.” This guy who helped me produce the whole record, he actually wanted to videotape the whole thing. He realized that here’s this guy coming from New York with this apparently simple idea, and not everybody’s going to go along with it. He wanted to go in with a video camera, and I said, “No, this is too much. On top of this, I can’t have three cameras trailing us.” I’m going to look like some type of gringo with the camera crew. I just want this to be the environment of trust. But he kept all the chatter between tunes. I got done explaining what I wanted briefly on the first tune, and Marconi, the bandoneon player says, “Why don’t we just run it once before we record?” Then you hear me say, “But what if we get it right?” Everybody cracked up, because what’s there to run? This is like A major, E7, and we know the tune – we’ve played it a thousand times. That take almost made it into the record. When we finished playing, we realized things like, “You did this, O.K., then I’ll do that. I see, we’re going to stop here.” So we made the little adjustments that you do and then play it again. Take two usually would be enough. That was basically the impetus.
Marconi – he’s number one. We’re playing this gig at Lincoln Center and Marconi was going to be part of the cast. He couldn’t make it, and I replaced him with two bandoneon players! The way that he plays traditional tango and the way that he improvises over changes – not everybody can do that. When I thought how to replace him, I thought – two guys! One who does this well and then someone who does the other well. So he’s a very special player.
LJC: Many people think that there’s no improvisation in tango and there’s no tango in jazz, but you found these guys that cross the worlds. Can the traditional tango musician who has never had any exposure to jazz sit down and play with much improvisation? Or would something like tango grill come out of that?
PA: Yea, because we could play the most traditional tangos and everybody would know them. There’s language called “a la parrila.” That is where the name tango grill comes from – playing on the grill. Basically it’s the simplest way to play a tune – from learned tradition. You can’t play very far and it may sound a little sloppy, but we do that a lot actually. You get together any group of players and say let’s play these tangos, and you won’t need the lead sheets. But nobody records that way – it’s looked down upon. “That’s just a la parrila.” Then we have this next stage that is called the organized parrila. The organized parrila is more or less what I did. A sketch of a formal thing, some instructions, and sometimes it’s all written out in chart. Otherwise, it just comes from working together at a club. But nobody records that way! So when you get these recordings, even those groups, it’s either intensely elaborated from years of playing together or it’s arranged. They have to write some arrangements if they’re going to record. They can’t just go and record a parrila. I wanted it to really have that feeling of like – this is serious. We’re improvising, so we better listen to each other and resolve these things by the second take.
LJC: What comes into my mind is a Cuban descarga – is it the same sort of open jam session aesthetic?
PA: No, because the form in those things is tons of percussion and a few chords with solos. I think it’s more like recording standards. Any old jazz musicians would go into the studio and record “All The Things You Are.” What do we need to rehearse? We don’t need an arrangement. We can do a couple of things – let’s do the intro, and roll it. If you’ve been playing together, you probably have a few things – you’ve changed this chord for that chord – but no more than that. At least that was the way that I was approaching it. And it’s complicated; one of the tunes I left out because there was a small train wreck and it was bugging the hell out of me; there’s even one on the recording. We tried to edit it out. Someone decided to do a little ritard before the end of the phrase and nobody followed. But that can happen – somebody’s used to doing a ritard there and we didn’t hear it. I heard it days later actually. I said, “Oh man, I wasn’t listening! He’s doing a ritard and I just kept playing.” You try to edit those out, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen in the music.
LJC: One of the things that strikes me on this album, you almost have to develop your own dialect of improvisation that doesn’t take the traditional bebop scales or anything like that. Is that something that naturally comes out of a session like this or is that something that you’ve had to develop?
PA: I think everybody has their own way of dealing with it. That’s why these particular musicians are on the recording – they’ve all dealt with it at some point or another or they are dealing with it. I think that we all are dealing with it in terms of developing the language. We don’t have a whole lot of tradition to fall back on and learn. A jazz player might transcribe solos or study patterns or things like that. We don’t have that training. But even though, that’s sort of where I’m going. I would like to, at some point, develop some sort of more methodical approach to it, which can be done. You just discover what the idiomatic phrases are, how they work against the harmony, practice them, and internalize them. But I think that everybody has dealt with tango phrasing and tango type melodies. You hear it in Gustavo’s trumpet playing. Even when he does bop it, it’s not really juxtaposed bop over tango. I think he’s trying to deal with it in Spanish, you know? The tango guys don’t even have to think about it – the track that we do as a quartet with bandoneon, piano, violin, and bass, they all basically are drawing from their experiences playing tango – perhaps the violinist is the one that is stretching more because he’s heard some jazz violinists. There’s a moment where they take an entire chorus or at least an entire A section of a tune, and they’re not used to that. They don’t get called to do that, because, there’s usually an arrangement. So when I said to them, play a whole chorus, I had to say that and keep a straight face because basically the answer would have been, “What?!?” When you hear tango, it wants to change the melodic lead every four or eight bars. It’s almost asks for it. I’ve used that before, I’ve done it, sharing the melody, but I wanted people to take a full chorus. When you hear the bandoneon play over changes, there’s parts that are just arpeggios and scales, but any time that he does anything expressive, it comes from playing tango.
LJC: You have this great album and people are going to want to hear it. After the Lincoln Center concert, how are you going to tackle playing this music live?
PA: I have a two-part strategy. One is to really try to internationalize these guys and see if I can take the next step in my career. I’ll say, “I’ve got this elite level group of musicians in Buenos Aires and that’s what it takes for my to do my show.” And then I’ll see if I can get away with it. Especially in Europe and places where we would have to travel anyways. I’m going to be pushing these guys quite a bit. The good news of this collaboration at Lincoln Center is that this could make Paquito D’Rivera’s next record for his record label. So when we have the mighty Paquito booking these things, I hope that we’ll at least be able to get the core musicians to do the touring. Then the other part of it is to focus a little more on the real core of musicians here in New York that I can do this stuff with and really develop that. It’s going back to my buddy Raul Juarena and a pianist here in New York that I would like to work with a lot deeper. I need someone who gravitates to tango naturally, I need that rhythmically. I need somebody who responds to my playing; otherwise I find that I work too hard to make things happen that should be spread around the band. I’m going to refocus on these few guys and try to get a project that represents us so that I can work locally and hold my head up. Now I have the recording, so I can say – this is what I need, can you do this or not?
LJC: There’s very much a cultural stereotype of tango with the woman dancing with the rose in her mouth and such. Do you find that you can be educational with audiences and change stereotypical perceptions of tango?
PA: Frankly, that’s been done already; I think that the dance has really re-educated everybody. The dance is huge now. That whole stereotyped image with the rose has been pretty much taken care of. That was the twenties. One thing about tango dancing, it’s huge right now. It seems like in every walk of life I run into people who are into tango, where it didn’t used to be this way. One of the great things about this core group of people around the world is that they actually like tango music. Unlike a lot of people in the music world who may like Piazzolla or even call themselves tango jazz guys, they don’t go home and listen to some of the classic recordings from the thirties, forties, and fifties. In fact, they don’t quite like them; these tango people, they really do. I’m on a discussion list of tango D.J.’s from around the world, and these guys are obsessed with all these recordings . . . so am I, so it’s a great thing! I have been part of that world off and on for the last twenty years.
I’ve taught musicality classes where I teach people to listen, break it down, and understand how it’s put together. I enjoy doing that and I think that it’s important work. There’s more and more people doing that. That also kind of relaxes me, because when I started with tango back in the eighties, it was still dormant. I felt like, this is such incredible music, we need to preserve this. I’ve met so many people over the years who are dealing with same problem and trying to find ways to do that, that I feel like I can just do my work. I can continue to be fascinated with the history and obviously if I get a teaching gig or somebody asks me to do a workshop, I’ll do it. That sense of mission perhaps is not as important as it is to continue to get this more creative work off the ground.
LJC: One of the things that I’ve been noticing is that there are a lot of different musicians from Argentina on the jazz scene today, doing different stuff. People like Emilio Solla, Pablo Ziegler, Guillermo Klein, Sofia Rei Koutsovitis – what do you think about the work being done today, and where do you see as the future of tango going?
PA: Tango jazz for me is a little more specific. I think that a lot of these people that you mentioned, they have a much wider section of things that they do. It’s great. What’s notable for me is that all these people are great musicians. We all know each other and we all support each other. I think it’s very inspiring. And it’s unique – Guillermo Klein, Emilio Solla, Fernando Otero, and people like that, they’re very unique, very professional, very creative, and extremely knowledgeable musicians. It’s just very inspiring to have a scene like that. I even wish that we had even more of a scene. I’ve tried over the years to create a concert series or have a regular night at a place where we could each just take over one night a week. It’s been hard to do but that’s because things are hard to produce in the America these days in general. So you do stay on top of each other’s work and we do see each other regularly. We all kind of have a connection with Buenos Aires too and there’s some great artists down there. If anything, I would love some of those artists to come up here and get some exposure, but as you know, the cultural scene in the United States has gotten kind of difficult to manage and make things happen.
I think that the level is going to keep going up. I think that the music that I’m doing will hopefully show one way to do work with tango and jazz. To me, it would be totally flattering to hear someone that does something similar to what I’m doing, but taking it to another level – or at least to a different conclusion and loosening it up, trusting the performer more than the arranger. Like I said, it’s tied a little bit with the business. We don’t live in a very fertile situation right now – the people that you mentioned, we’re all struggling right now for space and opportunities. Except for Pablo Ziegler, but Pablo Ziegler is the senior citizen of us – he better be touring around the world! Even knowing Pablo and his band though, none of us are really getting the exposure that we should as competent, creative musicians from a particular tradition. But that has to do more with what’s gong on in America – we don’t take it personally anymore!
Sometimes music from our childhood leaves our attention for a while, but it sits in our subconscious, waiting patiently to be rediscovered. We form an unbreakable link with the music that floated around us during our developmental years. Regardless of whether we choose to embrace it or not, we simply can’t escape it – that music is embedded in our lives. When we do grab it, the music becomes our passion and we attempt to capture its pure essence. We sometimes become the staunch traditionalist, holding onto the sounds and ideals that shaped our experience during our early years. When we leave the music in the past and then revisit it years later, we look at it through different eyes. It still holds deep meaning for us, but our perspective becomes skewed by all our new artistic experiences. We may find a place for our childhood music in our lives, but our interpretation looks and sounds very different than the original version. Just as life forces us to grow personally and artistically, the rediscovery of our early musical influences inspire a musical evolution.
By the time Pablo Aslan moved to New York, he had already rediscovered tango and dived headfirst into the style. The music had been a backdrop to Buenos Aires life in the seventies, appearing regularly, but never connecting with Aslan’s generation. He found himself passionately attracted to music though, and the young bassist looked for ways to develop as a professional. Aslan realized that a move to the States held the most potential for musical growth, so he researched college music programs. After a summer course at the Berklee School Of Music, Aslan opted for a liberal arts education and moved to Santa Cruz, California. He developed his orchestral skills in Santa Cruz and dove headfirst into the world of jazz. After graduating from Santa Cruz, Aslan shifted his attention to Southern California, where he continued his studies first at Cal Arts and then at UCLA. While pursuing graduated school, Aslan encountered a number of revelations that brought tango back into the center of his life. He began working consistently on the Los Angeles tango scene, performing traditional tango several nights a week and building his knowledge of repertoire and style. When a grant provided the opportunity for him to live in New York for a few months, he connected with the East Coast tango community and laid the foundation for a permanent move. As Aslan jumped from coast to coast, he carried a distinctly defined devotion to tango in its many forms.
