El Clan Destino Keeps the Beat

                                                                                                 SKepecs © 2012

by Susan Kepecs

El Clan Destino, one of Mad City’s sexiest bands, cooks up Afro-Cuban rock n’ roll jazz like nobody’s business.  And what better way to beat the mid-December, dark nights, grinchy holiday blues than with a super-tasty musical dish?  Clan Destino plays Happy Hour at the Cardinal Bar two Fridays in a row: Dec. 14 (5-7 pm) and 21^st, a kickoff for la fiesta del final del mundo, 5:30-8 pm (the fiesta continues with Tony Castañeda and more at 9).  

El Clan Destino turns 10 in 2013.  The current lineup: Nick Moran on bass, Vince Fuh on piano, Frank Martínez on drums and Yorel Lashley (who replaces Jamie Ryan from the original outfit) on percussion.  El Clan’s fledgling days were bright.  One of its first gigs was at the now long-defunct Luther’s Blues, where it opened for Big Apple salsa dura act Son Café.  At the time, the Clan’s signature was Jeff Beck’s “Led Boots,” arranged brilliantly by Fuh as songo, a highly bailable, rumba-driven, rock-influenced Cuban genre from the ‘70s. 

“Clan Destino’s the rock band I always wanted,” Fuh told me in a 2004 interview. 

“We put out hip-hop funk lines, but totally in clave.  We could do a polka-bembé,” Martínez added.

Eight of the tunes the band was working on then are on El Clan’s sole album, Rukus, released in 2006 – it sold so well Moran only has two left, though according to Amazon.com if you’re willing to wait two to three weeks you can get it there.  But a year or so after the CD came out, the band’s fortunes fell – Ryan left town, the economy crashed, venues closed, Martínez almost left town.  I hadn’t heard this band in years when it appeared onstage at the Cardinal this past Memorial Day.  ¡Y qué sorpresa!  Clan Destino emerged from its cocoon bold and bright, sizzling with impeccable improvisational skills and a boasting a repertory ranging the gamut of Havana’s genres – son y rumba, timba, mambo, Afro-Cuban jazz, plus a smattering of sounds from a different lattitude – Chicano rock, hip hop, hard rock, Afro-Cubanized to perfection. 

Sure, it’s fusion, and if you’ve been following CulturalOyster you know I’m no fan of the global fusions that’ve invaded world music these last few years.  Trying to dance to Irish flamenco funk salsa hip-hop isn’t my cup of – well, rum.  But Clan Destino’s fusions are flawless, falling totally within the Afro-Cuban canon. I can swear to this, since I put them to the test during two Happy Hour gigs at the Cardinal in September. 

Here are my notes, most taken while I was actually dancing: El Clan plays the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” – as a son montuno.  Later the band has its way with the Latin Playboys’ sultry vato cha “Manifold de Amour.”  Fuh takes it away, playing dissonant, Monk-like chords while Moran holds tumbao steady on the bass, giving Martinez leeway to slide through clave into bomba, then back. The Muñequitos de Matanzas’ classic yambú, “Congo Yambumba,” stars Lashley on congas; Moran supplies the vocal lines – “congo yambumba me llamo yo, yo soy el terror” – slightly off-key, a classic characteristic of the elder Cuban generation. Martínez takes that same approach to the vocals on Fausto “El Guayabero” Oramas’ famous son montuno, “Marieta.”  Clan Destino rides this timeless tune off the rails, then reels it back in with a long montuno, Fuh leaping his arms along the keys like Van Cliburn playing Tchaikovsky.  There’s “Led Boots,” por supuesto, and “Smite,” a Fuh tune, both flush with flights of fancy.  And while most of El Clan’s tunes would test any intermediate Latin dancer, there’s also a serious challenge for advanced bailadores – Chucho Valdes’ “Ponle la Clave.” Fuh spins Stravinskyesque progressions and deconstructs his montunos.  Moran plays his bass like a guitar; Martínez’ drum solo sparkles with polyrhythms.

“This is rock n’ roll, Latin jazz style,” Moran says as the band takes a break.

