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Brilliance And The Spirits at Global Cuba Fest

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Fernando González in Home, Jazz, Latin Jazz, On Music

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Dafnis Prieto, drums, leading his Sextet at the Light Box, Miami, Friday
Photo by Elvis Suarez, Glassworks Multimedia/ Miami Light Project @ The Light Box

Drummer Dafnis Prieto and pianist Omar Sosa closed this year’s Global Cuba Fest at the Light Box in Wynwood, Miami, with shows on Friday and Saturday, respectively, that suggested a sort of musical yin and yang. For an annual festival that celebrates the music of Cuba and its diaspora, the weekend was a perfectly tuned statement — artistically ambitious, global in its vision and brilliantly executed.

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“Take Five ” — With A Pakistani Swing

28 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by Fernando González in Home, Jazz, On Music

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The Sachal Ensemble performing at a jazz festival © Sachal Studios

Globalization has produced many stories —not all inspiring. But having a Pakistani ensemble become a worldwide sensation by playing Paul Desmond’s immortal “Take Five,” which pianist Dave Brubeck turned into a hit nearly 50 years ago, has to be one of the most delightful — and improbable.

The 10-piece Sachal Ensemble, a group from Lahore, Pakistan, became an unlikely global sensation when the video of their performance of “Take Five,” a peculiar, swinging blend of South Asian classical music and jazz, got a million hits on YouTube. In a letter quoted in a story in Esquire Middle East, Brubeck, who got to hear it before his passing in 2012, wrote to producer Izzat Majeed: “This is the most interesting and different recording of ‘Take Five’ that I’ve ever heard. … Listening to this exotic version brings back wonderful memories of Pakistan where my Quartet played in 1958. East is East, and West is West, but through music the twain meet. Congratulations!”

The album that followed it, Sachal Jazz: Interpretations of Jazz Standards & Bossa Nova, became a best seller that topped the iTunes jazz charts. That led to world tours, appearances at jazz festivals and a celebrated performance with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center in 2013, captured in Song of Lahore, a from-Lahore-to-New York documentary film by two-time Academy Award-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken.

The Sachal Ensemble is appearing at the Olympia Theater in downtown Miami, Saturday. The concert opens MDC Live’s 2017-2018 season under the banner “Ojala/ Inshallah: Wishes from the Muslim World. ”

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Chano Dominguez on an off night offers an unexpected treat

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Fernando González in Home, Jazz, Latin Jazz, On Music

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chano

VALENCIA. Pianist Chano Dominguez is in Valencia rehearsing a classical piece he wrote for brass quintet and piano for a July concert.(He’s working with Spanish Brass) But Chano, who has been living in the US for the past three years, decided he didn’t want to hang out at his hotel in the evenings so, without fanfare, he scheduled two nights of solo piano at Cafe Mercedes, an intimate club that feels like a living room. “I just want to play and see some friends,” he said in a sidewalk conversation before the show. (And I mean intimate, Club Mercedes by my rough count seats 60 people. Maybe)

Wednesday, playing on a stand up piano (yes, there was a concert piano somewhere behind the curtain but could not be used. Don’t ask.) he revisited “Marcel,” a piece for his youngest son, some Monk, a restless “My One and Only Love” and then invited Uruguayan violinist Federico Nathan (whom he had met the day before) to join him for three pieces that covered a lot of ground, from “I Got Rhythm” and “Footprints” to some Bartokian sidetrips.

Chano has integrated elements of flamenco and jazz in such an organic way that, at this point, discussing the parts means missing the whole. He has an unromantic, percussive attack and his single note runs sound more classical technique than bop. But what you really notice in his versions of standards is the pulse, an underlying beat that suggests flamenco and makes it all feel both familiar and different.

The highlight was the encore however, a mournful solo piano version of McCoy Tyner’s “Search for Peace,” which Chano turned into a meditation on the violence in Manchester. “I have two teenagers who go to those kind of concerts,” he said when introducing the song. He ended the piece ambiguously, fittingly unresolved.

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