New York served as the stepping-stone that would inspire Aslan to blend tango and jazz with a bold new conviction. In part one of our interview with Aslan, we discussed his early musical development, his experiences on the West Coast, and his discovery of tango. In the second piece of our three-part interview, we look at Aslan’s first collaborations with Raul Juarena in New York, the creation of Avantango, and the musical concept behind Aslan’s second album Buenos Aires Tango Standards.
———- LATIN JAZZ CORNER: When did you head out to New York from L.A., and what drove you out there?
PABLO ASLAN: I walked into the music department at UCLA once day and there was this little flyer put up titled “New York Residency Scholarship.” Pia Gilbert, a modern dance composer at Juilliard, who used to be at UCLA, set up this scholarship. She fundraised for one music student and one band student to go to New York and spend a tri-mester there for credit. They gave you $5000 – this was back in the eighties – and they said New York is that way, come back in a few months and tell us about it. New York was always that scary place where all the music happens. I thought it was incredible and I put this proposal together that consisted of checking out the avant-garde. I said, “I’m going to go to The Knitting Factory, and I’m going to go to all these other clubs that I’ve read about.” She bought it; she thought it was a great proposal. So I went to New York to do that. At the same time, I had a contact through my tango buddies with the guys who were working in tango in New York. I spent my nights at The Knitting Factory and I eventually started picking up tango gigs. Instead of staying three months, I stayed six months and laid the foundations for coming back.
When I graduated, I was married to a modern dancer, and she also wanted to check out New York. So we packed up the U-Haul, attached it to the back of the car with the bass and the cat, and left. The funny thing is, I was working every night as a tango player, and I hadn’t been able to find a sub. So I packed the car, the cat, and the bass in the U-Haul, I went and played a gig at the restaurant where I was working, and then I drove off into the desert. I worked until the last minute when I was in L.A. We drove across the country, came here, and when I got here, I had my tango connections. Through them, I also started working as a Latin Pop musician in restaurants and things. It was incredible if you think of how hard it is to move to New York and work. It was still the day when you could have gigs, and I was working three or four nights a week at a Latin restaurant accompanying singers and then also in the tango scene. New York is New York – it’s something that at some point every musician should consider. Whether you can do it or not, even for a few months . . . Once again, I never looked back, I had no idea. I just wanted to be where things were for as long as I could hang on.
LJC: When you were out there, one of the first groups that you put together was The New York Tango Trio with Raul Juarena – how did that group come together?
PA: Well actually, there was something before that. I met Raul during that scholarship trip. When I came to New York, I called this guy, and Raul had just gotten into town from Venezuela with the same phone number. We both called this guy, and then in the basement of this Venezuelan club, we put together a tango show. Then he went back to Venezuela to get his family, I went back to UCLA to finish my degree. When I got back, he was back. I made some connections and got a couple of tango gigs. That was back when nobody was really playing tango formally, so anybody who wanted to present tango was in. I had a little bit more of the entrepreneurial spirit, I knew how to deal with Americans, and all the older Argentine guys didn’t quite. So I started organizing gigs.
Raul and I hooked up for some things and started a band called New York-Buenos Aires Connection. That was our first group and it was basically New Tango. We got a record deal, we recorded, and we did some gigs. When we started doing dance gigs, we very quickly realized that our Piazzolla and New Tango stuff was not appropriate for the dance world. Quite literally, we wrote a dance book overnight. It was really quite a shock, because you write these Nuevo Tango things that last over eight minutes and dancers don’t like it. We were at Stamford Tango Workshop, which is something that happens every year. After the first night and the looks that we got, we locked ourselves up and wrote some charts. Raul knew how to play the traditional stuff and I had played it, but we just never really focused on the dance crowd. This is really when tango really started being dominated by the dancers. We went back to New York and we started this other thing, which was traditional dance music. We called that The New York Tango Trio. That group, again, worked old fashioned steady gigs – we stayed at the same clubs for years – Friday nights at Labella Park for five years and Saturday nights at these dance studios for another five years.
We went through a number of pianists, and we were frustrated because we couldn’t find the right person. So I said, “Let’s send a flyer to all the conservatories that says we need a piano player for a tango group.” We sent it to Julliard, The Manhattan School Of Music, and NYU – that’s where Ethan Iverson (now of The Bad Plus) came up. He had just moved to New York, and was about to quit NYU – that wasn’t working out for him – and he needed a job. Ethan is a phenomenal musician. We had quite a disorganized book, but Ethan was already a monster. He just sight-read the whole book on the gig. He lasted a good five years with us and he made the record – there’s a lot of improvisation on that. On the gig, he and I would re-invent bass lines, and Raul really likes to leave things loose. Instead of developing arrangements, we would write skeletons and then we’d improvise. So that was the germ of all my other work – just realizing that you could improvise so much and having Ethan around to really push all kinds of ideas into the music.
One or two years into New York Tango Trio, I started Avantango. I wanted to play with Ethan and some of the other guys from the jazz scene, that said, “Oh, tango, that sounds interesting. Let’s do something someday.” Mostly, I remember Thomas Chapin being the one that pushed me over the hump. These incredible musicians all wanted to do something, so I decided to do something. I started Avantango with a lot of great improvisers. Without really knowing what I was doing, I just formed this band, I put some charts together where everybody could solo and improvise.
LJC: Was the early version of Avantango the same musicians that were on the record?
PA: The first version of Avantango in 1994 included Phil Haynes and Kenny Wolesen on drums, Ethan, Mark Feldman, Thomas Chapin, Greg Wahl, and some other jazz musicians. It was not really tango. Ethan could play those rhythms and stuff, so it had that flavor. My writing never really developed to the point where I could create the fusions that I wanted; it was more about improvising. Interesting stuff would happen, but I couldn’t necessarily say that it was real tango, which is what I was trying to do. Because of the way things happened, my sextet went down to a trio and it was Ethan, Thomas Chapin, and I. We started working quite a bit, and we made a record. It’s a very interesting recording – Thomas’ playing there is phenomenal. He died a couple of years after we made that record. I managed to get that out on a label in Argentina in 1998. When Thomas died, Donny McCaslin covered for him for a little bit. Eventually, I started trying it out with Argentine guys. I said, “O.K., let me try it and see if I can get a sound that’s closer to what I’m hearing using Argentine guys.”
Raul started working in Europe more and I started pushing Avantango as my main band. Eventually I got a call to do a big show at Town Hall with dancers, and I just said, “I’m going to use Avantango and put the name there. Even though this is my experimental group, I’m going to put it up there with dancers.” I did that for a few years and that’s what that first Zoho record is about. It’s basically the music for that first show at Town Hall. There’s some Piazzolla charts, my own chart, and some other stuff. A lot of that stuff was planned on stage. I went from being part of a small scene where we were the one working band who played tango in any fashion, getting calls from all over the place, to being more of an entrepreneur, doing all the stuff that it takes to be in business. I eventually burned out on that. I also realized that every time we sold the show, the expectation was the dancers. It felt weird. You go to concerts, and they want to see the stereotypical tango show and then they get this bass player guy who has horns instead of bandoneon. My heart wasn’t into creating this commercially successful tango show at all. Musically, I really wanted to keep exploring this thing of improvising and getting this loose feel with the tango.
In 2006, my wife, our two kids and I went to Argentina to live for a year. That way my kids would get their Spanish, and we could put them in those schools. That’s when I really got into the local scene in Buenos Aires. I started meeting players and getting gigs and stuff. Towards the end of our stay, my wife said, “So are you going to make a record or what?” That’s when I got these guys and I told them what my method is, which is to just play. I worked with Daniel Piazzolla – I showed him my rhythmic concepts, with all my rhythmic sheets and all the things that I do. I basically told him, we’ve got all freedom – it’s just like jazz. We’re playing tango, but we’ve got all this freedom and we’ve got all these responsibilities to make it happen. We rehearsed for a while and put together the second Zoho record, which I was quite happy with. I started to be able to say, “Well, it may not be good, but it’s more or less what I have in mind.”
LJC: That album really was a turning point for me where I realized that tango could be very jazz oriented.
PA: I appreciate that, and I registered that people liked it. It’s fuel not just for the ego, but it’s fuel for continuing to try. It was like – here’s the concept and it works. I had the right musicians there. That’s what was so frustrating before, I just didn’t have the right musicians. The tango guys couldn’t improvise and the improvisers couldn’t play tango. I’m bringing these guys in, we’re playing our classic tango, and it’s going somewhere else. I had to make an effort to realize that it’s not that music, it’s just something else. I’m not the kind so musician who will write everything out so that it sounds exactly like you want it. I want everything to be spontaneous.
Kevin Whitehead, the jazz writer, reviewed New York-Buenos Aires Connection very early on in our careers and he called me up the next day to interview me. He was writing for Coda magazine and he asked me, “What was it about – everybody is isolated musically and here you are trying to combine them.” I said, “I’m not really trying to combine it. The jazz players don’t play tango and the tango players don’t improvise. So no, I actually don’t want to do this, because it frustrates the hell out of me.” So he called me an isolationist! He said, “He’s the only fringe musician that I know with a good word for isolationism.” What it meant for me is that it’s too constraining.
Any musician of note in Buenos Aires these days is very familiar of what’s going on in New York and in the general jazz world. Some of them travel, the recordings are much more available, obviously the internet, and a lot more musicians come through Buenos Aires than ever. A lot of them studied here and then went back – there’s a lot of Berklee grads . . . so the level out there is very high. They really got it. With the specific players that I ended up with, none of them were doing this for the first time. Maybe they were getting a bigger dose of freedom – Buenos Aires musicians tend to overwrite in general. They all have quite a bit of training, and they don’t have this thing that’s like, let’s just play. Which is something that I had learned with the avant-garde people. “Let’s play.” “Play What?” “I don’t know, let’s play and we’ll see.” That was my bottom line, let’s just play. We’re playing tango, so let’s play tango.
LJC: So musicians were already blending jazz and tango in Buenos Aires?
PA: Yea, the only one who was resisting it, funny enough, was Pipi Piazzolla. He’s got that last name, you know? He said, “If I start playing tango, then the critics and everyone are going to start talking about this.” But I was the one who said, “You play tango! You’re good!” He was kind of avoiding it, he wasn’t ready – he plays jazz and fusion. Gustavo Bergalli had been experimenting with this, like a lot of the old jazzers did. Back in the days of Gato Barbieri and all those guys, they all wanted to improvise on tango. He had been in Europe for many years. He had done a tango jazz thing that was overwritten and included a little bit of soloing, but not really interactive improvisation. Jorge Retamoza, the saxophone player, had been working in the tango language. I really wanted to work with him and see where he would take things. Abel Rogantini, the pianist, was a find, because he was actually my third call. My first two guys couldn’t make it. It’s incredible how these things happen – he really has a finish in each camp. He’s a great jazz player, he knows all that harmonic stuff – he’s a great improviser. He’s got quite a bit of tango experience so he’s able to bring it together to the point where I don’t know if the first two guys that I called would have been able to do it the way he did. I got really lucky with that.
LJC: When Buenos Aires Tango Standards was submitted for the Latin Grammy Awards, and they rejected it – what was the story there?
