Speaking in Latin Rhythms

The jazz week began on Monday with a formidable bang as the percussionist and educator Bobby Sanabria led the Manhattan School of Music’s Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra. Mr. Sanabria is as colorful and exciting a spieler as he is a musician, and he always puts on a wildly entertaining (if somewhat wordy) show that encompasses a veritable survey of the many aspects of Latin jazz, in which the orchestra journeys musically from Havana to Rio de Janeiro and back. (Mr. Sanabria is also playing and speaking this weekend at the Jazz Improv Convention, at the New Yorker Hotel.)It was a good way to set the stage for a week featuring two instrumentalist-composer-bandleaders of Latin heritage: the pianist Danilo Perez and the trombonist Steve Turre, both of whom liberally incorporate Pan-American rhythms into their music and supplement a wealth of other, more “traditional,” jazz sounds.Mr. Turre, who for 30 years has been one of the major stars of the trombone, has worked with Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Rubén Blades on one side of the fence, and Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the other. His playing incorporates everything from New Orleans tailgate to the vocalized, often muted moans of Duke Ellington’s pep section, to the ultra-smooth bop lines of J.J. Johnson. Yet it’s possible that Mr. Turre may be even more important to jazz as an arranger; I have never seen him with a predictable quartet or quintet lineup; he always comes up with some instrumental format that no one has thought of before.In his current sextet, which he calls Keep Searchin’ (the title of an album released last year by High Note), the frontline is made up of the leader on trombone, Stefon Harris on vibraphone, and Akua Dixon on cello. (The rhythm section is Xavier Davis on piano, Gerald Cannon on bass, and Dion Parson on drums.) Believe me, it’s unlike any trombone-vibraphone-cello band you’ve ever heard. Channeling the late Kirk for inspiration, Mr. Turre also is moved to experiment with unusual instruments, playing at least one number per set on conch shells, while Ms. Dixon plays both a baritone violin (a hybrid of violin and cello developed by Carleen Hutchins) and a hollow-form electric cello. At the group’s performance Tuesday at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the frontline combination offered a dark, almost mystical sound, quite different from anything I’ve heard in jazz. Although, in an attempt to show his unwavering allegiance to the fundamentals of jazz, Mr. Turre began with a basic, loping, swinging blues, “Easy Now.” Where most bands seem to exist simply to showcase the virtuosity of the leader, this group is about establishing a mood and a groove and letting the soloists enhance them. On the more complex “Reconciliation,” Ms. Dixon played a show-stealing solo; the use of classical stringed instruments in jazz has seriously declined in the modern era, and they primarily serve as backgrounds for soloists. It’s quite a surprise to see a violinist and especially a cellist taking a full-fledged improvised solo, blowing on chord changes like a saxophone.Tuesday’s opening set reached its climax with a gorgeously realized reading of Benny Goodman’s theme, “Goodbye” (composed by Gordon Jenkins), that began with the bridge and was deeply influenced in tempo and in mood by Frank Sinatra. It was a coup for Mr. Turre as both orchestrator, setting it in dark, dramatic colors, and as star, taking the melody himself on his horn and emitting as human a voice as I have ever heard sing a ballad. If Mr. Turre had ended his set at the one-hour mark, it would have been near perfect. Unfortunately, the finale, the Eastern-influenced “Sanyas,” which began and ended as a shell feature, went on way too long (almost a half-hour), and wound up as a series of overextended solos for everyone that, in contrast to the tightly controlled numbers that came before, proceeded without any apparent concerns for form or melody.With both Messrs. Turre and Perez, it’s all about family. Ms. Dixon, who in addition to playing with the group also sang Dinah Washington’s double-entendre blues “Big Long Sliding Thing,” has been married to Mr. Turre for many years, and their daughter, Andromeda, followed in her father’s footsteps when she worked with Ray Charles’s orchestra. Mr. Harris, who played brilliantly throughout Tuesday’s show, was originally one of Mr. Turre’s students, and is thus one of his musical progeny (the two have played together on at least six albums). Similarly, Mr. Perez, whose trio co-stars Ben Street on bass and Adam Cruz on drums, began his Wednesday night show at Jazz Standard with two recent original compositions dedicated to his daughters, “Daniela” and “Carolina.” The former started strong and gradually deconstructed itself into free form. Mr. Perez surprised us by ending it in outer space rather than coming back to the tune, and then explained that he can’t finish the song because his 3-year-old daughter is constantly growing and evolving. The second piece was very short but even further out, and Mr. Prerez described his younger daughter as having the kind of melody that refuses to be contained in bar lines. When Mr. Perez first emerged as a leader 10 years ago, he was an extroverted, virtuoso player firmly in the tradition of such Latin-influenced bop pianists as the late Hilton Ruiz. But in the intervening years, he has collaborated extensively with the legendary tenor saxist Wayne Shorter, whose introversion seems to have rubbed off on Mr. Perez: His playing has grown quieter and more introspective recently. This was evident in “Historia de un Amor,” an adaptation of a traditional bolero. But the highlight was Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations” (which is often called by its alternate title, “Budo,” as in Miles Davis’s two famous recordings).Although often played as a bright, bouncy bopper, “Hallucinations” was also famously recorded by Powell in a somewhat starker and darker solo version in 1951. Mr. Perez uses that performance as his starting point, and his treatment is even more profundo misterioso. I was reminded of how, when the novelist Gregory Maguire wrote “Wicked,” he said that he didn’t want to explain the witch; he merely sought to “deepen her mystery.” Likewise, Mr. Perez doesn’t reinterpret or modernize “Hallucinations”; he takes it into highly personal uncharted regions that are equal parts Latin and non-Latin jazz, and, in the process, deepens its mystery considerably.wfriedwald@nysun.com

Speaking in Latin Rhythms

Speaking in Latin Rhythms

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