A few weeks ago, we mentioned that some really astounding Jazz recordings were coming out this year.  New Cuban Express is one of them, and it's a masterpiece.    If you dug GES, Emiliano Salvador, Irakere, Afrocuba etc. back in the day, this new project is the next step forward from those beginnings, and it will bowl you over.     (If you have no idea who those other groups are, you have been ignoring some of the best music in our solar system.)  This recording is about to hit the streets this week, but there is already a lot of buzz about it for good reason.  Read the review, which includes links to sound samples, here...

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Verse 2 - The Road To The Concert 
(para leer este reporte en Español oprima aquí)

Story by Bill Tilford - All Rights Reserved

In the first verse, I mentioned that there was a lot of skepticism about the concert among potential ticket buyers from the very beginning, but the promised lineup was exciting enough that many people were prepared to attend from all over the country anyway. Unfortunately, many others  wanted to wait until they were absolutely certain that the concert was legitimate, and quite a few people asked me whether this concert was real, so I made it a point to learn as much as I could about the details, and I did my best to reassure them that to the best of knowledge, the concert was the real deal, and I was planning to attend personally.   

In the weeks before the the original May concert date, it became apparent that not all of the originally-promised bands were actually going to make the concert. A very important and serious mistake during this period was the failure of the organizers to redesign and effectively redistribute  all of  their materials when it become obvious that some of the groups and musicians would not be participating in the concert for various reasons. As the May 26 date approached, the organizers made the decision to postpone the concert until June 16 and change the venue from the gigantic Armory Arena  to the smaller Copacabana. This would have been the ideal moment for them to have effectively distributed  a fully-adjusted talent lineup as well. Many ticket holders, including my two colleagues, assumed the worst after the date change and chose not to reschedule for the June date. From the reports that I have received, the organizers did at least appear to have been forthright and effective with processing the refunds that were requested. They also offered a  free “VIP upgrade” to existing regular ticket holders (more about this later). Personally, I was determined to continue in spite of the astronomical fees for  changing  my flight and the equally horrible hotel room rates for a room close to the Copacabana.   

As the June 16th date approached, the organizers did publish some video from some of the performers confirming the new concert (unfortunately, one of the videos was by Mayito Rivera,  who did not actually appear at the concert due to another commitment on the new date), the New York FM radio station La Mega ran some ads, and Timba.com  (along with a few other websites) did its best to help get the word out about the concert. A couple of nights before the concert, many of the musicians were live on television in Miami.  This was favorably received, and it also had the benefit of proving that at least some of the musicians were actually in the country.  

I arrived in Manhattan the evening before the concert. I had booked a room in the Econolodge across the street from the Copacabana.  I did this in spite of the $200-plus per night rate (In some parts of the country, I think you can probably rent a floor for that)  and various  review website warnings that I would be paying for a space only slightly wider than the bed because (a) I wanted to stay as close as possible to the action, (b) the cheaper alternative, the New York Inn, had a lot of reviews that said “don’t go there”,  and (c) when I tried to go there anyway, they were supposedly all booked up. To my surprise, I had apparently booked the Econolodge version of the  Presidential Suite (or at least what they might offer deposed ex-Presidents from poor countries on the lam).   It was an actual room – the only room, in fact - on the top floor. This left me with some questions about how the reservation website magically steered me to this room while I was making reservations, but I also decided that it would just be too weird to go back downstairs and ask for one of those little shoeboxes that I had originally been threatened with by the hotel review websites.    

As I headed out for the evening, I walked by the Copacabana and noticed that there was no poster for tomorrow night’s concert outside of the club. I was later told that the event was not carried on the Copacabana website either. This probably did not help reassure the locals that everything was OK.   

Photo by Richard Williams (courtesy of Manuel Valera)

Manhattan is much better at Jazz than it is at Cuban music, so I went uptown and caught an absolutely wonderful set by Lenny White ’s quintet at a club called Smoke.  My real motive for doing this was that Manuel Valera and Tom Guarna were playing in this group, but the entire group including Lenny White, Wallace Roney, Victory Bailey, Manuel Valera and Tom Guarna  was excellent.  I had recently reviewed Manuel’s New Cuban Express and was curious to hear him in a more straight-ahead setting.  They did a wonderful tribute to Miles Davis’ Bitches’ Brew period, and Tom stretched out a lot more on guitar than he did on Manuel’s recording.   He will be worth watching in other projects that he gets involved with as well.   I also walked away from that performance with a new appreciation of just how much Miles’ music has influenced many members of the current generation of Cuban and other Latin Jazz musicians. 

