Tag Archives: roberto fonseca

Cuban star heads the week in gigs

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Roberto Fonseca - Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday

Pianist Roberto Fonseca’s last visit to Birmingham Town Hall was a triumph, though, inexplicably, I didn’t see a lot of regular Birmingham jazz lovers in the audience.

Perhaps it is the Cuban flavour of Fonseca’s music that doesn’t immediately appeal to the jazz purists, though if that were the reason they wouldn’t be listening to Dizzy Gillespie!

So, I’d urge all the jazz regulars, all the Conservatoire jazz students, in fact anyone who likes exciting and superbly played music in any style whatsoever, to get along to the Town Hall on Sunday evening.

Fonseca is working in a very fine tradition of Cuban jazz, with pianists like Chucho Valdes and Gonzalo Rubalcaba preceding him.

But he brings a fresh melodicism to assist the rhythmic drive that is characteristic of this music, and now he is extending the scope of his sound even further with African instruments and sounds.

So, the band for Sunday evening comprises Fonseca on piano and keyboards, Baba Sissoko on African percussion, Joel Hierrezuelo on Cuban percussion, Ramsés Rodríguez on drums, Yandy Martínez on bass, Jorge Chicoy on guitar, Javier Zalba on sax, flute and clarinet and Sekou Kouyate on kora.

There is also a new album, called Yo, coming out.

Afro-Cuban heaven, I would suggest. The music starts at 7.30pm, tickets are £17.50 and £15, and are available from www.thsh.co.uk

Excitement this evening as well, with the very good tenor saxophonist Paul Booth leading a band at Earlsdon Cottage in Coventry.

Paul spends a lot of time playing in stadia for classy rock stars like Steve Winwood, but when he has a chance to get intimate and jazzy he calls on his A-list friends to help him. So, on guitar is Phil Robson, on bass is Michael Janisch and on drums is James Maddren.

Paul has a new album out on Pathway Records. It’s called Trilateral and features a range of trio formats.

This Jazz Coventry gig starts at 8.30pm, and tickets are £10 on the door. Find out more at www.jazzcov.co.uk

Also tonight, Jack Bruce, bass player and singer for Cream and Blind Faith, as well as collaborator with Carla Bley among many others, has gone back to his blues roots, and brings his Big Blues Band to Birmingham Town Hall, offering “blues ancient and modern, and sweet and sour rock and roll”. An 8pm start, tickets are £25 from www.thsh.co.uk

And a special treat for jazz fans on a tight budget tomorrow evening. Pianist Kit Downes brings his Quintet to the Symphony Hall foyer bar for the Rush Hour Blues session. An exceptionally fine pianist expanding his tonal colours with clarinet and cello sheens laid on the core piano, bass and drum tones.

It starts at 5.30pm, goes till 7pm, and all you need to pay for is your drink. It’s also the final Rush Hour Blues to be co-hosted by Birmingham Jazz, though not, I hasten to add, the last Rush Hour Blues! (More of all that in the coming days)

Other gigs this week:

Tonight: Bass wiz Reed takes his Friends into The Yardbird. It starts after 8pm and it’s free.

Saturday: King Pleasure & The Biscuit Boys are at the Prince Of Wales Centre in Cannock. Tickets are £16 from 01543 578762 and the fun begins at 8pm.

Sunday: Stekpanna and The Russians bring their own particular brand of serious jazz with a knowing smile to No1 Shakespeare Street, Stratford, courtesy of Stratford Jazz. An 8pm start and £8 on the door (students half price).

New year, new jazz prospects

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No year is a particularly secure one for jazz, but if 2012 is being predicted as a particularly precarious year economically, does this necessarily mean that jazz will suffer?

I’m not sure that it will, for the simple reason that jazz is more accustomed to straightened times in a way that other more establishment arts are not. As the old blues man said: when you ain’t got nothin’, you ain’t got nothin’ to lose.

There are some changes ahead, though. As a result of demands made by the Arts Council upon the organisations it will support, Birmingham Jazz and Performances Birmingham (Town Hall/Symphony Hall to me and you) are climbing into bed together in April.

Tord Gustavsen (Picture: Russ Escritt)

Will we notice any difference? It’s hard to say at the moment. Both Birmingham Jazz And THSH have announced their programmes only up until April. Both have some cherries worth picking early so get your booking fingers around these:

From Birmingham Jazz there is the Tord Gustavsen Quartet on March 23 and the Neil Cowley Trio With Strings on April 13. Both are at the CBSO Centre.