            And what do I conclude from my keep-the-beat test?  These players can attach their hip, sophisticated Afro-Cuban angle to absolutely anything. Even when El Clan flings itself into the loosest corners of musical space, its musica is utterly bailable. Dance through the wormhole, and when the band comes out on the other side you’ll find yourself.  Right. On. Clave.  I just love that. 

Beyond Ninety Miles

by Susan Kepecs

Three prodigious players at the top of today's bop – saxman David Sánchez, vibraphonist Stefon Harris and trumpeter Nicholas Payton – bring their Ninety Miles Project to the Wisconsin Union Theater at Music Hall Thursday night (Nov. 29).  Ninety Miles refers to the distance between the tip of South Florida and the Castros’ big, music-wondrous island, and the project indeed was first conceived as a bridge between US and Cuban musicians.  Puerto Rico-born Sánchez, Harris, and trumpeter Christian Scott joined up in Havana with Cuban composer / pianists Rember Duharte and Harold López-Nussa, plus a rhythm section of their paisanos.  But the project’s name is deceptive.  Even on the eponymous 2011 album, recorded at very epicenter of clave, the son-y-rumba rhythmic key is more implied than literal.  The Ninety Miles Project isn't Cubop, the raw, powerful mix of rumba and bebop forged in New York by Dizzy Gillespie with two Cubans, trumpeter Mario Bauzá and volatile percussionist Chano Pozo, when Havana was Mobster Heaven and the US sat at its WWII-era height of global hegemony.  What Ninety Miles plays isn’t mambo / cha-cha-cha bailable Latin jazz in the Eddie Palmieri, Poncho Sánchez, Tony Castañeda sense.  Instead, the Ninety Miles Project puts out lovely new-century bop with a bright pan-Latin tinge.   

Nicholas Payton replaced Scott on trumpet after the Cuba session.  The rest of the current, US-based lineup: venezolano Edward Simon on piano, Henry Cole on drums, Sánchez’ fellow borinqueño Ricardo Rodriguez on bass and Cuban timbero Mauricio Herrera on percussion.

Simon is an established leader in his own right; Rodriguez, Herrera and Cole (whose debut album was released last year), rising players all, are compiling impressive credits.  But Ninety Miles’ trio of top-tier frontmen is the reason this is a milestone show.  Sánchez, who headlined the Isthmus Jazz Festival in 2009, is a master at coaxing the far-flung ritmos of Latin America and Africa into his Afro-Boricua, bomba-based post-bop.  Sánchez’ approach to rhythm is remarkably subtle, which lends mystery to his music – but if you close your eyes and feel the beat you can usually find the roots from which it springs.

Vibraphone virtuoso Stefon Harris, who started out playing classical and has worked with the great bop pianist Kenny Barron in multiple formats, can swing anything, from soul to Stravinsky.  Harris puts out some of the most complex, and often lyrical, R&B / hip hop / post-bop fusions on the planet with his own band, Blackout.

Nicholas Payton is one of the most fiercely articulate New Orleans trumpeters working today.  A prominent player of Marsalis-style neo-bop, Payton’s also turned out boss boogaloos and, recently, a musically open-ended approach to R&B (his 2011 release, Bitches).  He’s prolific as a writer, too, howling up a hurricane of liberation opinion – he can out-Cornel West Cornel West – on his blog, “The Cherub Speaks” (http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/).  One of Payton’s top topics is his crusade to replace the once-pejorative term “jazz” with the unencumbered descriptor “Black American Music.” While I don’t agree with everything he has to say I think he’s right on this one, except for a critical glitch -- Payton's preferred term excludes the Caribbean parts of the Latin canon.

I interviewed Payton a few weeks back, about the way he plays and his place in the Ninety Miles Project.  Somewhat surprisingly, given the way he writes, he wasn’t blustery at all on the phone.  Here are my questions, and his thoughtful answers. 

CulturalOyster: The New York Times recently called you “jazz’s chief polemicist.”  Anyone who’s taken a look at your blog would agree, and Bitches is a little like that – it takes very pointed aim at the artificial walls that tend to be used to categorize what you call Black American Music.  On the other hand, despite how overblown it is, I really don’t see much that’s polemical about the black American music argument – I think it’s mostly a truth-to-power issue, and I like to think reasonable people will choose truth over power most of the time.  Also, the bio on your website says you’re the embodiment of all trumpet players who came before, and that long tradition is evident in the way you play – to me you sound much more spiritual than – ok, not a trumpet player, but – Archie Shepp angry.  So, how do you reconcile the dichotomy between polemicist and traditionalist?

