Multiverse (Jazzheads)
Bobby Sanabria Big Band
Released August 14, 2012
Grammy Nominee for Best Latin Jazz Album 2013
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=vhVubPiSWho&list=OLAK5uy_l2voVcwiffD1TUlQIJCzvR7692YVGBlDA
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/0saGN49zx64i3BBlOBF5Qw?si=36d9DjjXTjq-rzNF8KkvFQ&dl_branch=1
About:
“… What sets the worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization, for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.”
Octavio Paz, 1970
These words by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz describe Bobby Sanabria’s cultural heritage and musical vision. As he always proudly proclaims, he is a Nuyorican from the South Bronx. He was raised in a time before the mass corporatization and commodification of media and popular culture affected the vacuous product that seems to pervade much of today’s mainstream music scene. The Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s was the perfect cauldron, or caldera, of rich musical ingredients, the Crossroads, set apart, yet part of, the main road, where Elegua meets George Carlin, the place where Bobby was exposed to more than one sphere of being and knowing—a figurative “Multiverse.” The Puerto Rican and Cuban rhythms of family and neighbors in the projects. The rock-n-roll riffs enjoyed by schoolmates. The jazz still played on the radio and used as soundtracks in movies and even cartoons. And the funk danced to by new b-boy crews in the parks and sidewalks of the Boogie Down—all have left their aural mark in Bobby’s musical development.
His music continues to celebrate these “interplays” of differences and commonalities. What started off in his critically acclaimed Grammy-nominated big band album, Live and in Clave!!!, where this Nuyorican son excelled at playing the Cuban son, while performing at the temple of jazz, Birdland; to the Grammy-nominated Big Band Urban Folktales, where the sounds and experiences of life in New York City were woven into songs which are the soundscape for what Rubén Blades has called, the contemporary “folklore of the City.” And as we know, all magical things come in threes. Now there is Multiverse, the culmination of influences and inspirations, bringing together elders who guided his development, respected colleagues in the field, as well as some of his own talented former students
This Multiverse vision of jazz is rooted in a deep tradition that goes back to Africa, Cuba, New Orleans, to St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago and finally arrives and coalesces in New York City. Along the way Bobby’s Multiverse has incorporated other influences thereby reaffirming jazz, challenging its tenets and expanding upon it. The jazz of the Multiverse rejects uniformity and embraces plurality. The fusion of different traditions and sounds does not destroy or dilute the traditional concepts of jazz, but creates other vibrant and interesting “possibilities.”
It is a multiplicity of styles all joined together by the virtuosity of the contemporary jazz musician and the forward thinking vision of a man who has, as he has stated, one foot in the past, one in the present, and his head always looking toward the future. Revel in the MULTIVERSE. Enjoy the ride.
Track Listing:
1. The French Connection (Don Ellis) 5:52
2. Cachita (Rafael Hernández / Bernardo Sancristóbal) 9:39
3. Jump Shot (Jeremy Fletcher) 5:36
4. Over the Rainbow (Harold Arlen / E.Y. “Yip” Harburg) 7:02
5. ¡Que Viva Candido (Andrew Neesley) 7:58
6. Wordsworth Ho (Chris Washburne) 4:46
7. Speak No Evil (Wayne Shorter) 4:47
8. Broken Heart (Eugene Marlow) 8:10
9. Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite For Ellington (Michael Philip Mossman) 13:40
10. The Chicken/From Havana To Harlem: 100 Years of Mario Bauza (La Bruja / Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis / Caridad De La Luz) 8:48
Personnel:
Bobby Sanabria: drum set, percussion, vocals
Cristian Rivera: congas, vocals
Obanilu Allende: percussion, vocals
Matthew Gonzalez: percussion, vocals
Hiram “El Pavo” Remon: vocals
Enrique Haneine: piano
Leo Traversa: electric bass, vocals
David Dejesus: alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, flute
John Beaty: alto flute
Peter Brainin: tenor saxophone, clarinet
Norbert Stachel: tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute
Jeff Lederer: tenor saxophone
Danny Rivera: baritone saxophone, bass clarinet
Kevin Bryan: trumpet
Shareef Clayton: trumpet
Jonathan Barnes: trumpet
Andrew Neesley: trumpet
Dave Miller: trombone
Tim Sessions: trombone
Joe Beaty: trombone
Chris Washburne: bass trombone, tuba, dijeridoo
La Bruja/Caridad De La Luz: spoken word/rap, vocals
Charenee Wade: vocals