PA: I wrote this letter in response with a sense of humor – I was mad, but I realized that I might as well just raise some hell and see what happens. Then it got picked up by Billboard and All About Jazz. I was basically just tired of the tango police. They would say, “It’s not tango.” “What do you mean it’s not tango? We’re all Argentines, we’re playing “La Cachila” from the 1920s and we’re playing all these standards. The rhythms are tango. It’s got trumpet and drums and no bandoneon, but you know . . .” It’s like someone saying that you couldn’t play jazz without a banjo. A lot of my most aggressive stuff in that letter was like, “Who are these people who decide that this music is not tango?” I’ve been working in the tango world for twenty years! So it was kind of amusing. I really had fun writing that!
The funny thing is that same year I won a Latin Grammy as a producer because Raul Juarena’s recording ended up winning and I was one of the producers. Raul wasn’t there so I actually got to get up, accept the Grammy, and make a little speech. They actually sent me a Grammy even though I was not the artist and I was not actually listed as a producer. I was listed as a mix engineer, which is mostly what I did. But I have a Grammy at home from that year!
I’ve spoken to a couple of people on the panel that I’ve met since then and there’s a lot of debate. But I know that there’s some old fashioned people on those panels and you know what – tango needs to come out of its shell and not just be this recreated old stuff. They should encourage people – especially Argentine musicians – to take it to the next level. That’s really what was sad about it. It was all Argentine musicians and I’d been playing tango for twenty years. I wasn’t mad because I didn’t win; I was mad because I didn’t get a chance to compete. It’s a tango record! It was 2007! In a way, they’re just encouraging people to write the same old stuff and for the bandoneon to be the only voice that can play tango. It’s ridiculous.
LJC: Do you find that type of reaction – like your music is too jazz oriented for traditionalists and too traditional for jazz audiences – do you find any of that catch-22?
PA: No, at this point I think it’s almost the opposite. When I want to play traditional tango, I play traditional tango. I don’t owe anything to anybody stylistically. This is my take on it, and it comes to a point where I can do whatever I want. On the other hand, I have a deep respect for the tradition in the sense that if you call your music tango, then you have to deal with it. Labels may work for you on a marketing basis, but if you use the word tango, let me hear you deal with it in some way. I want to hear the fact that you can actually play this music and you’re not just slapping it on because it’s a sexy name. So I have a lot of respect for tradition . . . and I thought that I had approached the record with a lot of respect. The liner notes are scholarly liner notes, compared to what people usually write. I talk about the composers and the context of when they were writing the pieces – I thought that it was done with a lot of respect. And when I started putting these bands up on stage with dancers, I know that I turned off a lot of people. That’s because they want the dancers. I can deal with that. If I want to please the traditional crowd, I can play.
I think that this new recording has a little bit of the answer to that – we did both. I combined everybody and I combined the repertoire in the sessions so that we would address the tradition. I’ve had some people in Buenos Aires saying, “This is a little too traditional.” A comment that I got from a colleague of mine was like, “Well, some of these interpretations . . . this is what we all know how to do. This other stuff is what’s really original.” Well, O.K., that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go down to Buenos Aires and play tango that everybody knows how to play with the best musicians. I don’t get to do that all the time here in New York. Then I wanted to do some of my own take on it. At least this record should get considered for the tango category. I’m not saying that we’re going to win anything, but we should be safely inside the tango category. There’s a bandoneon, so . . .
Music serves as the soundtrack to our lives; sometimes it sits at the forefront of our attention and at other times it drifts in the background. For musicians at the height of their creative energy, music consistently demands focused attention. They intently listen to recordings, analyzing the artistic process and searching for new musical inspirations. They concentrate upon their own performances with intense attentiveness, keeping their ears wide open and their minds constantly thinking about their music. Their rapt listening sessions push their musicianship onto a higher plane and it makes the soundtrack of their lives much more vivid. Most people outside the performing artist community experience music in a much less active way, but it still makes a strong impact upon their lives. They might use music as background noise, filling the space behind menial chores and helping to alleviate boredom. Music enters their life through the television and movies, filtering through dramatic action and blatant advertisements. It accompanies exercise, long drives, homework, video games, internet surfing, more; whenever the opportunity arises, music becomes a part of their life journey, attaching itself to their consciousness like super glue. While both of these experiences value music, they share one special bond – they permanently embed vivid musical sound bytes in a person’s mind
Bassist Pablo Aslan experienced music in both these ways as a young musician, but the genre that would become his passion sat quietly in the background. Growing up in Buenos Aires during the seventies, Aslan showed early potential as an active music participant, grabbing any musical opportunity enthusiastically. Access to recordings was limited and live musicians rarely visited from outside Argentina, but Aslan grabbed what he could get. His parents owned a diverse collection of recordings, which Aslan investigated, and friends served as good sources of musical inspiration. Through all of this, traditional tango sat in the background, looking like the music of another generation. Although Aslan heard this music, it wasn’t the voice of his generation and it wasn’t at the forefront of his attention. Other music was on his mind though, and as Aslan grew, he continued on a steady course towards a career in music. This path led him out of Argentina, towards the States and a collegiate music education. He studied on both coasts, discovering both jazz and classical music, and eventually becoming an in-demand bassist. While attending graduate school in Los Angeles, Aslan finally came full circle and discovered a strong connection to tango. This bond laid the foundation for his future career as a professional and defined his artistic direction for years to come.
Now a leader in the tango jazz field, Aslan has taken bold strides in this arm of the Latin Jazz world. There was a myriad of experiences that led to that point though, and every story has a starting point. In the first piece of our three-part interview with Pablo Aslan, we look at his early musical development and the journey that led him back to tango.
———- LATIN JAZZ CORNER: You grew up in Buenos Aires in the seventies, what got you interested in music initially?
PABLO ASLAN: I’m just viscerally attracted to music. I was one of those kids that liked to listen to music. Somehow I started to seek out instruments. My sisters were starting guitar; I wasn’t, but they were around. Little by little, I started going to concerts and started becoming fascinated by music. Just by myself – I wasn’t from one of those families where you got piano lessons or anything like that. I just started seeking out teachers and then started the guitar and the electric bass. Then I started playing with people – it was a spontaneous combustion type of thing. I have kids now and I make a huge effort to expose them to music, but I never had any of that. It really was spontaneous combustion. The kind of stuff that my parents had in their record collection was good – they had Piazzolla, they had Brazilian music, some jazz and classical music . . . and the Beatles, of course. That was sort of my menu. I was playing and a lot of my good friends were playing near the end of high school. My core group of friends were all in music – either around playing or being fanatical about listening and seeking out recordings. During the seventies in Buenos Aires, it was not easy to get a hold of a lot of the recordings that were out there in the world, so we would make due with what we could. We were always looking to people who traveled to bring records back.
I remember a neighbor of mine had a Berklee School Of Music catalog that he had gotten somehow and that completely turned me on. I realized two or three years before finishing high school that I wanted to do something like that. I wanted to leave Argentina; this was also during the dark years of the dictatorship – there really wasn’t a whole lot for musicians to do if you were serious about studying and really doing it professionally. So, I set my goals around coming up here. I used to get the magazines; I used to have a formal subscription to Downbeat through a local bookshop. I used to get copies of Guitar Player, Musician magazine, and all that stuff; I just really soaked it up. When I finished high school, I was able to come up here and study, which was something that was rather unusual. At that time, the economic policy of the military was that the dollar and the peso were pretty much equal. So it made it possible to come up here. I first did a summer course at Berklee and decided that it was not for me. There was just too much practicing and too much single-mindedness. I really was more of an open-minded and intellectual musician; in general I just didn’t like locking myself up in a three feet by three feet room and practicing. While I was at Berklee, my roommate who was a West Coast guitar player said, “What you want is a liberal arts education.” So I researched that, and it looked good. I knew nothing of how things worked, so I discovered everything as I went. I got accepted to University of California in Santa Cruz. You can kind of see where my head was at – I turned down Berklee to go to Santa Cruz and be a hippy! Before I left Argentina, I had a wonderful composition and harmony teacher who really prepared me, so that when I got to Santa Cruz, I skipped through the first year of theory and such. It wasn’t a great music program, and in hindsight, I almost wished I had gone to Berklee. On the other hand, it was relaxed, I got so much playing experience, I got into the Orchestra thing, and there was so much music that I got to participate in by being one of the very few bass players. I guess my decision to go to the West Coast and do it that way shaped where I’m at today.
LJC: The seventies was not really a great era for tango in Argentina. Was that something that you were interested in during your younger days that you took to Santa Cruz when you left?
PA: It was Piazzolla really; Piazzolla was very much present during that time. People will say that’s not tango, it’s something else, but it’s not just marginal. Piazzolla was part of our record collections. We went crazy over Piazzolla just like we went crazy of Gismonti or John Coltrane. In terms of tango, you are very much right, they were not good years. You would see it in T.V. in black and white and it was all these old guys basically. It was around – you’d hear it on the radio, in the taxi, or at the newsstand. It was everywhere; but it was just this old black and white thing. When I left for the States, I definitely had my Piazzolla cassettes. Then I started doing radio; I had a show on a free form community station. That’s when I started playing some more classic tango stuff, on that show. I had a few LPs that I must have picked up when I went back home. Little by little I became more interested in it. I remember back at Santa Cruz at one point, someone in the opera department was putting together a Latin American show, so I played bass and wrote some tango arrangements. Somehow it was part of my consciousness, but like I said, I think that Piazzolla was mainly all my contact with the music until much later.
LJC: When you were at Santa Cruz, were you playing jazz? And how did the jump to Los Angeles work out?
PA: In Santa Cruz, I was basically playing jazz. I immediately hooked up with a group of people – Graham Connah, Ben Goldberg, all the guys on the scene out there now. Graham was my roommate – we would get up at 8 in the morning and listen to Charlie Parker and Cecil Taylor. For an Argentine immigrant, it was quite an education. He would drag me over to the practice room, open up the Real Book, and say, “Let’s play this.” I played in a Latin Jazz trio with a guitar player and drums; we’d play at all the coffee shops on campus and started getting some work around town. The most important lesson at Berklee happened the second or third day there – I was practicing and someone knocked on the door and said, “Come on, I’m having a session.” So I went in there and this clarinet player had recruited quite a big band, he must have had his own arrangements. He got me to play bass, put a chart in front of me, and it was probably the first time that I had seen a chart. I saw a whole measure C major and then a whole measure of F major. There was a guy next to me, so I said, “O.K., this is measure of four, so I play C and count to four and then I go to F?” And he said, “Yes.” That was the most important lesson that I got, because I could read chord charts then! From there, I arrived in Santa Cruz and discovered the standards. But it took me a while to realize that none that really meant much to me. It wasn’t like I grew up listening to this stuff and now I was playing it. It was like, now there’s a song called “All The Things You Are,” and I play it almost every day for some reason. It was fun, it was fascinating, and I was learning an enormous amount from doing that; still, it was not my music, it was something else.
