• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 10 / 09 / 2010

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THE NEW YORK TIMES.October 8, 2010, 3:30 pm. What happens when you put some great American jazz musicians onstage with the biggest names in Afro-Cuban music?

They have a blast. At least, that is what they did at the Mella Theater in Havana the last two nights.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra played on Wednesday and Thursday to a packed house of 1,500 with a lineup of Cuban stars that included Chucho Valdés;Pancho Terry, the country's foremost chekeré player; Bobby Carcassés; and Orlando Valle, known as Maraca.

They did it all: the Americans playing Afro-Cuban music, the Cubans jamming blues and quintets from both sides of the
Florida Straits doing their own thing.

Wednesday night's program of Cuban songs and arrangements, which opened with Chico O'Farrill's "Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite," had the audience whooping and tapping out the syncopated clave beat on their laps.

Some pieces got a traditional treatment: Mr. Carcassés, the 72-year-old elder of the Cuban jazz scene, took the stage in a wide-collared magenta shirt and sang and danced his way through Ernesto Duarte Brito's "Como Fué."

Other arrangements, like the Lincoln Center bassist Carlos Henriquez's "2/3's Adventure" named for the structure of the clave beat -played with Afro-Cuban traditions, splicing mambo and guajira with fusion jazz.

Boris Sarmiento, a trombonist who was in the audience, said it was "interesting to hear their interpretations of Cuban songs and Cuban elements, played with their own style, their own arrangements, their own formation."

Mr. Sarmiento said the American musicians played with more definition than Cubans do, giving the Latin music a new range.

"We tend to play everything at full tilt." he said. "But they give it this kind of delicacy: loud bits, quiet bits,
different sounds."

Thursday's set was split between the American and the Cuban: Mr. Valdés and his Afro-Cuban Messengers showed off their European and African heritage with a playful danzón and a number dedicated to Changó, the Yoruba orisha of thunder and music, which had the percussionist Dreiser Bambolé thrusting his lean frame about the stage in an energetic rumba.

Next a quintet of Lincoln Center players led by Wynton Marsalis played a 45-minute set of arrangements by Mr. Marsalis, which included "Skippin' " and "The Magic Hour."

Then the two groups came together to play a blues homage to the giants of jazz,each digging into their African roots. Mr. Marsalis opened with a chant drawn from "Congo Square"; Mr. Bambolé came back with a Yoruba prayer.

Speaking during Wednesday night's concert, Mr. Valdés told the audience what many have been saying this week on the sidelines of the Lincoln Center residency, "Something magical is happening here."

By VICTORIA BURNETT

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/118388