Gene Jefferson: vocals
Mary Gatchell: vocals
Georgia Schmidt: vocals
Ernesto Lucar: vocals
Gene Marlow: vocals
Recorded August 16 – 17, and October 8, 2011, at The James L. Dolan Music Recording Studio
Produced by Bobby Sanabria
Mastering: Gene Paul
Mixing: James Gately
Engineer: Jeanne Montalvo
Review:
There are few drummers today who have as much energy and imagination as Bobby Sanabria. He is a percussion colourist of the highest order and his palette is so wide as to encompass all manner of media and idioms—from the iridescent swagger of swing to the spirited canter of the Afro-Caribbean shuffle. His playing is loud and fearless, yet he can be soft and sensuous when the music demands it. He is all of these things on Multiverse, an ambitious project featuring a considerable ensemble that traverses the length and breadth of the African and South American component of the continents with breathtaking and inebriating vigour. The term “multiverse” is coined from an observation by the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who suggests that the Big Bang of cultural collisions keeps life fresh, mysterious and alive when the cultures collide but remain relatively unique and separate rather than mingle and diffuse into one anonymous whole. Sanabria is the epitome of such a cataclysmic event when he begins to play music: Afro-Cuban rhythms nestle cheek-by-jowl with the elasticity of jazzy rhythmic extravagance. As a result, Sanabria plays music on a vast array of percussion instruments and can lead from the front or accompany a whole bevy of instruments: as many as it takes to create a whole “multiverse” of sound, so to speak.
Bobby Sanabria cannot play safe and it is just as well. On the great Don Ellis’ chart “The French Connection” the drummer and Danny Rivera create a majestically explosive re-imagination of an already modern chart. The result is a heady mix of brass, woodwinds and percussion; yet even in ensemble passages the tones and colours as well as the cross-textures of each instrument are so utterly distinct that it is possible to even enjoy a seemingly drunken splash of even Chris Washburne’s digeridoo. Although the record is by no means a conglomeration of instrumentation from conventional to obscure, the sound that is wrought from each horn, each reed and every kind of drum is not only distinct, but wild, bright and texturally unique. There is also an active “coro” virtually throughout the record and this too is spectacular—from the one on “Cachita,” which is led by the voice of Mathew Gonzalez to the improvised ensemble on “¡Que Viva Candido” and the breathtaking rap on Wayne Shorter’s classic—and now part of a new standard—“Speak No Evil”. Off course this is not all there is to enjoy on the outstanding album; the human voices are, after all, just one component of the larger sound scape of voicing in the grander scheme of things. The arrangers, including Sanabria, Rivera, Jeff Lederer and Kelly Berg have crafted a spectacular universe of sound for this record.
Rarely is one trumpet distinct from another, but this is the case on Multiverse. Jonathan Barnes on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is sharp and redolent in crisp highs; Kevin Bryan sounds fat and bronzy. Even the trombones have their own smearing DNA. Washburne is spectacular throughout and even memorable on bass trombone. And then there is that utterly unforgettable exchange between vocalist Charnee Wade and Shareef Clayton on trumpet played with a plunger that is reminiscent of growling Bubber Miley and the “jungle” sounds of Rex Stewart. Every chart has its highs but the ones on “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite for Duke Ellington” appear to have enabled the ensemble to create a chart seemingly of only sonic crests. “The Chicken/From Havana to Harlem—100 Years of Mario Bauzá” feels no different and the chart seems to jump off a musical cliff and soar as if that flightless bird somehow learned the art of catching thermal. It is all on the up and up after that and the mash of brass and woodwinds take over for an extraordinary ride after that. The reeds and woodwinds players are more than up to the task as well. David Dejesus, Peter Brainin, Norbert Stachel, Jeff Lederer and, of course, the altogether magnificent Danny Rivera, give a stellar account of them every time they are called upon to stand out and solo. At the end of it all it seems impossible to have enough of the record where Bobby Sanabria has drawn from the several cultural universes that he inhabits and the result is just as Octavio Paz suggested: “Life is Plurality”. Certainly, in the music of Bobby Sanabria this is wholly true.
Raul da Gama (Latin Jazz Network)