My studies were more towards the classical. My teacher was Mel Graves. He was great; he really shaped me up as a bass player. I don’t know if I would be a bass player without him. He really was very serious about me practicing bass – and I finally did! I was a late starter, I’m a small guy, and I had a bigger bass than me. The fact that I was raised in the third world kind of showed. Now I see that the exposure that kids have when they’re in middle school and high school really matters – I had none of that. I caught up with it somewhat. I graduated and I could play the Dragonetti concerto, so I must have spent some time in there practicing. As I was finishing my four years there, I hooked up with the Santa Cruz Symphony and the Monterey Symphony. I was working jazz gigs and I was doing the symphonies. I started to do Christmas music and freelance orchestras around the area, going up to San Jose, over to Gilroy, down to Carmel – doing both classical and jazz. There was also another important teacher, Randy Masters. He came in as the jazz teacher, and he turned us on to Latin music basically. He had his own charts and that’s when I discovered I could read – it was the same type of thing, they put a complex bass line in front of me and it was like, “O.K., that’s one, two, three, and four . . .” It’s funny you know, you do all these years of school, but sometimes you learn everything in the first five minutes when you’re on the spot! So that basically was it – I played quite a bit, I realized I had a facility for it, and I forced myself to practice, and little by little I became a bass player.
When school was over, I heard everyone talking about graduate school. I had no idea what that was, but a friend of mine was going to Cal Arts. I said, “Sign me up.” They gave me a full scholarship to be in the classical department. As it was, I wasn’t ready to go, and I stayed in Santa Cruz another year working in all these symphonies and jazz gigs. The next year, I said, “O.K., I’m ready.” They said, “Well, we don’t have a full scholarship anymore because it’s all based on what we need; we have a half-scholarship.” I said, “O.K.,” and I went down to Cal Arts in kind of miserable conditions. I had to take out loans and I also didn’t have enough money for housing so I was living in a trailer in the parking lot. Being at that school as a classical player was very frustrating because Charlie Haden was there and that was one of my all-time heroes. At the time when Charlie came in to teach this ensemble class, I had to be at orchestra. It just wasn’t working out for me, so I only spent a year there. Then I had hooked up with Lalo Schifrin; Lalo had a youth orchestra that he was directing through Young Musician’s Foundation. Even in my last year at Santa Cruz, I was commuting to Los Angeles to do rehearsals. When I found the opportunity, I said, “I’ve got to do this, no matter what.” I was driving down to L.A., sometimes sleeping in the car, to do these rehearsals and concerts with them. So when I moved to L.A., I was hooked up already with that scene. I also started playing shows, theater, and things like that.
When I decided to leave Cal Arts, I discovered tango, full blown. It was the summer right after that year at Cal Arts – I got a job playing in a show at the Roosevelt Hotel there in Hollywood. I was working in the second floor lounge which had been reconditioned as a set; there were several shows a week. I remember on a Sunday, between the matinee and the evening, going down to the lobby. Right next to the lobby was another big room, so I peeked my head in. There was a trio playing tango and a whole bunch of people dancing. The trio was piano, bass, and bandoneon. The bassist was playing upright bass; he was a classical guy that I ended up meeting many years later. I said, “That’s my gig; that sounds good, playing tango gigs.” There was nothing I could do, but the obsession was there. Then I had a second stroke of luck – when Tango Argentina the show was in L.A., I went to see the show, saw the bass player, and hung out with him. I realized that there was a huge thing for me there and it kind of brought everything around. It was played with the bow, it was popular music, but it was elaborate. Through listening and understanding Piazzolla and the Brazilians – especially Gismonti and those guys – I realized I was after some sort of arty Latin outlet for myself that incorporated the sophistication of all these musics. Also around the time that I was still at Cal Arts, Charlie Haden did some work with Dino Saluzzi. They were basically hanging out at Cal Arts, and I was hanging out with Dino. I heard every gig that they did – they played as a duo, bandoneon and bass, and it just flipped me out.
Then the last stroke of luck – the year after I left Cal Arts, I was living in L.A., and my neighbor who was living two doors down was this guy, Norman Brown. He was a guitar player, who since then has become quite popular. He saw me hauling my bass, and I saw him hauling his guitar. So finally one day, he came over and we played together. He invited me to come play at Donte’s, which was a club down there. Nothing came of it; I wasn’t a great jazz player, and this guy was really great. But I got offstage from playing a few duets with him and there were these guys there speaking Spanish – Argentine Spanish. We started talking and the guy said, “I own a tango club.” The other guy said, “I play the bandoneon at the tango club.” I said, “What?!?” So I showed up that weekend and they had this American bass player who didn’t know anything about tango. I didn’t know a whole lot, but I had the classical training and I was very eager to get in there. When they realized it, they gave me the gig, and that was the beginning. We were working the old fashioned way – three or four nights a week for years. That’s how I learned. They wrote some of these tangos down on napkins, and singers would come every weekend. I was serious enough, and I knew enough about how to learn music that if I didn’t know a tune, I would make it my business during the week to learn it. So I started learning the repertoire. The fact that different singers would come every week meant that there was more and more to learn. I started listening to different recordings, started to understand the history, and it just took off from there.
I eventually ended up going to UCLA, basically because I discovered that I could get paid to go to graduate school. I was the only graduate bass player . . . I was pretty much the only bass player. They needed me – as a graduate student, I wasn’t obligated to be in the orchestra, so the orchestra director gave me a teaching assistantship so that I would be assistant manager. I got paid to do that, I got paid to teach strings to education majors, and I got a scholarship. I was working just about every night, I had subsidized student housing, I was on scholarship, and I was going to graduate school. So it was great. The only conflict there was that my teacher wanted me to be a classical player, the same thing as at Cal Arts. I was working in a lot of orchestras in the area, but that was not my career. Just like at Cal Arts, I wasn’t able to put my idea of what I wanted to do into the curriculum. Ideally, I would have been studying composition, playing in some ensembles, and practicing the bass – but not necessarily to be an orchestra guy. At UCLA at least I was getting paid to be there!
The library had an enormous amount of tango books, so I read everything. I started collecting recordings, and when I went down to Argentina, much to everyone’s surprise, I was Mr. Tango Guy. This was back in the eighties – my parents were like, “What? You left for Santa Cruz and now you come back talking about tango all the time?” This was 1986 or ’87. By the time that I got done at UCLA, my senior graduate recital was basically bringing in my guys from the tango clubs were I was working, putting together that with saxophone player Kim Richmond, and doing some improvising. I already had a germ of the work that I’m doing now which is to open up some stuff for solos and featuring the bass even more. But L.A. was incredible – I got to play with Lalo Schifrin and I also got to play in the Hollywood Studios. I was playing in some of the better symphonies, I was playing Latin Jazz with Bobby Matos and his band, and I was doing the tango thing three or four nights a week . . . I’m glad that I made that move. And literally, I went to L.A. because a friend of mine was going to graduate school and I said, “That’s what I’m supposed to do now. Let’s do that.” It was never part of a plan; I just kind of left home and never looked back.
LJC: I’ve heard about the master’s thesis that you put together while you were down in L.A., what did you do for your thesis?
PA: I just basically wanted to put the chronology together for myself. I called it something like Stylistic Evolution And Innovation. In the history of jazz, you can see who the players and the bands that were most influential in advancing the language; I wanted to do sort of the same thing for tango. This guy came, and then this guy came and built on it – like that until you get to Piazzolla. Basically it was condensing all those books into a chronological and evolutionary narrative. Just like you have that in jazz – first there was Louis Armstrong and then there was Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and so forth. That was the basic idea. It’s a modest work. It’s funny; there’s so little work out there that I still get requests for copies of it. I’m disowning it now, because I’ve learned so much since then! The reason why that paper is still in circulation is because there’s not a whole lot out there – I wish there was and that my paper wasn’t as well known. It was kind of a youthful indiscretion. I haven’t read it in a while, and I didn’t know as much as I do now. It certainly set the foundation for all the scholarly work that I’ve done since then. Even though I haven’t written a whole lot, I have an enormous amount of books and recordings. I’ve taught a lot of classes. Every time I travel to Argentina, I build up my record collection so that I would hear all these things that I was reading about; but I’ve never gone back and put it all together to be another book with that idea – an evolutionary chronology.
Latin Jazz This Week will bring you a weekly look into news from the Latin Jazz world. You’ll find new releases, recommended performances, web finds, and more. You can check out some current sounds in the Listening Center tab at the top of the page. Performance dates will be kept in the Live Latin Jazz tab at the top of the page.
NEWS
WBGO jazz expert Josh Jackson treated us to some more fantastic Latin Jazz insight this past week on his show The Checkout through an interview with tango jazz specialist Pablo Aslan. The interview includes Aslan’s comments about his most recent album Tango Grill as well as some information about this week’s concert at The Rose Theater, which will feature musicians from Buenos Aires as well as saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera. It’s a must-hear – you can stream it or download it HERE.
LAST CHANCE! – there’s a special deal going on for LJC readers in New York that might want to check out Pablo Aslan’s concert at the Rose Theater on March 26 & March 27. Just purchase your tickets online HERE and enter the promo code “Tango”. You’ll be entitled to a discount that goes up to 25% of the ticket price. Fans of tango-jazz will not want to miss this!
Influential percussionist Victor Pantoja died recently, after a long struggle with cancer, leaving behind a trail of vivid memories among the Latin Jazz community. Best known for his work with the Latin Rock band Azteca in the seventies alongside Pete and Coke Escovedo, Pantoja spent a good deal of his career on the West Coast, performing with some of the area’s best musicians. Over at A Blog Supreme, Felix Contreras recently posted reflections upon Pantoja, with some great music clips embedded. It’s a fitting tribute – check it out HERE.
Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca has led an interesting career that reflects the vast depth of his musicianship – as a sideman he has worked with Buena Vista Social Club icons Ibrahim Ferrar and Omara Portuondo. He has also led his own groups through countless performances and several great albums, including the recent Akokan. All About Jazz captures the details of that career with an in-depth interview from Raul d’Gama Rose. The conversation moves through the different aspects of Fonseca’s career and gets into the new album; it’s a good read, check it out HERE.
Over at Rifftides, Doug Ramsey dug into the work of the great Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto this past week, giving a brief overview of his career and talking about a Brazilian music camp. The highlight of this article is some fantastic pictures of Neto teaching Brazilian music to several students in Brazil and a video of Neto premiering a recent work at Symphony Space in New York. It’s worth checking out – find it HERE.
Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble Of San Francisco: Generaciones
———-
LATIN JAZZ BIRTHDAYS
3/22: Pianist Oscar Hernandez, 1954
3/23: Guitarist Greg Diamond, 1977
———-
LIVE LATIN JAZZ
If you’re in the MIDDLE EAST this week . . . EDMAR CASTANEDA QUARTET WHEN: Thursday 3/25/10 – Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:JC’s – Istanbul
Çırağan Caddesi Salhane Sk. No.10 34349
Ortaköy-İSTANBUL TIME: 9:30 p.m. & 11:00 p.m. TICKETS: Table – 25 TL Bar – 20 TL
If you’re on the EAST COAST this week . . . ANNETTE AGUILAR & STRINGBEANS WHEN: Tuesday 3/23/10 WHERE:The Museum Of The City Of New York
1220 5th Avenue
New York, NY TIME: 6:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 WHERE:Zinc Bar
82 West 3rd Street
New York, NY TIME: 7:30 p.m. TICKETS: $10
BOBBY SANABRIA
Big Band WHEN: Wednesday 3/24/10 WHERE:Fonda Boricua Lounge
172 East 106th Street
New York, NY TIME: 7:30 p.m. & 9:30 p.m. TICKETS: $10
El Espiritu Jibaro w/Roswell Rudd, Yomo Toro, & Ascension WHEN: Saturday 3/27/10/ WHERE:Symphony Space
2537 Broadway
New York, NY TIME: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS: $25
CHICO O’FARRILL’S AFRO-CUBAN JAZZ ORCHESTRA WHEN: Sunday 3/28/10 WHERE:Birdland
315 W. 44th Street
Manhattan, NY TIME: 9:00 p.m. & 11:00 p.m. TICKETS: $30
CHRIS WASHBURNE & S.Y.O.T.O.S. WHEN: Sunday 3/28/10 WHERE:Smoke
2751 Broadway
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m. & 11:30 p.m. TICKETS: $20 minimum
EDDIE PALMIERI WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 WHERE:Tarrytown Music Hall
13 Main Street
Tarrytown, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $35 – $75
ERIC KURIMSKI WHEN: Thursday 3/25/10 WHERE:Terraza Cafe
40-19 Gleane St
Elmhurst, NY TIME: 10:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
FRANK VILLAFAÑE & THREE TO CLAVE WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 WHERE:The Teak
64 Monmouth Street
Red Bank, NJ TIME: 10:30 p.m.
