Los Guachos V (Sunnyside)
Guillermo Klein
Released June 3, 2016
2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll Latin Top 10
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nBJbXARF5InK2N78KM3vAYXuAn_Xj6fAI
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/01qBCcpGlPtzlCbyVxWOH5?si=ATHl0GerQ2Sp6vhMwYcL9A
About:
For 20 years, Guillermo Klein has been creating some of the most singular and exciting music for his highly adept 11-piece ensemble, Los Guachos. His compositional style has been evolving over the years, though always utilizing elements of jazz, folkloric music of his native Argentina, rock and modern classical music. Klein’s musical voice has established a number of unique composing concepts. His new recording, Guachos V, heralds his use of a new method: symmetries. To highlight this work, Klein has created two suites, Suite Indiana and Suite Jazmin, that use familiar works of the jazz canon and his own material reworked using mirroring, inversions and retrogrades of harmonies and melodies to create new compositions. Klein celebrates this anniversary by doing what he does best, presenting new, challenging, but tremendously gripping and rhythmically attractive, music.
Track Listing:
Suite Indiana
1. Back Home Again (Guillermo Klein) 03:44
2. Donna Lee (Miles Davis) 02:47
3. Patria Espiral (Guillermo Klein) 05:19
Suite Jazmin
4. Symmetry I (Guillermo Klein) 05:01
5. Si No Sabes 4/4 (Guillermo Klein) 04:40
6. Si No Sabes 9/8 (Guillermo Klein) 05:28
7. Burrito Hill Mirror (Guillermo Klein) 04:56
8. Human Feel Mirror (Guillermo Klein) 03:43
9. Jazmin (Guillermo Klein) 05:40
10. Symmetry II (Guillermo Klein) 05:14
…
11. Ashes (Andrew Hill) 02:20
12. Quemando Velas (Guillermo Klein) 05:33
Personnel:
Ben Monder: guitar
Bill McHenry: tenor saxophone
Chris Cheek: soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxofone
Diego Urcola: trumpet, trombone
Fernando Huergo: electric bass
Guillermo Klein: piano
Jeff Ballard: drums
Miguel Zenon: alto saxophone
Richard Nant: percussion, trumpet
Sandro Tomasi: trombone
Taylor Haskins: trumpet, flugelhorn
Recorded May 15 – 16, 2015, at Avatar Studios, NYC
Produced by Gulllermo Klein
Executive Producer: François Zalacain
Audio Mixer: Katsuhiko Naito.
Photographer: Kimberly Bacon.
Graphic Design: Pablo Engel
Review:
It has been 20 years since Argentine composer-pianist Guillermo Klein first assembled his stellar 11-piece ensemble Los Guachos. To celebrate, he has composed two rhythmically knotty, harmonically allusive, structurally ambitious suites: “Suite Inidana” and “Suite Jazmin.” Both toy with the stuff of jazz standards, but the game Klein is playing has to do with various forms of musical symmetry, such as mirroring, inversions and retrogrades of harmonies and melodies. Mozart was a master of such musical geometrics, but they aren’t exactly common in jazz. It’s easiest to get a sense of what he’s up to on Miles Davis’ “Donna Lee.” It starts with guitarist Ben Monder pulsing 16th notes on the tonic. Then Chris Cheek, on baritone sax, enters with a seven-beat bass figure, over which a five-beat trombone pattern is eventually added. By the time you’re fully distracted by the carefully overlaid rhythms, Monder and bassist Fernando Huergo whisper a bit of the tune, but it’s just a hint; throughout, Davis’ melody appears only in fragments. Because the music is so densely interwoven, it’s seldom clear how much is improvised and how much composed, something that may disappoint those waiting to hear Monder or saxophonists Bill McHenry and Miguel Zenon cut loose. But that would be missing the forest for the trees, as the collaborative energy of this ensemble is exhilarating in a way that solitary soloists seldom are.
J.D. Considine (DownBeat)