From THSH there is the Portico Quartet on March 7, Jack Bruce and his Big Blues Band on March 29, and Roberto Fonseca on April 1.

All these concerts can do be booked on 0121 345 0600 or at www.thsh.co.uk

The award for forward planning must go to the Mostly Jazz Festival, which has announced its dates as June 29 to July 1, though it has now changed its name to the Mostly Jazz, Funk & Soul Festival.

Gilles Petersen

Does this mean a watering down of the jazz content? Not really. The name now reflects more accurately the fare on offer at this three-year-old and increasingly confident weekend festival in Moseley Park.

You can book tickets already, although, apart from the fact that comperes will be Gilles Petersen and Craig Charles, and Birmingham Jazz and the Yardbird will have a hand in programming a stage for part of the festival, you won’t know who’s appearing.

Just go to www.mostlyjazz.co.uk

So there is some of the good news. Precariousness is, of course, ever lurking in the jazz wings, and there are worrying signs both local and further afield.

Locally, I hear news that the regular Thursday night Cobweb Collective promotions at the Yardbird may be a thing of fond memory. Recently added sessions at the Drum may offset this, but it would still be a pity to lose this city centre opportunity for jazz exposure.

And down in the Black Hills of Wales, dark clouds hang once more over the Brecon Jazz Festival, an August favourite for many Midland jazz fans.

Hay Festivals, which stepped in to save the struggling jazz event a couple of years back, is  withdrawing in order to concentrate on the 25th anniversary of its centre-piece book festival. There could still be financial support from Wales for Brecon – it just needs an organisation to take it on, I understand.

To end on a brighter note, the dates for the 2012 Cheltenham Jazz Festival are May 2-7. Find out more at cheltenhamfestivals.com/jazz

CD review: Danay Suarez

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Havana Cultura Sessions
(Brownswood  Recordings)

The story goes that when Gilles Peterson was in the studio rehearsing for a tour with pianist/MD Roberto Fonseca and the band that had made the exciting Havana Cultura album, they were so excited by the performances of young Cuban singer Danay Suarez, that they booked the space for another day and laid down these four tracks featuring her direct and powerful vocals.

In fact Suarez is not the only one giving a direct and powerful performance. The whole band, and especially its pianist leader, fires on all cylinders from the start.

The opener, Ser O No Ser, is a near 23-minute jam, with drummer Ramses Rodriguez a little too high in the mix; Hay Un Lugar is a graceful ballad for Suarez and Fonseca with minimal percussion; while Fonseca’s own Guajira shows the singer in a more traditional Cuban setting.

I’m not sure I’d rave over Suarez’s voice as much as Peterson does – maybe you had to be there… Overall, the charm of this disc is that it has the spontaneity, languid development and rough edges of a spontaneous jam session, which is what it primarily is.

The best of my 2010 in live gigs

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Now they have a name: The Impossible Gentlemen

If live jazz in 2010 ends with a snowy and icy backdrop, it didn’t start all that differently.

My first highlight gig of the year came after a stride through snow flurries to Birmingham Town Hall where the Jan Garbarek Group warmed the crowd via its heat-seeking drummer Trilok Gurtu.

A few days earlier another drummer, Mark Holub, had fired his band, Led Bib, down at the Rainbow in Digbeth.

February increased the frequency of the high points with superb Rush Hour Blues performances from the Kit Downes Trio and from Kairos 4tet (such great music and all for free!), and there were also storming sets in small venues from the Alyn Cosker Power Trio with Seamus Blake, and from the completely terrifying Trio VD at the Rainbow.

With the spring shoots in March a new jazz festival was established with the inaugural Harmonic Festival, masterminded by young musicians Chris Mapp and Percy Pursglove, and centred round the CBSO Centre. It featured a rich mix of local musicians and some big guns from New York, with strong performances from new bands created by trumpeter Aaron Diaz (Moon Unit) and bassist Mapp (Gambol), as well as the NYers, the Claudia Quintet (with Pursglove guesting).

Also part of Harmonic was a fascinating evening of Dave Holland music played by Birmingham Conservatoire students and with the great bassist present to hear it all.

We look forward to what Chris and Percy have lined up for the second Harmonic in 2011.

But March’s finest gig for me, and in the top three gigs of the year, involved a bit of a drive down to Bristol with friends to the lovely St George’s for Nik Bartsch’s Ronin. The zen funk sounds good on CD but really is exciting as anything in the flesh.