GABRIEL ALEGRIA WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 – Sunday 3/28/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: Friday & Saturday – 8;00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m.; Sunday – 7:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
GREG DIAMOND WHEN: Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:Iridium
1650 Broadway
New York, NY TIME: 12:00 a.m. TICKETS: $20
HENDRIK MUERKENS WHEN: Sunday 3/28/10 WHERE:Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive
Baltimore, MD TIME: 5:00 p.m. TICKETS: $28
JACKIE COLEMAN WHEN: Tuesday 3/23/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
JERRY GONZALEZ & THE FORT APACHE BAND WHEN: Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:Jazz Gallery
290 Hudson Street
New York,NY TIME: 9:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: $25
PABLO ASLAN WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 – Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:Rose Theater
Broadway at 60th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $30 – $95
SHUSMO WHEN: Wednesday 3/25/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
SOFIA REI KOUTSOVITIS WHEN: Wednesday 3/24/10 WHERE:ING DIRECT Café
968 3rd Avenue
New York, NY TIME: 5:30 p.m.
New England Conservatory 40th Anniversary Celebration WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 WHERE:Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette Street
New York, NY TIME: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS: $15
SOFIA TOSELLO WHEN: Thursday 3/25/10 WHERE:Tutuma Social Club
164 East 56th Street
New York, NY TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. TICKETS: NO COVER
WILLIE MARTINEZ WHEN: Thursday 3/25/10 WHERE:Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe
236 East 3rd Street
New York, NY TIME: 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: $7
If you’re in the MID-EAST this week . . . ARTURO SANDOVAL WHEN: Monday 3/22/10 – Tuesday 2/23/10 WHERE:Dakota Jazz Club
1010 Nicollet Avenue
Minneapolis, MN TIME: 7:00 p.m. & 9:30 p.m. TICKETS: $28 – $45
CHEVERE
Unity Temple Concert Series WHEN: Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:Unity Temple Church
875 Lake Street
Oak Park, IL TIME: 7:30 p.m. TICKETS: $15 – $30
DARWIN NOGUERA EVOLUTION QUARTET WHEN: Tuesday 3/23/10 WHERE:Andy’s Jazz Club
11 E. Hubbard Street
Chicago, IL TIME: 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
HECTOR DEL CUERTO
Zero Hour Tango Festival WHEN: Friday 3/25/10 WHERE:The Buskirk-Chumley Theater
114 East Kirkwood Avenue
Bloomington, IN TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $25
LOS GATOS WHEN: Wednesday 3/24/10 WHERE:Live At PJ’s
102 S 1st St
Ann Arbor, MI TIME: 8:00 p.m. & 9:15 p.m. TICKETS: $7
PABLO ZIEGLER
Zero Hour Tango Festival WHEN: Friday 3/25/10 WHERE:The Buskirk-Chumley Theater
114 East Kirkwood Avenue
Bloomington, IN TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $25
PAULINHO GARCIA WHEN: Wednesday 3/24/10 WHERE:Piccolo Mondo
1642 E. 56th Street
Chicago, IL TIME: 6:00 p.m.
With Solataire Miles WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 WHERE:Villa Verone
13 Douglas Ave
Elgin, IL TIME: 7:30 p.m.
PONCHO SANCHEZ WHEN: Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:Prairie Center for the Arts
201 Schaumburg Court
Schaumburg, IL TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $34 – $36
TUMBAO BRAVO WHEN: Sunday 3/28/10 WHERE:Sangria’s
401 South Lafayette Avenue
Royal Oak, MI TIME: 9:30 p.m. TICKETS: $5
If you’re on the WEST COAST this week . . . ELIANE ELIAS WHEN: Tuesday 3/23/10 – Wednesday 3/24/10 WHERE:Yoshi’s – San Francisco
1330 Fillmore Street
San Francisco, CA TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $18
FRANK CANO WHEN: Sunday 3/27/10 WHERE:Steamers
138 W. Commonwealth Avenue
Fullerton, CA TIME: 8:30 p.m. TICKETS: $8
JOHN CALLOWAY WHEN: Sunday 3/28/10 WHERE:CODA Supper Club
1710 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA TIME: 8:00 p.m. TICKETS: $10
PETE ESCOVEDO WHEN: Friday 3/26/10 WHERE:Dimitris Lounge
700 Main Street
Suisun City, CA TIME: 9:00 p.m. TICKETS: $29
REBECA MAULEON
Public Forum: “Crossover: Jazz Artists in the Concert Hall” WHEN: Saturday 3/27/10 WHERE:Oakland Senior Center
200 Grand Avenue
Oakland, CA TIME: 3:00 p.m. TICKETS: FREE
Simpatico
Claudio Roditi Resonance Records
Latin Jazz composition is a tricky prospect that requires a mature musical mind and a refined set of technical skills. On it’s most basic level, writing a Latin Jazz piece can be a snap; an artist simply needs to throw a melody over some chord changes and put a Caribbean or South American rhythm underneath it. This generic approach might serve as a good start, but it generally yields stylistically awkward and aesthetically unpleasing results. The composer needs a fundamental understanding of the rhythmic structures connected to their song; whether they are writing around the clave or connecting to an upbeat samba, the melody, harmony and rhythm need to align. Once they create stylistic coherence between all the different pieces of the song, detailed rhythm section writing pushes the song into another level of interest. The incorporation of percussion breaks, textural changes, and distinctive bass variations all give the piece a more articulate sound. From there, the composer needs to make an important choice that probably requires the most artistic vision – focus the writing even more closely or step away and leave ample space for musical embellishment. Latin Jazz involves collaborative spontaneous creation; the more that a composer wants to capture this element, the more that they need to trust their musicians. It’s a heavy set of requirements that demand a musician with a clear concept. Trumpet player Claudio Roditi shares his clear and mature artistic vision on Simpatico, a collection of smart compositions that combine Brazilian music, straight ahead jazz, and more.
Digging Into A Classic Brazilian Jazz Sound
Roditi digs into a classic Brazilian Jazz sound on several tracks, reflecting a direction that has been a hallmark of his career. Trombonist Michael Dease and Roditi bounce through the groove with a lively melody on “Spring Samba” pushed ahead with a steady propulsion from the rhythm section. Roditi mixes long lyrical phrases and quick streams of notes into an appealing statement, while Dease moves his trombone through the chord changes with impressive dexterity. The band brings down the dynamic for an enthusiastically executed solo from pianist Helio Alves, full of syncopated ideas and boppish licks, before moving into a colorful drum solo from Duduka da Fonseca. Guitarist Romero Lubambo maintains an active comping pattern while Roditi presents the melody on “Vida Nova,” until the full rhythm section enters, pushing into an attention grabbing improvisation from Alves. Roditi weaves his flugelhorn through the upbeat samba groove, starting with thoughtful ideas and building into racing streams of notes. Lubambo charges into an energetic statement, running melodically interesting and artistically engaging lines into a head turning climax. Alves and Lubambo float through a unison series of arpeggios, introducing a subdued melody over a medium tempo samba rhythm on “How Intensive.” Roditi cleverly builds a strong solo based upon a combination of short sharp rhythmic ideas and hard bop flourishes. Lubambo follows with an immediate energy, connecting extended phrases into a fiery statement that provokes response from da Fonseca. Roditi reflectively places an understated melody based upon a catchy repeated phrase over a driving groove on “Alberto And Daisy.” Riding off da Fonseca’s spontaneous interaction, the rhythm section steadily builds into a ferocious inertia behind Roditi’s improvisation, keeping a quiet momentum behind Alves’s solo. The group comes down even more behind Lubambo’s strongly musical statement, growing back into a fiery drive as Roditi, Alves, and Lubambo trade ideas with da Fonseca. These pieces find Roditi and his band mates at home in a Brazilian Jazz setting, showing their strongly musical skills over original pieces.
Injecting A Serious Dose Of Swing
Roditi moves in a straight ahead jazz direction with a few compositions, injecting a serious dose of swing into his writing. Alves leaps into a soulfully bluesy introduction on “Piccolo Blues” until Roditi enters into a perfectly simply melody on piccolo trumpet. Roditi plays off the melody as he moves into a jazz fueled improvisation, flying through a mix of classic licks in the high range of his instrument. Alves blends the best qualities of a traditional swing pianist with flashes of modern improvisation ideas on a relaxed solo. Roditi quietly repeats a beautifully understated phrase on “A Dream For Kristen” while da Fonseca balances between swing and bossa nova with some fantastic brush work. The piece moves solidly into bossa nova as Lubambo creates a lush statement through the use of Wes Montgomery inspired chordal passages and smartly constructed lines. Electric bassist John Lee reveals a skill for melodic construction, as he weaves through the rich chord changes, leading into a strong solo from Roditi. A bold drum build-up sends the group into a swinging blues melody from Roditi and Dease on “Blues For Ronni.” Both Dease and Roditi stretch out across several choruses on their solos, inserting some enthusiastic and fiery momentum into their work. Alves follows their direction with a soulful improvisation, leading into a lyrical statement from Lee that explodes into a climatic exchange between Roditi and Dease. These songs reveal another side to Roditi’s work, firmly stating his credibility as a traditional jazz artist.
Integrating Decidedly Different Elements
Roditi integrates some decidedly different elements into his work on other pieces, allowing for a diverse mixture of music. A rich combination of string and orchestral winds blossom into a lush setting on “Slow Fire,” setting the stage for delicately handled melody from Roditi. As the strings fade into the background, Roditi creates a lyrical statement, building into a high point as the strings rise behind him once again. Alves carefully constructs a thoughtful statement over just the rhythm section and then comes down behind Lee, who weaves a sensitive melody over the symphonic background. Lubambo elegantly places arpeggiated figures over a swing waltz on “Waltz For Joana” until vocalist Holli Ross winds through a simply poignant lyric. Roditi tip toes through the waltz with an understated improvisation on muted trumpet, finding his way through the moving changes with grace and style. Alves plays upon the basic shape of the melody, stretching into an original thought before Lubambo slides through legato melodies in a calm and reflective solo. Roditi and Dease travel through an introspective melody in harmony on “Alfitude,” floating over an uncharacteristically down tempo groove. The trumpet player glides over an open and swishing bossa nova tinged rhythm, allowing him the space to improvise at his lyrical best. Dease follows Roditi’s lead with a slightly more active melodic solo, leading into a brief but memorable statement from Alves. These pieces explore a different side of Roditi’s compositional skills, letting him find his voice within a variety of textures.
