Enrique Fernandez

ESP-Disk' has a little bit of history with Argentina – we issued Gato Barbieri's first international release, and our Steve Lacy album was recorded there – so we couldn't resist putting out this compilation of 2012-17 recordings (most previously unreleased) from the Buenos Aires scene. In his liner notes, compiler Jason Weiss writes, "In June 1966, just as General Juan Carlos Onganía was leading a military coup d’état, Steve Lacy’s quartet arrived in Buenos Aires: not exactly safe harbor for free jazz. Despite opposition the group gained a small following, appearing on television, at a museum, in private homes, but they couldn’t earn enough for their return flights. When the quartet—Lacy, Enrico Rava, Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, a supergroup in retrospect—played at the venerable Instituto di Tella, whose experimental music center was directed by the composer Alberto Ginastera, Lacy instructed the group to do two free improvised sets of twenty minutes each; it proved to be their only document of the whole adventure, released by ESP the following year as The Forest and the Zoo."

The billing (Irakere "featuring Chucho Valdés") illustrates what a draw the leader-pianist Valdés has become in his own right, and Yemayá does indeed showcase his prodigious talents as a keyboardist, albeit on an electro-acoustic instrument and with a set designed as much for the American jazz audience as for his Cuban roots. The opening title cut with Valdés's sister Mayra Caridad on vocals is a killer Latin-soul-jazz workout, while track 2, with blistering solo work from Valdés over a crisp, percussion-led rhythm, sets the tone for the remaining seven extended cuts. This is not so much Cuban music as jazz with a Latin base–complex, disciplined, but swinging hard. Yemayá represents a new phase for Irakere and is Latin Jazz of the highest caliber, full of virtuosity and passion.