Afro Disia

Here we have a summit meeting late in the careers of the pioneering titans of Afro-Cuban jazz: Dizzy Gillespie fronting the Machito orchestra on trumpet, with Mario Bauza as music director, alto saxophonist/clarinetist, and organizing force, and Chico O'Farrill contributing the compositions and arrangements. This could have been just a nostalgic retro gathering 25 years after the fact, but instead, these guys put forth an ambitious effort to push the boundaries of the idiom. The centerpiece is a 15-minute trumpet concerto for Gillespie called "Oro, Incienso y Mirra," where O'Farrill melts dissonant clusters, electric piano comping, and synthesizer decorations together with hot Afro-Cuban rhythms into a coherent, multi-sectioned tour de force…

Time is Now is like a delightful summer breeze, a refreshing album that recreates with absolute freedom some of the most excel and refined Latin American and classic repertoire. Mario Bauzá made it possible with that characteristic sound, filled of Latin flavour and vigorous radiance that will captivate you from the first track. You won't believe the mesmerizing adaptation of "Mack the Knife", for instance. Don't let this album pass in front of you. Go for it and enjoy it forever.

After not having led a recording session under his own name in 29 years, O'Farrill came from seemingly out of nowhere to lead a terrific Afro-Cuban big band date on this CD. O'Farrill claims that he turned down offers to lead standard seven or eight-piece salsa bands on records over the years, preferring to wait until a big band opportunity came along - and clearly, he was bursting with accumulated charts dating from the 1960s through the 1990s. Not too much has changed since O'Farrill's exciting string of albums for Clef in the 1950s; if anything, his arranging hand has become surer, more sophisticated, thoroughly in touch as ever with a wide variety of influences…

Music is one of the most magical of all the arts. It can, by its mere sound, excite the body to such an extent that it leaps up and dances - in most cases instinctively; with eyes closed it can suggest a palette of a myriad colours; and by its sheer mystical nature music can heal the body and the mind of many ailments. Bobby Matos’ music does all of this and some more. It helps pay homage to the soul and the spirit. This is once again evident in the music of Mambo Jazz Dance. There is an inherent energy that converts musical notes here that drives the mind into a state of trance where it seems to become a kind of crucible into which the mambos and the boleros of Mr. Matos pour themselves, stirring the mind into an interminable dance. The exciting aspect of this musical unguent is that it is invisible and soon fills all parts of the body, awakening it and pushing it into an ebullient mambo, no less…