Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Michele Rosewoman’s Latin Jazz at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: October 4, 2013
The pianist Michele Rosewoman’s long-running project New Yor-Uba, which she revived for a new album and two nights of performances at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, still looks good on paper and sounds better in practice.
The clunky old designation Latin jazz isn’t totally wrong for this band, but it would be desperately limiting. As heard in a late set on Tuesday night, this 12-piece band has a jazz-trained rhythm section, with the bassist Gregg August and the drummer Adam Cruz; trumpet, trombone, tuba and two saxophonists; three percussionists, with the dynamic Román Díaz in the middle, playing Afro-Cuban folkloric rhythms of rumba and religion on the conga and the two-headed batá drum; and several voices, including the singer Nina Rodriguez and Ms. Rosewoman herself, cycling through Yoruba chants. The music wasn’t a sleek, defined hybrid, but two big cultural streams flowing simultaneously, or many instruments chattering at one another.
The basic model for her band is the same as it ever was, if more refined. It’s cultural multiplicity in sound taken to a reasonable extreme, where a song can still be allowed to sound logical and beautiful. In an extraordinary section of one piece in the middle of the set, “Earth Secrets,” all the musicians improvised simultaneously through chord changes and song form; you heard a mashing together of 6/8 and 4/4 patterns, and some drummers playing a downbeat as others played an upbeat: a strange additive chemistry of rhythm made coherent through practice. It was dense, but it fizzed; it was grand but never grandiose.
Nearly all the set came from the striking new record “Michele Rosewoman’s New Yor-Uba: 30 Years — A Musical Celebration of Cuba in America” (Advance Dance Disques), which is a lot less clinical on the ears than its title suggests. Mr. Díaz, a calm and elegant presence who turned flashingly intense when he changed up the rhythm, can be heard on the album, too. Present on the album but missing from the live version was Pedrito Martínez, who is as close as traditional Afro-Cuban music has to a superstar these days. The set didn’t suffer from his absence.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/michele-rosewomans-latin-jazz-at-dizzys-club-coca-cola.html?_r=0
The clunky old designation Latin jazz isn’t totally wrong for this band, but it would be desperately limiting. As heard in a late set on Tuesday night, this 12-piece band has a jazz-trained rhythm section, with the bassist Gregg August and the drummer Adam Cruz; trumpet, trombone, tuba and two saxophonists; three percussionists, with the dynamic Román Díaz in the middle, playing Afro-Cuban folkloric rhythms of rumba and religion on the conga and the two-headed batá drum; and several voices, including the singer Nina Rodriguez and Ms. Rosewoman herself, cycling through Yoruba chants. The music wasn’t a sleek, defined hybrid, but two big cultural streams flowing simultaneously, or many instruments chattering at one another.
The basic model for her band is the same as it ever was, if more refined. It’s cultural multiplicity in sound taken to a reasonable extreme, where a song can still be allowed to sound logical and beautiful. In an extraordinary section of one piece in the middle of the set, “Earth Secrets,” all the musicians improvised simultaneously through chord changes and song form; you heard a mashing together of 6/8 and 4/4 patterns, and some drummers playing a downbeat as others played an upbeat: a strange additive chemistry of rhythm made coherent through practice. It was dense, but it fizzed; it was grand but never grandiose.
Nearly all the set came from the striking new record “Michele Rosewoman’s New Yor-Uba: 30 Years — A Musical Celebration of Cuba in America” (Advance Dance Disques), which is a lot less clinical on the ears than its title suggests. Mr. Díaz, a calm and elegant presence who turned flashingly intense when he changed up the rhythm, can be heard on the album, too. Present on the album but missing from the live version was Pedrito Martínez, who is as close as traditional Afro-Cuban music has to a superstar these days. The set didn’t suffer from his absence.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/michele-rosewomans-latin-jazz-at-dizzys-club-coca-cola.html?_r=0
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