A Defined Vision And A Lively Performance
Roditi’s compositions come to life throughout Simpatico, as a direct result of his defined vision and the lively performance of his musicians. His compositions reveal a clear preference for lyrical melodies, rich chord changes, and extensive improvisational freedom. Roditi writes straight forward melodies that always find their spot within the groove; whether the rhythm section charges through a samba or breezes through a swing, his melodic content always reflects the stylistic basis. At the same time, he favors memorable lines that filter into the listener through repetition. His thick harmonies always provide great foundations for improvisation, mixing Roditi’s connection to classic bossa nova chord changes and boppish complexity. His pieces leave plenty of room for improvisation, which makes perfect sense – Roditi improvises with an effortless ease, creating statements that range from reflective thoughts to fiery rampages. He surrounds himself with like-minded musicians that help bring spontaneity to the forefront. Alves matches Roditi’s passion for improvisation, improvising and comping with keen insight, while da Fonseca prods and provokes the soloists with interactive intensity. Lubambo stands as a model of tastefully exciting playing and Lee presents a uniquely melodic voice on the bass. Roditi pulls all the pieces together on Simpatico, allowing him to present a strong picture of his compositional skills.
Latin Jazz Live reflects upon the most vital piece of the music’s existence – live performance. Recordings stand as historical milestones, but in a spontaneous and evolving art form like Latin Jazz, live performance in the standard by which musicians are measured. In this recurring series, LJC writers will provide their impressions about Latin Jazz concerts and share the evening’s proceedings with the Latin Jazz community. Comments are welcomed and discussion encouraged as we dig into the live music experience.
———- Latin Jazz Live
The Paul Austerlitz Quintet
El Taller Latino Americano
Saturday, March 6, 2010
By Tomas Peña
———- The Paul Austerlitz Quintet made a rare New York appearance at El Taller Latino Americano, a performance space and showcase for artistic talent on Manhattan’s upper west side. The occasion marked the introduction of music based on Dominican rhythms and was sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Sundeman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College, where Austerlitz teaches ethnomusicology and Africana Studies. The concert also featured new pieces written for a grant from the American Composers Forum, which were premiered in Philadelphia earlier this week.
For the event the bass clarinetist assembled a consortium of forward thinking musicians including pianist Richard Johnson (who performs regularly with Wynton Marsalis), bassist and young lion Eric Wheeler, master drummer, percussionist and bandleader Babatunde Lea and visionary drummer, song-writer, singer and dancer Jose Duluc, all of who took part in a joyful and transcendental conversation with the audience.
The evening’s festivities commenced with “East Broadway Merengue,” a tune inspired by the Sonny Rollins recording “East Broadway Rundown” and which fuses jazz with Dominican Pambiche. It was followed by “Underground Palo,” which represents the most widely diffused Afro Dominican ritual music throughout the Dominican Republic (not to be confused with Cuban Palo). The tune takes its inspiration from John Coltrane’s “Song of the Underground Railroad” which in turn was inspired by the African American spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” (code for the Big Dipper, a constellation that points north and consequently to freedom). “Thunderflow” is a traditional Yoruba Cuban song dedicated to the Orisa (Orisha) Sango (Chango) and is combined with the rarely heard Pri Pri rhythm. The tune features Jose Duluc on the Balsie (Talking) drum, whose tones are manipulated by the movement of the player‘s foot. Changing the pace, the quintet offered prayers for the victims of the Haitian earthquake. After this, the band played a traditional song invoking Haitian-Dominican spirits known as Lwa. The theme revolved around the indivisible bond between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. During one section Jose Duluc donned a Rara dress, which is worn in processional ceremonies during Lent. Finally, the band brought the audience to its feet with a joyous merengue, “Juanita Morel” and came full circle with a closing invocation to the Orisas.
Paul Austerlitz has had a long-standing relationship with Dominican music. Born in Finland and raised in New York City, he was exposed to Latino culture at a young age; however he had no contact with Dominican music until he returned to New York in the 1980s after graduating from Wesleyan University. As an aspiring saxophonist with a deep love for Afro-Caribbean music, he joined a Latin Jazz band but work was scarce. At the time a popular form of Dominican music known as merengue was taking New York City’s Latin club by storm and there was as shortage of merengue saxophonists in the city. Shortly thereafter, Austerlitz started playing with merengue bands. As he became more committed to the music he moved to Washington Heights, where he learned to speak Spanish and participated in occasional gigs with first-rate musicians, including Jose Mateo, the “king of merengue.” His work as an ethnomusicologist includes the books Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (2005, Wesleyan University Press) and Merengue : Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (1997, Temple University Press).
I am no stranger to Afro Caribbean music; however I must confess that I was rendered speechless by the power, beauty and communal nature of Paul‘s music. During a recent telephone conversation I asked Paul to describe his music and he modestly told me that it is “Jazz with Afro Dominican and Haitian influences.” Left wanting more, I referred to the liner-notes for Journey (Innova Records) and happened upon the following passages written by Paul. “I believe that music is rooted in conversation and African based rhythms. The drum speaks and we respond by dancing outwardly (as in merengue) or inwardly (to more meditative sounds). I offer the creative fruit of my ethno musicological journey as a universal communion.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING Journey, Innova CD 2008 The Fret Cycle, with poet Michael Harper, W. Kaufman Forthcoming Our Book on Trane: The Yaddo Sessions, with poet Michael Harper, Yaddo CD 2004 Double Take: Jazz Poetry Conversations, with poet Michael Harper, innova CD 2004 Dominican Dreams, American Dreams, Engine CD 2003 A Bass Clarinet in Santo Domingo and Detroit, XDot-25 CD 1998
Most people define Latin Jazz by the two broad strokes that brought the music into existence – the combination of aesthetics from jazz and Afro-Cuban music – but in reality, there’s so much more to the story. The genre initially arose from these two influences, but as the music developed into a modern style, it absorbed everything that entered its path. When Brazilian music stepped into the public eye of the United States, it became undeniably linked to the Latin Jazz world. As jazz musicians experimented with rock and funk in the sixties, Latin Jazz artists found a way to combine their rhythmic world with these emerging influences. The jazz world dived headfirst into fusion during the seventies, and Latin musicians sat steadily in the mix, becoming an irreplaceable piece of bands like Return To Forever, Weather Report, and more. In return, Latin Jazz musicians started incorporating fusion elements into their music, experimenting with new harmonic sonorities and structures. The eighties saw a rise in technology and electronic sounds in music, which bled into Latin Jazz albums from artists like Dave Valentin, Giovanni Hidalgo, and more. The history of Latin Jazz has been characterized by a constant evolution as musicians incorporated new ideas from the culture around them.
Legendary conguero Mongo Santamaria reigns as the undisputed champion of funky Latin Jazz with a huge catalogue of albums to back his claim. A well-respected percussionist that arrived to New York in the 1950s, Santamaria made his mark upon the Latin dance and jazz worlds through work with Tito Puente, Cal Tjader and more. He established himself as a bandleader in the late fifties with several albums for Fantasy Records, but didn’t hit the mainstream until the early sixties, when a funky version of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” hit big. From that point, Santamaria steadily kept one foot in the pop music world, re-interpreting modern hits through Latin rhythms and creating bluesy descargas over chunky backbeats. He touched upon modern rock with versions of Beatles tunes, connected with soul through Motown covers, and stayed up-to-date with Credence Clearwater Revival tunes. Along the way, Santamaria never lost his Latin Jazz roots, placing most of these songs in an instrumental context and providing plenty of room for improvisation. He made sure that his music included the best of both worlds with funky masters like drummer Bernard Purdie and great jazz soloists like saxophonist Sonny Fortune. At the root of Santamaria’s sound, arranger Marty Sheller made sure that the music oozed with greasy funk, creating amazing contexts for the drummer to excel. As Santamaria moved into the seventies, he incorporated disco and more aggressive funk sounds, while his work in the eighties and nineties signaled a shift back to a more traditional Latin Jazz approach. Santamaria’s full collection of work represents an important piece of the Latin Jazz world, but his boogaloo charged work in the sixties remains a trademark of his sound.
Throughout its history, Latin Jazz has spread across the United States, evolving differently in the country’s various regions. The East Coast, and New York in particular, often sits in history as the music’s birthplace; it remains a vital spot for the growth and survival of Latin Jazz, but it’s not the end of the story. Latin Jazz spent years jumping all over the map, developing a significant presence on the West Coast in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Transplanted mentors in Afro-Cuban music helped solidify the knowledge base in these areas, with role models like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo, Francisco Aguabella, and Armando Peraza sharing their experience with local musicians. These musicians provided a firm understanding of the music’s Afro-Cuban foundations, but from there, local musicians helped it grow into a uniquely West Coast version of Latin Jazz. From that point, the East and West Coast Latin Jazz scenes shared a common heritage, but they created very different products. The West Coast’s version of Latin Jazz built a very authentic link to Cuban heritage but stepped away from New York tradition. The East Coast remained on the cutting edge of the music, thriving upon the the strength of history and innovation bred through the New York scene. As Latin Jazz moved into the twenty first century, both sides of the country held significant musical movements, and major opportunities for collaboration and shared knowledge. 
to the 2008 album 
Bobby kicked off the evening’s festivities with a unique a cappella interpretation of “Son de La Loma,” integrating elements of bebop, scat, Yoruba chants and rhythms. He then turned to the keyboard and accompanied himself on the bolero, “No Sera De Mi.” Midway through the tune, pianist Manuel Varela, bassist Yunior Terry, drummer Dafnis Prieto, saxophonist Yosvany Terry and percussionist Marvin Diz joined him onstage (followed by flutist Andrea Brachfeld who joined the band onstage later). Bobby‘s passion for American jazz was most apparent during his interpretations of “On Green Dolphin Street” (sung in Spanish) and “Sometimes I’m Happy” (sung in English). He also paid tribute to two Cuban icons, Miguelito Valdes (“Babalu“) and Chano Pozo (“Blues Para Chano”), which evolved into an all out descarga (jam session). Lastly he performed “De La Habana a Nueva York” and a heartfelt bolero titled “Veronica,” which he dedicated to his daughter. 
Once a musician has spent years developing their fundamental skills, they reach the true starting point of their career. The endless practicing and study is simply a precursor, not a launching point; it’s the materials that you need to build something wonderful. A musician’s honest artistic statements start when they have the tools to make a meaningful statement about their background, culture, and beliefs. From there, they can experiment intelligently with a relationship to history, offering their own perspective on a genre or style. They can develop a unique improvisational approach that draws upon technique, style, and a relationship to a musical lineage on their instrument. They have the opportunity to step into the forefront of their genre and promote true change, helping the music evolve into its next permutation. This is an exciting time, full of inspiration and enthusiasm – in a sense, the fun really begins here. 
Marconi – he’s number one. We’re playing this gig at Lincoln Center and Marconi was going to be part of the cast. He couldn’t make it, and I replaced him with two bandoneon players! The way that he plays traditional tango and the way that he improvises over changes – not everybody can do that. When I thought how to replace him, I thought – two guys! One who does this well and then someone who does the other well. So he’s a very special player.