Payton: I think life is riddles with dichotomies.  You negotiate extremes on a daily basis, it’s what makes life dynamic.  We wouldn’t know good without bad, night gives us an appreciation and perspective of the day…so we’re always negotiating the state of opposites and the gradient scales that exist in between.  I try to break down the illusory walls that separate things that are in essence unified but that people tend to divide.  I try to look for constants, and, as you said before, for truth.  So, getting back to the black American music issue, to me it’s not about a genre or a movement or anything else.  Black American music is what it is.  The term jazz, that was slapped on after the music was developed.  It doesn’t really speak to what the music is, and it’s a very disdainful word if you look at its etomology.  The whole motive for what I’ve been saying is that “black American music” isn’t a gimmick, it’s not a name – it’s just the truth. 

CulturalOyster: You came to the Ninety Miles Project after the original recording in Havana, on which Christian Scott played trupmet.  What do you bring to that table that changes what we should expect, if we’re basing our expectations on the album?

Payton: By virtue of there being a different energy and personality, the music changes.  Scott and I are both trumpet players from New Orleans, but we have very different personalities, very different experiences.  I bring the things that make me me to the table.   That said, in New Orleans we often liken ourselves to the northernmost part of the Caribbean.  New Orleans is the entryway through which those Afro-Caribbean rhythms came to North America.  And in places like New Orleans and Cuba, where musicians are some of the most respected and prominent people in the community, and where music and dance are so intertwined, the rhythms are in the air.  You can feel that energy as soon as you set foot in these places.  If you’re raised in the New Orleans tradition you have an affinity and a very natural and organic connection to Afro-Caribbean music.  So Scott and I both provide natural links to how Afro-Caribbean rhythms were translated to the the North American area – but the way we do that is a very individual thing.

CulturalOyster: Right, the cross-currents in the Ninety Miles Project are historic – the line goes straight through from the New Orleans connection – Jelly Roll Morton’s “Spanish tinge” – to Cubop, to the ongoing influx of players from Latin America and the Caribbean in New York today.  Can we pinpoint what Ninety Miles is doing, or is this really all one thing, moving forward through new generations?

Payton: I don’t think we can pinpoint it – since I’ve been in the band it’s definitely taking a different shape than when the project started.  With all due respect to Cuban music it’s not an Afro-Cuban project.  The lines have become very fluid and pan-diaspora, it’s a lot of different kinds of languages all steeped in the traditions of  the Americas – and it’s about how that primal, rhythmic DNA has taken shape in the form of the music today.  Even within a solo at times we find now that the groove becomes very pliable, it might go from funky to kind of traditional or go into 4/4 swing, so the lines blur on a nightly basis when we perform.  It’s really cool for me since that’s where I am with it, going back to your first question about breaking away from the idea of separate genres. 

CulturalOyster: Sounds like it’s time for a new recording.

Payton: We haven’t nailed down any specifics yet, but we’re talkin’ about it! 

Birdland Big Band's Tommy Igoe Talks to CulturalOyster

by Susan Kepecs

Today’s incarnation of Birdland, the famous midtown Manhattan jazz club, is not the place Jack Kerouac famously called a bop joint – just like today’s jazz bears only occasional resemblance to the bop traditions of the late ‘40s through mid-‘60s, the original nightspot’s heyday.  But Birdland, reborn in a new midtown location in the ‘90s, has had a hand in the current jazz resurgence – and like the club, the Birdland Big Band, which has played there every Friday night since 2006, serves up a new take on an old form.  The brassy, full-throttle music machine is taking its act on the road this month, and making a stop at Overture’s Capitol Theater this coming Tuesday, Oct. 23. 

The Birdland Big Band is the brainchild of drummer Tommy Igoe, who toured with Blood, Sweat and Tears and became the principal drummer and conductor for the original Broadway production of Lion King.  But Igoe was born to big band jazz – his father, the late drummer Sonny Igoe, played with Woody Herman and Benny Goodman.  I had a chance to ask Igoe (Tommy, that is) about his own 15-piece orchestra (for the lineup, go to http://www.tommyigoe.com/bands/birdland-big-band/) last week.