If former EST bassist Dan Bergland divided opinions with his new band Tonbruket, he certainly brought an eclectic crowd together for a gig mixing Euro-jazz with mid-Western country rock.

The beginning of May is always jam-packed with highlights at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and this year mine were Carla Bley’s Lost Chords, Food, and Fly, with a second chance to hear Fly – the trio of Jeff Ballard, Mark Turner and Larry Grenadier – a few days later in the Adrian Boult Hall in Birmingham.

I think my other two gigs of the year would have to be the Gwilym Simcock Quartet at the CBSO Centre in late May, and the Roberto Fonseca band at the Town Hall in June.

With Simcock were British guitarist Mike Walker and the US bass and drums partnership of Steve Swallow and Adam Nusbaum.

Walker has been a favourite for years and it was great to hear him soaring in this esteemed company.

The good news is that this band now has a new name, The Impossible Gentlemen, and a CD out on the Basho label in May next year.

Roberto Fonseca

Fonseca has forged a very attractive new amalgam from jazz and Cuban music, so continuing the cross-fertilisation started by Dizzy in the ‘40s and continued by bands like Irakere. His band is tight as a drum and his own playing is warm and generous.

July brought another new jazz festival to Birmingham. Mostly Jazz, modelled on the folk bash that happens a bit later in the summer, featured strong headliners, including the Sun Ra Arkestra, and sunny weather added to the good vibes.

The autumn jazz season started strenuously with a double bill from Atomic and the Ken Vandermark 5, prime examples from both sides of the Atlantic of how to mix structure and freedom to create a fresh jazz for this century.

Highs in November and December were Claire Martin and Soweto Kinch, respectively, both gigs at the CBSO Centre.

If it has been another good year for contemporary jazz in Birmingham, the future looks a little uncertain. Recent news reports have announced that Birmingham City Council is to cut its grants to a number of arts organisations in the city and Birmingham Jazz is one of them.

Birmingham Jazz does a lot of good work in the city, not only by creating a strong platform for the city’s young musicians (and thereby stopping them heading for London) but also with inventive education work in schools.

In one ground-breaking project in 2010 they even started bringing jazz to pre-school children. Now that’s what I call forward thinking.

Concert review: Roberto Fonseca

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Birmingham Town Hall, Birmingham UK
02-06-10
The young Cuban pianist opened his breakthrough album Zamazu with the voice of Omara Portuondo, whom he had accompanied as part of the band of the Buena Vista Social Club; he opened his latest disc, Akokan, with the voice of his mother, Mercedes Cortes Alfaro.

And it was this voice that floated from the speakers over the Town Hall audience, before Fonseca’s quintet began with Siete Potencias (Bu Kantu). On the album this gentle melody is sung by the Cape Verdean Mayra Andrade, but reedsman Javier Zalba and Fonseca’s own voice proved perfectly adequate substitutes.

The hour and three-quarter continuous set was made up of the Akokan music, the band that was on stage having made the album. It’s an incredibly tight outfit, and Fonseca needs it to convey the highly organised and subtly nuanced music he writes and plays. Here is a perfect coming together of music and skill, both of an extraordinary high level.

There is nothing quite like a Cuban band playing Cuban rhythms, whether it be the ever so quiet cushion of congas and trap drums that Joel Hierrezuelo and Ramses Rodriquez lock into on Drume Negrita, or the swirling torrent that Rodriquez can build to – and he did it to ecstatic effect on two occasions.

Double bassist Omar Gonzalez holds it all down with class and gets his own turns in the solo spotlight, while Zalba is particularly affecting on clarinet.

But the instrumental honours have to go, of course, to the leader. Fonseca is a pianist of huge range, able one minute to be articulating a gentle single-note lullaby, the next to be pummelling the keyboard like a drum. And even at his fastest – which is very fast indeed –  there are no fluffed or slurred notes. His accuracy is phenomenal and his note and chord choice is exemplary.

The closeness of the group and their familiarity with this material means they can change it ever so subtly in performance. And, boy, do they give good coda! Just as a tune is reaching its resolution and coming back to base after some soaring solos, Fonseca will introduce a new groove and the band will follow him down a fresh concluding avenue.

Following a tune dedicated to Ibrahim Ferrer – “the man who first brought me here,” Fonseca told the audience – some crowd singing and a perfectly judged encore the audience was left cheering, standing and sharing what had been a joyful and enriching evening. Good sound, too.

One of my gigs of the year.