PA: No, because the form in those things is tons of percussion and a few chords with solos. I think it’s more like recording standards. Any old jazz musicians would go into the studio and record “All The Things You Are.” What do we need to rehearse? We don’t need an arrangement. We can do a couple of things – let’s do the intro, and roll it. If you’ve been playing together, you probably have a few things – you’ve changed this chord for that chord – but no more than that. At least that was the way that I was approaching it. And it’s complicated; one of the tunes I left out because there was a small train wreck and it was bugging the hell out of me; there’s even one on the recording. We tried to edit it out. Someone decided to do a little ritard before the end of the phrase and nobody followed. But that can happen – somebody’s used to doing a ritard there and we didn’t hear it. I heard it days later actually. I said, “Oh man, I wasn’t listening! He’s doing a ritard and I just kept playing.” You try to edit those out, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen in the music.
PA: I think everybody has their own way of dealing with it. That’s why these particular musicians are on the recording – they’ve all dealt with it at some point or another or they are dealing with it. I think that we all are dealing with it in terms of developing the language. We don’t have a whole lot of tradition to fall back on and learn. A jazz player might transcribe solos or study patterns or things like that. We don’t have that training. But even though, that’s sort of where I’m going. I would like to, at some point, develop some sort of more methodical approach to it, which can be done. You just discover what the idiomatic phrases are, how they work against the harmony, practice them, and internalize them. But I think that everybody has dealt with tango phrasing and tango type melodies. You hear it in Gustavo’s trumpet playing. Even when he does bop it, it’s not really juxtaposed bop over tango. I think he’s trying to deal with it in Spanish, you know? The tango guys don’t even have to think about it – the track that we do as a quartet with bandoneon, piano, violin, and bass, they all basically are drawing from their experiences playing tango – perhaps the violinist is the one that is stretching more because he’s heard some jazz violinists. There’s a moment where they take an entire chorus or at least an entire A section of a tune, and they’re not used to that. They don’t get called to do that, because, there’s usually an arrangement. So when I said to them, play a whole chorus, I had to say that and keep a straight face because basically the answer would have been, “What?!?” When you hear tango, it wants to change the melodic lead every four or eight bars. It’s almost asks for it. I’ve used that before, I’ve done it, sharing the melody, but I wanted people to take a full chorus. When you hear the bandoneon play over changes, there’s parts that are just arpeggios and scales, but any time that he does anything expressive, it comes from playing tango. 
PA: I have a two-part strategy. One is to really try to internationalize these guys and see if I can take the next step in my career. I’ll say, “I’ve got this elite level group of musicians in Buenos Aires and that’s what it takes for my to do my show.” And then I’ll see if I can get away with it. Especially in Europe and places where we would have to travel anyways. I’m going to be pushing these guys quite a bit. The good news of this collaboration at Lincoln Center is that this could make Paquito D’Rivera’s next record for his record label. So when we have the mighty Paquito booking these things, I hope that we’ll at least be able to get the core musicians to do the touring. Then the other part of it is to focus a little more on the real core of musicians here in New York that I can do this stuff with and really develop that. It’s going back to my buddy Raul Juarena and a pianist here in New York that I would like to work with a lot deeper. I need someone who gravitates to tango naturally, I need that rhythmically. I need somebody who responds to my playing; otherwise I find that I work too hard to make things happen that should be spread around the band. I’m going to refocus on these few guys and try to get a project that represents us so that I can work locally and hold my head up. Now I have the recording, so I can say – this is what I need, can you do this or not?
I’ve taught musicality classes where I teach people to listen, break it down, and understand how it’s put together. I enjoy doing that and I think that it’s important work. There’s more and more people doing that. That also kind of relaxes me, because when I started with tango back in the eighties, it was still dormant. I felt like, this is such incredible music, we need to preserve this. I’ve met so many people over the years who are dealing with same problem and trying to find ways to do that, that I feel like I can just do my work. I can continue to be fascinated with the history and obviously if I get a teaching gig or somebody asks me to do a workshop, I’ll do it. That sense of mission perhaps is not as important as it is to continue to get this more creative work off the ground.
Sometimes music from our childhood leaves our attention for a while, but it sits in our subconscious, waiting patiently to be rediscovered. We form an unbreakable link with the music that floated around us during our developmental years. Regardless of whether we choose to embrace it or not, we simply can’t escape it – that music is embedded in our lives. When we do grab it, the music becomes our passion and we attempt to capture its pure essence. We sometimes become the staunch traditionalist, holding onto the sounds and ideals that shaped our experience during our early years. When we leave the music in the past and then revisit it years later, we look at it through different eyes. It still holds deep meaning for us, but our perspective becomes skewed by all our new artistic experiences. We may find a place for our childhood music in our lives, but our interpretation looks and sounds very different than the original version. Just as life forces us to grow personally and artistically, the rediscovery of our early musical influences inspire a musical evolution.
PABLO ASLAN: I walked into the music department at UCLA once day and there was this little flyer put up titled “New York Residency Scholarship.” Pia Gilbert, a modern dance composer at Juilliard, who used to be at UCLA, set up this scholarship. She fundraised for one music student and one band student to go to New York and spend a tri-mester there for credit. They gave you $5000 – this was back in the eighties – and they said New York is that way, come back in a few months and tell us about it. New York was always that scary place where all the music happens. I thought it was incredible and I put this proposal together that consisted of checking out the avant-garde. I said, “I’m going to go to The Knitting Factory, and I’m going to go to all these other clubs that I’ve read about.” She bought it; she thought it was a great proposal. So I went to New York to do that. At the same time, I had a contact through my tango buddies with the guys who were working in tango in New York. I spent my nights at The Knitting Factory and I eventually started picking up tango gigs. Instead of staying three months, I stayed six months and laid the foundations for coming back. 
PA: Well actually, there was something before that. I met Raul during that scholarship trip. When I came to New York, I called this guy, and Raul had just gotten into town from Venezuela with the same phone number. We both called this guy, and then in the basement of this Venezuelan club, we put together a tango show. Then he went back to Venezuela to get his family, I went back to UCLA to finish my degree. When I got back, he was back. I made some connections and got a couple of tango gigs. That was back when nobody was really playing tango formally, so anybody who wanted to present tango was in. I had a little bit more of the entrepreneurial spirit, I knew how to deal with Americans, and all the older Argentine guys didn’t quite. So I started organizing gigs. 
Raul and I hooked up for some things and started a band called New York-Buenos Aires Connection. That was our first group and it was basically New Tango. We got a record deal, we recorded, and we did some gigs. When we started doing dance gigs, we very quickly realized that our Piazzolla and New Tango stuff was not appropriate for the dance world. Quite literally, we wrote a dance book overnight. It was really quite a shock, because you write these Nuevo Tango things that last over eight minutes and dancers don’t like it. We were at Stamford Tango Workshop, which is something that happens every year. After the first night and the looks that we got, we locked ourselves up and wrote some charts. Raul knew how to play the traditional stuff and I had played it, but we just never really focused on the dance crowd. This is really when tango really started being dominated by the dancers. We went back to New York and we started this other thing, which was traditional dance music. We called that The New York Tango Trio. That group, again, worked old fashioned steady gigs – we stayed at the same clubs for years – Friday nights at Labella Park for five years and Saturday nights at these dance studios for another five years. 
We went through a number of pianists, and we were frustrated because we couldn’t find the right person. So I said, “Let’s send a flyer to all the conservatories that says we need a piano player for a tango group.” We sent it to Julliard, The Manhattan School Of Music, and NYU – that’s where Ethan Iverson (now of The Bad Plus) came up. He had just moved to New York, and was about to quit NYU – that wasn’t working out for him – and he needed a job. Ethan is a phenomenal musician. We had quite a disorganized book, but Ethan was already a monster. He just sight-read the whole book on the gig. He lasted a good five years with us and he made the record – there’s a lot of improvisation on that. On the gig, he and I would re-invent bass lines, and Raul really likes to leave things loose. Instead of developing arrangements, we would write skeletons and then we’d improvise. So that was the germ of all my other work – just realizing that you could improvise so much and having Ethan around to really push all kinds of ideas into the music. 
PA: The first version of Avantango in 1994 included Phil Haynes and Kenny Wolesen on drums, Ethan, Mark Feldman, Thomas Chapin, Greg Wahl, and some other jazz musicians. It was not really tango. Ethan could play those rhythms and stuff, so it had that flavor. My writing never really developed to the point where I could create the fusions that I wanted; it was more about improvising. Interesting stuff would happen, but I couldn’t necessarily say that it was real tango, which is what I was trying to do. Because of the way things happened, my sextet went down to a trio and it was Ethan, Thomas Chapin, and I. We started working quite a bit, and we made a record. It’s a very interesting recording – Thomas’ playing there is phenomenal. He died a couple of years after we made that record. I managed to get that out on a label in Argentina in 1998. When Thomas died, Donny McCaslin covered for him for a little bit. Eventually, I started trying it out with Argentine guys. I said, “O.K., let me try it and see if I can get a sound that’s closer to what I’m hearing using Argentine guys.” 
Raul started working in Europe more and I started pushing Avantango as my main band. Eventually I got a call to do a big show at Town Hall with dancers, and I just said, “I’m going to use Avantango and put the name there. Even though this is my experimental group, I’m going to put it up there with dancers.” I did that for a few years and that’s what that first Zoho record is about. It’s basically the music for that first show at Town Hall. There’s some Piazzolla charts, my own chart, and some other stuff. A lot of that stuff was planned on stage. I went from being part of a small scene where we were the one working band who played tango in any fashion, getting calls from all over the place, to being more of an entrepreneur, doing all the stuff that it takes to be in business. I eventually burned out on that. I also realized that every time we sold the show, the expectation was the dancers. It felt weird. You go to concerts, and they want to see the stereotypical tango show and then they get this bass player guy who has horns instead of bandoneon. My heart wasn’t into creating this commercially successful tango show at all. Musically, I really wanted to keep exploring this thing of improvising and getting this loose feel with the tango. 
PA: I appreciate that, and I registered that people liked it. It’s fuel not just for the ego, but it’s fuel for continuing to try. It was like – here’s the concept and it works. I had the right musicians there. That’s what was so frustrating before, I just didn’t have the right musicians. The tango guys couldn’t improvise and the improvisers couldn’t play tango. I’m bringing these guys in, we’re playing our classic tango, and it’s going somewhere else. I had to make an effort to realize that it’s not that music, it’s just something else. I’m not the kind so musician who will write everything out so that it sounds exactly like you want it. I want everything to be spontaneous. 
PA: Yea, the only one who was resisting it, funny enough, was Pipi Piazzolla. He’s got that last name, you know? He said, “If I start playing tango, then the critics and everyone are going to start talking about this.” But I was the one who said, “You play tango! You’re good!” He was kind of avoiding it, he wasn’t ready – he plays jazz and fusion. Gustavo Bergalli had been experimenting with this, like a lot of the old jazzers did. Back in the days of Gato Barbieri and all those guys, they all wanted to improvise on tango. He had been in Europe for many years. He had done a tango jazz thing that was overwritten and included a little bit of soloing, but not really interactive improvisation. Jorge Retamoza, the saxophone player, had been working in the tango language. I really wanted to work with him and see where he would take things. Abel Rogantini, the pianist, was a find, because he was actually my third call. My first two guys couldn’t make it. It’s incredible how these things happen – he really has a finish in each camp. He’s a great jazz player, he knows all that harmonic stuff – he’s a great improviser. He’s got quite a bit of tango experience so he’s able to bring it together to the point where I don’t know if the first two guys that I called would have been able to do it the way he did. I got really lucky with that. 