Cultural Oyster: What made you decide to start a big band, in these times when there are so few large jazz ensembles working?

Igoe: The big band approach is in my background – when I was 18 I went on the road with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.  A slot opened up at Birdland and I asked them to give me a shot, to build something there that stood out – and they gave me the chance.  For a while I did Lion King at the same time – the band was only one show a week, and it didn’t conflict.

CulturalOyster: I read that you recently moved to the Bay Area, where you’re now doing a much buzzed-about Monday night gig.

Igoe: I go back and forth, and I have two bands – but this tour is about THE Birdland band, the exact same band that plays in Manhattan.  It’s grown beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, especially mine.  When we started there was nobody in the club.  Half a year out the club was about half full and within a year you couldn’t get in.  We’ve been the most popular weekly jazz event in New York for a couple of years now.

CulturalOyster: Your sound is so different from the other big jazz bands working today – in some ways it’s closer to the big Latin bands like Machito’s, or Tito Puente’s, than to, say, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. 

Igoe: We’re not trying to be a jazz band or a Latin band.  We’re trying to be a music event.  Being a jazz band is too narrow a scope, at least for me.  I want to play music from every corner of the world in one show.  If you bring someone who loves music, even if they’d never heard jazz or a large ensemble, they’d love the experience.  The problem is that people try to compare us with what else is out there, or they try to tie us to the big band legacy – so many bands look backwards and play the same old standards over and over.  We try our best to look forward while acknowledging where we came from.  We want to make our mark in the twenty-first century.  Music from everywhere – that’s our mission statement.

CulturalOyster: Is that because the world we live in is so globally interconnected?

Igoe: It’s that, but it’s also because I’m a drummer.  I like lots of rhythmic excitement, and I think the audience does too. People are hearing much more authentic music from around the world than ever before.  The days of playing a full night of swing and calling it satisfactory for a twenty-first century audience are over.  Today’s audience comes in with a much more varied expectation.

CulturalOyster: What makes you decide to add a tune to your repertory?

Igoe: Because I’m not a composer, I’m not locked into any dogma.  I get to pick and choose anything I want, from anywhere.  There are tunes I’ve always wanted to play that have never been done by a large ensemble, or haven’t been done justice to.  Our album [Eleven, the band’s 2012 release on CD Baby, up for four Grammys next year] is a perfect example of our artistic schizophrenia – it’s got music from Argentina, the Caribbean, a tune by the hot [Dominican-born] composer Michel Camilo, a Herbie Hancock piece – it’s literally all over the map, which is exactly the way we like it.  We do pay tribute to where we came from – like with Bobby Timmons’ “Moanin’” [a CulturalOyster favorite, recorded in 1958 by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers].

CulturalOyster: Is there a new album in the works?

Igoe: There’s always a new album in the works.  Once the Grammys are over we’ll go right back into the studio and make a new one.

Fleck and Roberts beat Obama and Romney!

Dear readers -- just a note from me, in case you didn't read my fall ticket preview.  If you know me you know I'm a political junkie -- it takes a whole lot to get me to miss the Second Presidential Debate tomorrow night.  But I'm too psyched about the fabulous Bela Fleck with the Marcus Roberts trio, at Overture’s Capitol Theater, to stay home. It’s hard to imagine Fleck without Victor Wooten and Futureman, but this collaboration cooks.  The unexpected quartet put out an album on Rounder,Across the Imaginary Divide, this spring, and it was on the jazz fest circuit all summer.  Fleck’s indescribable jazzgrass banjo and Marcus’ two-fisted, honed-in-the-black-church piano style, steeped in the history of the music and polished in the classical canon, simply synch. Marcus’ regular trio’s filled out by a pair of hard-hitting, impeccable players – Jason Marsalis, the youngest member of the Marsalis dynasty, on drums, and Florida-based jazz educator Rodney Jordan on bass.  It’s a gorgeous new groove. Miss it at your own risk!
                                                                                                       -------- Susan Kepecs

Dance Review: Ballet Folklórico de México

by Susan Kepecs

Tuesday night’s performance by the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández at Overture Hall was a shining example of culturally relevant programming.  It’s been two years since the last time we heard Mariachi los Camperos (in Overture’s Capitol Theater, in 2010), and I was itching for a big dose of mexicanidad. 

