• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 02 / 28 / 2011

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By JON PARELES. February 27, 2011.The New Orleans-Caribbean connection has always been obvious in the music itself, though things get tricky for anyone seeking origins or credit. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Mr. O’Farrill asked with a smile. “It doesn’t matter. We’re grooving heavily.”

Mr. O’Farrill’s big band had a guest: the alto saxophonist and composer Donald Harrison, from New Orleans. Mr. O’Farrill and Mr. Harrison are in many ways two of a kind. As composers they are modernizers of music with dance rhythms at its core: Mr. O’Farrill with Afro-Latin music, Mr. Harrison with the heritage of New Orleans. They add layers of harmony and counterpoint, toy with meter and melody, make knowing allusions and take structural detours without forgetting the beat.

Mr. O’Farrill and Mr. Harrison also carry family legacies forward. Mr. O’Farrill’s father was Chico O’Farrill, a Cuban trumpeter, composer and bandleader who created groundbreaking Latin jazz in the United States. Last year Arturo O’Farrill brought the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra to Cuba to perform his father’s music. Mr. Harrison’s father was known as Big Chief Donald Harrison, the leader of a New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and Mr. Harrison is now a chief himself.

The opening piece was “Iko Iko,” a Mardi Gras Indian song that became a rock hit in the 1960s. Arranged Saturday by Todd Bashore with thick, cantilevered horn-section chords, it became a big-band rumba — or, from a New Orleans perspective, a Mardi Gras mambo. Mr. Harrison’s “I’m the Big Chief of Congo Square” was a modal blues with a second-line beat that also merged easily with the band’s Latin percussion; Mr. O’Farrill, on piano, splashed it with two-fisted chords and cross-currents. his suitelike “Ruminaciones Sobre Cuba” used vintage and more recent Cuban rhythms behind knotty melody lines

Both composers are fascinated by extrapolations and complications as well as roots and fusions. Mr. Harrison’s “Quantum Leap” jumped back and forth between a speedy, convoluted tune and a bluesy riff; his “Sandcastle Headhunters” juggled funk, swing and quasi-African rhythms. He also brought a plush, gorgeous Ellingtonian ballad, “Sincerely Yours.”

Mr. O’Farrill’s “Corner of Malecón and Bourbon” was an episodic, nonchronological jazz history, pausing for impressions of Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Charles Mingus, and eventually transforming an arpeggiated Scott Joplin ragtime phrase into the faster, more percussive arpeggiation of a Cuban montuno, a piano pattern driving a dance tune — a surprising musical link. “Fathers and Sons” featured young musicians, including Mr. O’Farrill’s sons Adam on trumpet and Zack on drums, in a piece that held pensive soliloquies, tricky meter shifts and crashing, percussion-propelled climaxes. And Mr. O’Farrill’s “40 Acres and a Burro,” the title piece of the orchestra’s new album on Zoho Music, wandered all over the Americas and the last century, from a mariachi parody to Stravinsky-like pointillism to a bristling but danceable full-band attack.

This was music full of intellectual ambitions and compositional whims, but the technical feats were only part of its gusto.

Mr. O’Farrill has honed the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra to handle dizzyingly complex music with earthy joy.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/arts/music/2