PA: I wrote this letter in response with a sense of humor – I was mad, but I realized that I might as well just raise some hell and see what happens. Then it got picked up by Billboard and All About Jazz. I was basically just tired of the tango police. They would say, “It’s not tango.” “What do you mean it’s not tango? We’re all Argentines, we’re playing “La Cachila” from the 1920s and we’re playing all these standards. The rhythms are tango. It’s got trumpet and drums and no bandoneon, but you know . . .” It’s like someone saying that you couldn’t play jazz without a banjo. A lot of my most aggressive stuff in that letter was like, “Who are these people who decide that this music is not tango?” I’ve been working in the tango world for twenty years! So it was kind of amusing. I really had fun writing that! 
PA: No, at this point I think it’s almost the opposite. When I want to play traditional tango, I play traditional tango. I don’t owe anything to anybody stylistically. This is my take on it, and it comes to a point where I can do whatever I want. On the other hand, I have a deep respect for the tradition in the sense that if you call your music tango, then you have to deal with it. Labels may work for you on a marketing basis, but if you use the word tango, let me hear you deal with it in some way. I want to hear the fact that you can actually play this music and you’re not just slapping it on because it’s a sexy name. So I have a lot of respect for tradition . . . and I thought that I had approached the record with a lot of respect. The liner notes are scholarly liner notes, compared to what people usually write. I talk about the composers and the context of when they were writing the pieces – I thought that it was done with a lot of respect. And when I started putting these bands up on stage with dancers, I know that I turned off a lot of people. That’s because they want the dancers. I can deal with that. If I want to please the traditional crowd, I can play. 
Music serves as the soundtrack to our lives; sometimes it sits at the forefront of our attention and at other times it drifts in the background. For musicians at the height of their creative energy, music consistently demands focused attention. They intently listen to recordings, analyzing the artistic process and searching for new musical inspirations. They concentrate upon their own performances with intense attentiveness, keeping their ears wide open and their minds constantly thinking about their music. Their rapt listening sessions push their musicianship onto a higher plane and it makes the soundtrack of their lives much more vivid. Most people outside the performing artist community experience music in a much less active way, but it still makes a strong impact upon their lives. They might use music as background noise, filling the space behind menial chores and helping to alleviate boredom. Music enters their life through the television and movies, filtering through dramatic action and blatant advertisements. It accompanies exercise, long drives, homework, video games, internet surfing, more; whenever the opportunity arises, music becomes a part of their life journey, attaching itself to their consciousness like super glue. While both of these experiences value music, they share one special bond – they permanently embed vivid musical sound bytes in a person’s mind
PABLO ASLAN: I’m just viscerally attracted to music. I was one of those kids that liked to listen to music. Somehow I started to seek out instruments. My sisters were starting guitar; I wasn’t, but they were around. Little by little, I started going to concerts and started becoming fascinated by music. Just by myself – I wasn’t from one of those families where you got piano lessons or anything like that. I just started seeking out teachers and then started the guitar and the electric bass. Then I started playing with people – it was a spontaneous combustion type of thing. I have kids now and I make a huge effort to expose them to music, but I never had any of that. It really was spontaneous combustion. The kind of stuff that my parents had in their record collection was good – they had Piazzolla, they had Brazilian music, some jazz and classical music . . . and the Beatles, of course. That was sort of my menu. I was playing and a lot of my good friends were playing near the end of high school. My core group of friends were all in music – either around playing or being fanatical about listening and seeking out recordings. During the seventies in Buenos Aires, it was not easy to get a hold of a lot of the recordings that were out there in the world, so we would make due with what we could. We were always looking to people who traveled to bring records back. 
PA: It was Piazzolla really; Piazzolla was very much present during that time. People will say that’s not tango, it’s something else, but it’s not just marginal. Piazzolla was part of our record collections. We went crazy over Piazzolla just like we went crazy of Gismonti or John Coltrane. In terms of tango, you are very much right, they were not good years. You would see it in T.V. in black and white and it was all these old guys basically. It was around – you’d hear it on the radio, in the taxi, or at the newsstand. It was everywhere; but it was just this old black and white thing. When I left for the States, I definitely had my Piazzolla cassettes. Then I started doing radio; I had a show on a free form community station. That’s when I started playing some more classic tango stuff, on that show. I had a few LPs that I must have picked up when I went back home. Little by little I became more interested in it. I remember back at Santa Cruz at one point, someone in the opera department was putting together a Latin American show, so I played bass and wrote some tango arrangements. Somehow it was part of my consciousness, but like I said, I think that Piazzolla was mainly all my contact with the music until much later.
PA: In Santa Cruz, I was basically playing jazz. I immediately hooked up with a group of people – Graham Connah, Ben Goldberg, all the guys on the scene out there now. Graham was my roommate – we would get up at 8 in the morning and listen to Charlie Parker and Cecil Taylor. For an Argentine immigrant, it was quite an education. He would drag me over to the practice room, open up the Real Book, and say, “Let’s play this.” I played in a Latin Jazz trio with a guitar player and drums; we’d play at all the coffee shops on campus and started getting some work around town. The most important lesson at Berklee happened the second or third day there – I was practicing and someone knocked on the door and said, “Come on, I’m having a session.” So I went in there and this clarinet player had recruited quite a big band, he must have had his own arrangements. He got me to play bass, put a chart in front of me, and it was probably the first time that I had seen a chart. I saw a whole measure C major and then a whole measure of F major. There was a guy next to me, so I said, “O.K., this is measure of four, so I play C and count to four and then I go to F?” And he said, “Yes.” That was the most important lesson that I got, because I could read chord charts then! From there, I arrived in Santa Cruz and discovered the standards. But it took me a while to realize that none that really meant much to me. It wasn’t like I grew up listening to this stuff and now I was playing it. It was like, now there’s a song called “All The Things You Are,” and I play it almost every day for some reason. It was fun, it was fascinating, and I was learning an enormous amount from doing that; still, it was not my music, it was something else. 
When school was over, I heard everyone talking about graduate school. I had no idea what that was, but a friend of mine was going to Cal Arts. I said, “Sign me up.” They gave me a full scholarship to be in the classical department. As it was, I wasn’t ready to go, and I stayed in Santa Cruz another year working in all these symphonies and jazz gigs. The next year, I said, “O.K., I’m ready.” They said, “Well, we don’t have a full scholarship anymore because it’s all based on what we need; we have a half-scholarship.” I said, “O.K.,” and I went down to Cal Arts in kind of miserable conditions. I had to take out loans and I also didn’t have enough money for housing so I was living in a trailer in the parking lot. Being at that school as a classical player was very frustrating because Charlie Haden was there and that was one of my all-time heroes. At the time when Charlie came in to teach this ensemble class, I had to be at orchestra. It just wasn’t working out for me, so I only spent a year there. Then I had hooked up with Lalo Schifrin; Lalo had a youth orchestra that he was directing through Young Musician’s Foundation. Even in my last year at Santa Cruz, I was commuting to Los Angeles to do rehearsals. When I found the opportunity, I said, “I’ve got to do this, no matter what.” I was driving down to L.A., sometimes sleeping in the car, to do these rehearsals and concerts with them. So when I moved to L.A., I was hooked up already with that scene. I also started playing shows, theater, and things like that. 
When I decided to leave Cal Arts, I discovered tango, full blown. It was the summer right after that year at Cal Arts – I got a job playing in a show at the Roosevelt Hotel there in Hollywood. I was working in the second floor lounge which had been reconditioned as a set; there were several shows a week. I remember on a Sunday, between the matinee and the evening, going down to the lobby. Right next to the lobby was another big room, so I peeked my head in. There was a trio playing tango and a whole bunch of people dancing. The trio was piano, bass, and bandoneon. The bassist was playing upright bass; he was a classical guy that I ended up meeting many years later. I said, “That’s my gig; that sounds good, playing tango gigs.” There was nothing I could do, but the obsession was there. Then I had a second stroke of luck – when Tango Argentina the show was in L.A., I went to see the show, saw the bass player, and hung out with him. I realized that there was a huge thing for me there and it kind of brought everything around. It was played with the bow, it was popular music, but it was elaborate. Through listening and understanding Piazzolla and the Brazilians – especially Gismonti and those guys – I realized I was after some sort of arty Latin outlet for myself that incorporated the sophistication of all these musics. Also around the time that I was still at Cal Arts, Charlie Haden did some work with Dino Saluzzi. They were basically hanging out at Cal Arts, and I was hanging out with Dino. I heard every gig that they did – they played as a duo, bandoneon and bass, and it just flipped me out. 
I eventually ended up going to UCLA, basically because I discovered that I could get paid to go to graduate school. I was the only graduate bass player . . . I was pretty much the only bass player. They needed me – as a graduate student, I wasn’t obligated to be in the orchestra, so the orchestra director gave me a teaching assistantship so that I would be assistant manager. I got paid to do that, I got paid to teach strings to education majors, and I got a scholarship. I was working just about every night, I had subsidized student housing, I was on scholarship, and I was going to graduate school. So it was great. The only conflict there was that my teacher wanted me to be a classical player, the same thing as at Cal Arts. I was working in a lot of orchestras in the area, but that was not my career. Just like at Cal Arts, I wasn’t able to put my idea of what I wanted to do into the curriculum. Ideally, I would have been studying composition, playing in some ensembles, and practicing the bass – but not necessarily to be an orchestra guy. At UCLA at least I was getting paid to be there! 
The Paul Austerlitz Quintet made a rare New York appearance at 
The evening’s festivities commenced with “East Broadway Merengue,” a tune inspired by the Sonny Rollins recording “East Broadway Rundown” and which fuses jazz with Dominican Pambiche. It was followed by “Underground Palo,” which represents the most widely diffused Afro Dominican ritual music throughout the Dominican Republic (not to be confused with Cuban Palo). The tune takes its inspiration from John Coltrane’s “Song of the Underground Railroad” which in turn was inspired by the African American spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” (code for the Big Dipper, a constellation that points north and consequently to freedom). “Thunderflow” is a traditional Yoruba Cuban song dedicated to the Orisa (Orisha) Sango (Chango) and is combined with the rarely heard Pri Pri rhythm. The tune features Jose Duluc on the Balsie (Talking) drum, whose tones are manipulated by the movement of the player‘s foot. Changing the pace, the quintet offered prayers for the victims of the Haitian earthquake. After this, the band played a traditional song invoking Haitian-Dominican spirits known as Lwa. The theme revolved around the indivisible bond between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. During one section Jose Duluc donned a Rara dress, which is worn in processional ceremonies during Lent. Finally, the band brought the audience to its feet with a joyous merengue, “Juanita Morel” and came full circle with a closing invocation to the Orisas.
(2005, Wesleyan University Press) and 
(1997, Temple University Press).
I am no stranger to Afro Caribbean music; however I must confess that I was rendered speechless by the power, beauty and communal nature of Paul‘s music. During a recent telephone conversation I asked Paul to describe his music and he modestly told me that it is “Jazz with Afro Dominican and Haitian influences.” Left wanting more, I referred to the liner-notes for 
, with poet Michael Harper, innova CD 2004