Obviously, I wasn’t alone – la comunidad turned out big for this event.  One reason for the recent waves of in-migration from Mexico, of course, is the ominous shadow cast over that country by the drug cartels that have run amok over the last five years.  Watching the show, I kept thinking about a piece I read recently in the Mexico City news magazine Proceso, aptly titled “Mexico is the most violent, happiest country.”  The Ballet Folklórico, which regularly plays both the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico’s Distrito Federal, approaches dance performance as historical anthropology – and the current of violencia and alegría that runs endlessly through the country’s social fabric was evident in the choreography, in multiple ways.

The famous Yaqui Deer Dance, a staple in Ballet Folklórico’s repertory, is, as the program notes state, an example of imitative magic – but it’s also at least tangentially linked to the ancient, transcendental nature of death in Mexican art.  The mature dancer who wore the deer headdress Tuesday night imbued his performance with convincing animal wisdom.  His stag leaps, second position split jumps and agonized tremors expertly evoked the ungulate’s experience of fear and death.

In “Revolution,” gaily waltzing couples decked out in lavish costumes from the 1890s – the period during which the country was ruled by the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who built a new Mexican bourgeoisie on a base of world capitalism – were interrupted by the rifle-bearing soldados and soldaderas (Adelitas) of the Revolution, marching fiercely across the stage with bandoleirs like Pancho Villa’s strapped across their chests.

There was sheer alegría in the mariachis and soneros jarochos who provided musical live accompaniment for about half the works on the program, and, of course, in those dances. Two works in particular stood out – one from coastal Veracruz, the other from Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco.  Both places are under seige by the drug cartels, but there as elsewhere in Mexico, the festivals these dances are based on continue to occur like clockwork. 

The Veracruz piece, “Tlacotalpan Festivity,” showcased that town’s annual, carnaval-linked fiesta in honor of the Virgin of Candelaria.  The dance featured the full company in bright white traditional Veracruz dress, zapateando – the word means “rhythmic footwork,” rather than “tap dancing” in the Savion Glover sense – with abandon to familiar jarocho tunes like La Bamba.  Some dancers wore giant puppet costumes – demons, clowns and rumberos reflecting the influence of Cuban culture in Veracruz – to scare off evil spirits.

“Jalisco,” another Ballet Folklórico staple, is an ode to mariachi anthems.  The dance, a sparkling study in color, rhythm and pattern, wraps every show.  At the end, the dancers sail colored mylar strips that glow like fireworks into the theater.

“Jalisco” in particular is brilliant.  That said, I’ve seen this company many times, both in Mexico City and in Madison, and last night’s performance wasn’t peak.  The dance quality was uneven, though some of the men stood out for their flashy footwork. I can’t single them out for praise, unfortunately, since they weren’t named in the program.

And, in fact, the program and the performance didn’t entirely match, leaving anyone in the audience unfamiliar with Mexican folklore without a guidepost. The first post-intermission piece was a theatrical reproduction of the Totonac Quetzal dance from Veracruz and Puebla, done by eight men wearing the classic headdress that symbolizes the plumage of a tropical bird sacred in Mesoamerica throughout the prehispanic epoch.  Yet the Totonac dance wasn’t anywhere listed or described.

According to the program, the first piece in the show's second half was “Wedding in the Huasteca.”  The work that followed the Totonac dance might be construed as a wedding dance, but the opening tune was a Cuban-influenced, Veracruz-stye danzón, not huapango music from the huasteca. Even more confusing, the dancers – the full company of men and women – were precisely outfitted for a Yucatecan vaquería, which is the dance that kicks off the festivals for the patron saints of the towns in that state, a thousand miles southeast of the huasteca.  In a final disjunction, the “huasteca” work wrapped up with a typical Yucatecan jarana in 6/8 time.  How a dance company that’s usually so anthropologically correct wound up with an odd pastiche like this is beyond me.

But in the end it didn’t matter.  I left the theater happy, and grateful to be surrounded by the culture of a country I love despite its fatal flaws.  I know I wasn’t alone in that sentiment.