Tags: Latin Jazz

Review: Jazzman recently served up a big and freaky old collection of Halloween themed jazz sounds from Greasy Mike. Now the venerated digger and collector opens up his archives once more for another deep dive, this time under the heading of 'Shipwrecked On A Tropical Island.' As such these are Afro-tinged jazz sounds with shimmering steel drums and gently breaking waves. There are Afro-Cuban spinners like Phyllis Branch's 'Babalu' and samba shufflers full of soul. An epic and escapist collection that takes you to another world.

Review: Horacio Chivo Borraro is an Argentine saxophonist who toured with many bands and artists in the 1960s and 70s. His album Blues Para Un Cosmonauta is a curt four-tracker of naive-not-naive free jazz and avant-garde spiritualisms, all of which, in theme, collapse the boundary between actual space exploration and that of the figurative astral plane. A comparatively rare jazz record, now reissued in greater numbers, its mystique is backed up by its musical dubiousness, with quizzically trilling synths on the title track, or the potent and full-bodied electric pianos on 'Cancion De Cuna Para Un Bebe Del Ano 2000', spreading both confusion and delight.

Review: Opa's Back Home was first reocrded in 1975 but not released until 1996; it was the fourth and final album by the esteemed Uruguayan fusion band, whose preferred admixture was usually some melted pot of funk and samba, making for an impressive heuristic building on their intuitive recalling of their mutual upbringing in South America. Mysteriously (for reasons unknown to the band), Opa's debut was shelved and remained so until the mid-1990s. But the story goes that it was recorded after renowned label producer and owner Larry Rosen heard the band playing in a Brooklyn nightclub; with this in mind, Back Home makes for an ironic title, since the sonic turn expressed by the band is not one of homesickness, but rather that of an immersion in New York's metamorphous music scene ('Brooklynville' has an instant proto-hip-hop vibe, if not for its original urban field recording, then certainly for its bulbous broken funk twang). Now reissued on vinyl and CD via Far Out, you won't want to miss this round trip.