...Pedrito, but not this time...

Later, I went over to Guantanamera, the 8th Avenue lair  of the Pedrito Martinez Group. Guantanamera is a very nice Cuban restaurant with very good food, but this is what it is; it is theoretically possible to dance in there, but there is no dance floor to speak of. Pedrito’s group wasn’t there that night,  and when I asked who was playing, I was told “We don’t know exactly who is playing, but it will be Cuban music.” Could this be some of Saturday’s musicians sneaking in to play for the night?  My hopes rose as I decided to stay and find out. As it turned out, the answer to that question was “no”, but there was a nice descarga by some local musicians that I will choose to call Grupo Incognito because they really didn’t want to be named either. (I saw this phenomenon in LA a few times years ago, so I am respecting their wishes.)   

As I went to bed that morning, I realized that things seemed awfully quiet for what was supposed to be the Timba concert of the decade.

CHORUS:   Even little things that look out of place can raise big suspicions. This is an important lesson for the future. 

Coming Next:  3rd Verse -  A Concert Against All Odds

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(para leer en español oprima aquí)
Story and photos by Bill Tilford, all rights reserved 

“What we have here is a failure to communicate…….”  

As I look at everything that has been happening in the Timba music  concert scene in the United States over the past two years, I am reminded of Aesop’s  fable about the little shepherd boy who cried “wolf”.  For those of you who are not familiar with that story, the short version is that a little shepherd boy falsely warned the villagers about a wolf attack on the sheep in order to bring them running out to the pasture.  After he did this twice, and the villagers came running both times only to learn that there really was no wolf, the villagers vowed to ignore him.  The third time that he cried out, there actually was a wolf, but the villagers ignored him because of the previous false alarms, and the flock of sheep was lost.   In a way, we are faced with a similar problem regarding potential audiences for large Timba concerts in the United States now. There is an atmosphere of understandable skepticism among many of the fans, and those of us who work professionally with the music whether as musicians, agents, promoters, managers, venue owners, writers, media figures etc., will need to put our heads together and try to figure out ways that we might be able to address that skepticism.    This problem was already present before the New York concert, which did at least end with a concert. There was also some collateral damage from this event - a lot of discussion in the industry about possible longer tours by individual bands associated with the concert failed to become actual tours.  

I have seen and heard comments in other places questioning whether some of the bands originally advertised for the May/June 2012 New York concert were ever really signed in the first place.  After examining all of the evidence available to me, it appears that even if all of the original bands had truly been signed and confirmed the number of tickets actually being sold   would still not have been enough to permit a concert of the size originally announced, and it still would probably have been economically necessary for the organizers to “downsize” the concert   ( although I don’t know the actual number of tickets sold, the change from the Armory to the Copacabana would not have been practical if thousands of people had already been buying tickets).   Under these circumstances, it is difficult for me to criticize the fact that a smaller concert was the finished product. However, the handling of the public communications aspects of that process was absolutely horrible.   

Since I am also a brass musician myself, I can tell you that since the same brass section was performing throughout the concert, it was probably a good thing that they didn’t play for six full hours – unless the song list was carefully paced to give them plenty of rest, hour six would not have been pleasant for the musicians or the audience.  But here again, there was a serious communications failure between the organizers and the ticket holders.....click here to continue reading.........  

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Cuban music in the United States isn't limited to the cities on the coasts; In between a club (Coconut Beach) that has hired Charanga Habanera twice in two years along with actively pursuing other Timba bands and a locally-based band, Grupo Aché, which plays some Songo and TImba (including some Los Van Van covers) as well as the Salsa one might normally expect, Louisville Kentucky is emerging as an important  location for spreading awareness of Timba music in the central United States.   Read more about this and see concert photos of Grupo Aché  here. 

An important African source of Afrocuban music is what is now the country of Benin, and one of Benin's most important bands, Le Tout-Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, is currently on tour in North America.   We recently caught them in concert and asked the band some questions. Read the review and interview and see concert photos of the band here. 

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