Jazz legends and their relationship with Cuban and Brazilian sounds are comprehensively surveyed in this delightful three-CD retrospective set.
Distinct Latin influences on jazz can be traced back at least to 1938 when trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was playing with Cuban flautist Alberto Socorro in Harlem. Four years later, as Roy Carr’s liner note tells us, he wrote his deathless A Night in Tunisia on an upturned dustbin, with the Cuban sound still - apparently - ringing in his ears. (Well, maybe not.)
An upturned dustbin figures, as the first tracks on CD 1 show how prominent percussion was integral to the sound when American players took to treating with this glorious Latin stuff. Right from the off on this anthology, the mood is upbeat and infectious, with for starters, Horace Parlan’s Conaglegre and Charlie Rouse’s Back Down to the Tropics, proceeding on to tunes from Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Grant Green and Donald Byrd. That’s just the first CD, happily we meet some of these folk again on the remaining two discs.
We also meet saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Just listen to the track Succotash (from Shorter's 1964 Blue Note album, Inventions & Dimensions) with its amazing brush sounds from the late Willie Bobo, a sound which actually suggested the title of the tune as Shorter envisaged it. On Succotash, Bobo's brilliantly attuned brush strokes are paired with the percussion instrument known as a guiro. This Latin American percussion instrument is an open-ended, hollow gourd with notches cut into it - you rub a stick along it to get that scraping sound. The blend must have sounded charmingly strange and exotic 52 years ago, when most jazz fans were not so familiar with what is now known as `World Music.'
The great Brazilian singer Flora Purim features on a number of tracks,. while the selection wisely blends a rollicking party atmosphere - exemplified by Lou Rawls' unashamedly tongue-in-cheek swing version of Girl From Ipanema - with the wistful. Indeed, for the wistful and adroitly tender, listen to guitarist Grant Green’s take on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Corcovado, featuring the aforementioned Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Larry Young on organ and Elvin Jones on drums. Check out also tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine's reading of Jobim's Wave, it's splendid stuff, like most everything else gathered here.
Paddy Kehoe
