[Dixielandjazz] Revenge of the Spanish Tinge.

[Stephen G Barbone]

Is this the revenge of the spanish tinge, or a treatise on the  
evolution of jazz?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Varied Music Legacies Find Much in Common

NY TIMES - Feb 28 - By JON PARELES


A New Orleans second-line beat, shaken and tapped on tambourines,  
started “CubaNOLA: More Than the Spanish Tinge,” the concert by Arturo  
O’Farrill and theAfro Latin Jazz Orchestra on Saturday night at  
Symphony Space. Then a cowbell joined in, tilting the rhythm toward  
Cuba. It was the prologue to a concert devoted to musical kinships:  
between Cuba and New Orleans, and between generations.

The New Orleans-Caribbean connection has always been obvious in the  
music itself, though things get tricky for anyone seeking origins or  
credit. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Mr. O’Farrill  
asked with a smile. “It doesn’t matter. We’re grooving heavily.”

Mr. O’Farrill’s big band had a guest: the alto saxophonist and  
composer Donald Harrison, from New Orleans. Mr. O’Farrill and Mr.  
Harrison are in many ways two of a kind. As composers they are  
modernizers of music with dance rhythms at its core: Mr. O’Farrill  
with Afro-Latin music, Mr. Harrison with the heritage of New Orleans.  
They add layers of harmony and counterpoint, toy with meter and  
melody, make knowing allusions and take structural detours without  
forgetting the beat.

Mr. O’Farrill and Mr. Harrison also carry family legacies forward. Mr.  
O’Farrill’s father was Chico O’Farrill, a Cuban trumpeter, composer  
and bandleader who created groundbreaking Latin jazz in the United  
States. Last year Arturo O’Farrill brought the Afro Latin Jazz  
Orchestra to Cuba to perform his father’s music. Mr. Harrison’s father  
was known as Big Chief Donald Harrison, the leader of a New Orleans  
Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and Mr. Harrison is now a chief himself.

The opening piece was “Iko Iko,” a Mardi Gras Indian song that became  
a rock hit in the 1960s. Arranged Saturday by Todd Bashore with thick,  
cantilevered horn-section chords, it became a big-band rumba — or,  
from a New Orleans perspective, a Mardi Gras mambo. Mr. Harrison’s  
“I’m the Big Chief of Congo Square” was a modal blues with a second- 
line beat that also merged easily with the band’s Latin percussion;  
Mr. O’Farrill, on piano, splashed it with two-fisted chords and cross- 
currents. his suitelike “Ruminaciones Sobre Cuba” used vintage and  
more recent Cuban rhythms behind knotty melody lines

Both composers are fascinated by extrapolations and complications as  
well as roots and fusions. Mr. Harrison’s “Quantum Leap” jumped back  
and forth between a speedy, convoluted tune and a bluesy riff; his  
“Sandcastle Headhunters” juggled funk, swing and quasi-African  
rhythms. He also brought a plush, gorgeous Ellingtonian ballad,  
“Sincerely Yours.”

Mr. O’Farrill’s “Corner of Malecón and Bourbon” was an episodic,  
nonchronological jazz history, pausing for impressions of Charlie  
Parker, Louis Armstrong and Charles Mingus, and eventually  
transforming an arpeggiated Scott Joplin ragtime phrase into the  
faster, more percussive arpeggiation of a Cuban montuno, a piano  
pattern driving a dance tune — a surprising musical link. “Fathers and  
Sons” featured young musicians, including Mr. O’Farrill’s sons Adam on  
trumpet and Zack on drums, in a piece that held pensive soliloquies,  
tricky meter shifts and crashing, percussion-propelled climaxes. And  
Mr. O’Farrill’s “40 Acres and a Burro,” the title piece of the  
orchestra’s new album on Zoho Music, wandered all over the Americas  
and the last century, from a mariachi parody to Stravinsky-like  
pointillism to a bristling but danceable full-band attack.

This was music full of intellectual ambitions and compositional whims,  
but the technical feats were only part of its gusto. Mr. O’Farrill has  
honed the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra to handle dizzyingly complex music  
with earthy joy.