Cal Tjader Soul Sauce

Soul Sauce is one of the highlights from Tjader's catalog with its appealing mixture of mambo, samba, bolero, and boogaloo styles. Tjader's core band - long-time piano player Lonnie Hewitt, drummer Johnny Rae and percussionist's Willie Bobo and Armando Peraza - starts things off with a cooled down version of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo's latin jazz classic "Guachi Guaro (Soul Sauce)". With the help of guitarist Kenny Burrell, trumpeter Donald Byrd, and tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath they offer up a lively version of Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue." Sticking to his music's "Mambo Without a Migraine" reputation, though, Tjader's musicians keep things fairly calm, especially on Latinized ballads such as Billy May's "Somewhere In the Night" and on midtempo swingers like "Tanya"…

In the '60s, R&B was a much larger market than jazz. While John Coltrane or Art Blakey could fill a small club like The Village Vanguard, James Brown and the Temptations were selling out large auditoriums - gone were the days when jazz was very much a part of popular culture and Benny Goodman's name was all over the pop charts. Soul's popularity wasn't lost on Verve, which is why some of Cal Tjader's '60s LPs had titles like Soul Sauce and El Sonido Nuevo: The New Soul Sound - Verve wanted the baby boomers who were buying Stax and Motown releases to notice Tjader as well. However, Soul Bird: Whiffenpoof isn't the R&B-drenched project that some might expect it to be. Tjader's vibes solos are soulful in that he plays with a lot of feeling, but he isn't trying to be Marvin Gaye…

In apparent response to the sampling of old Latin jazz records by hip-hop artists, Verve raided its Cal Tjader archive to come up with this fiercely grooving collection drawn from nine of his Verve albums. For all of producer Creed Taylor's '60s penchant for fashioning two- to four-minute cuts aimed at airplay, he allowed Tjader's groups considerable room to stretch out on several of the tracks included here, particularly on the live "Los Bandidos" and the hypnotic collaboration with pianist Eddie Palmieri, "Picadillo." More importantly, Tjader's records with Taylor were more varied in texture than his earlier discs, venturing now and then from his solid Afro-Cuban base into Brazilian rhythms, soul, big-band backings, and '60s pop touches…

Having finished his tenure with George Shearing in 1954, a thoroughly Latin-inoculated Cal Tjader took off on his own, recording several short slices of infectious Latin jazz, from which a dozen were selected for this album. Many of the selections are standards retrofitted with percolating Latin rhythms, cut and shaped to fit the old three-minute limit of 45 or 78 rpm singles. Tjader's crystalline vibes are teamed with a San Francisco Latin percussion section that lays down the grooves crisply and succinctly, with an occasional emulation of the more laid-back Shearing Latin sound ("East of the Sun"). Elsewhere, Cal experiments with a hot four-man trumpet section on four of the tracks, the best of which is a rhumba version of "Fascinating Rhythm"…

Cal Tjader - Descarga (1995) {Fantasy ‎FCD-24737-2 rec 1971-1972}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 412 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 188 Mb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 1971-72, 1995 Fantasy ‎Records | FCD-24737-2
Jazz / Latin Jazz / Afro-Cuban Jazz / Cool / Vibes

Descarga is a merger of two albums recorded near the beginning of the '70s – the fascinating studio session Aqua Dulce and the self-explanatory Live at the Funky Quarters. Having not yet lost his yen for adventure from the Verve days, Tjader neatly integrates Al Zulaica's Rhodes electric piano, electronic effects, and occasionally horns and voices into a bedrock Latin format, and the combination works even at its most outlandish. Two of the reasons why Aqua Dulce stays on track are the solid Latin percussion team of Pete and Coke Escovedo and Michael Smithe, and that Tjader's rippling, to-the-point, easily adaptable vibraphone manner hadn't changed a whit over the years.

Only six months after the third volume of Verve Remixed was released, Verve issued this, a box combining the three volumes of the series with an additional disc of extra remixes.
Though variously rooted in hip-hop, rave and dance clubs sensibilities, the art of mixology has evolved into a potent staple of contemporary pop music. That mainstreaming reached a new zenith with the release of the first installment of Verve Remixed in 2002 and continued to expand via two subsequent collections of eclectic Jazz/R&B-rooted remixes that found a growing, enthusiasitc audience at public radio and other adult-oriented radio outlets. This set compiles those three savory, largely Downtempo anthologies of Jazz-DJ Fusion, from the reworked takes on classic vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday that dominated the first set to the follow-up editions' more expansive palette…