04 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Home, In Other Words, Jazz, On Music
Maria Schneider conducting the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, featuring guest Donny McCaslin saxophone, at Gusman Hall, University of Miami. Photo by Jenny Abreu
The concert debut of composer, arranger, and conductor Maria Schneider as Artistic Director of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music Henry Mancini Institute on January 25 was as much a musical event as a statement of purpose.
26 Thursday Dec 2019
Posted in Home, In Other Words, Jazz, Latin Jazz, On Music
Arturo O’Farrill Photo by Laura Mariet ©
Born in Mexico City and raised in New York City, pianist, composer and educator Arturo O’Farrill grew up close to Cuba and its culture.
Geography and physical distances can be just an illusion. After all, O’Farrill is the son of the great, late Cuban composer and arranger Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill and is himself a leading figure in Afro-Cuban jazz. Deepening the connection, in the past two decades, professional and family reasons have taken O’Farrill to his father’s homeland.
The results include albums such as Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded in Havana and features his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and several top-flight Cuban musicians. The album earned a 2016 Grammy nomination, and O’Farrill won a Grammy, his sixth, for “Best Instrumental Composition” for the “Afro Latin Jazz Suite,” the centerpiece of the recording.
In 2017, O’Farrill also celebrated Cuban music history – and his family´s – in a moving collaboration with Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Chucho Valdes, son of the late Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Bebo Valdes, another essential figure in the history of modern Afro-Cuban music and a friend of Chico O’Farrill. The resulting Familia, a tribute to the elders, is a multigenerational recording that features younger musical members of both families.
O’Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra will present some of this work, and more, in “Jazz Roots: Cuba: New Perspectives” on Jan. 10 at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
28 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Home, In Other Words, Jazz, On Music
Lunise and Richard Morse (far left) leading RAM at the North Beach Bandshell, Miami Beach Saturday. Photo credit © Luis Olazábal, courtesy The Rhythm Foundation
It’s hard to tell what the spirits are doing any given night, but it´s a good bet that a few of them were dancing with RAM at the North Beach Bandshell in Miami Beach, Saturday. As earthly pleasures go, this would’ve been one hard to pass up.
Led by singer and dancer Lunise Morse and founder, singer, and emcee Richard Morse, the 11-piece Haitian roots music band RAM offered an intense and joyful performance that had the mostly Haitian expat audience up, dancing and singing all evening.
Founded in 1990 by Morse, RAM once blended elements of rock and funk with Haitian traditional and Vodou ritual music and instruments and became a leading band of the mizik rasin (roots music) movement. That was then. Over time, the group has de-emphasized the rock elements in favor of Haitian musical tradition. (Guitarist William Morse, Lunise and Richard’s son, teased a few heavy rock riffs, but never longer than a few bars) In fact, Saturday, the rich, deep-rooted Africanness of the music offered moments that hinted at modern African styles as disparate as Congolese soukous or Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. Also, a vocal ensemble piece suggested, at least to a non-Haitian listener, a sort of proto-gospel song.
Anchored by a battery of three single-head, conga-like drums and a standard rock drum kit, electric bass and guitar; and featuring three backing vocalists who also played light percussion, a scrapper, and, occasionally, the vaksen, the conical metal horns of the rara carnival tradition, RAM was, basically, a drums and vocals ensemble.
Most of the pieces were in triple meter, and RAM’s drummers — a phenomenal engine room that worked with relentless intensity, exact but swinging — gave the music a muscular, textured forward drive. Meanwhile, lead singer Lunise danced and set up call-and-responses with the backing choir while seemingly floating over the music.
The show was sung and conducted in Kreyol, but the power and beauty of the music needed no translation.
Jazz With an Accent 