Live in Marciac (5Passion)
Aymée Nuviola / Gonzalo Rubacalba
Released May 20, 2022
Latin Grammy Award for Best Traditional Tropical Album
JAZZ.FM91 Best Jazz Albums of 2023
Grammy Nominee Best Jazz Vocal Album 2024
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nJkFwRfn696zmGnJ-qs8_qo6GPxyzuZI8
Spotify:
About:
Multiple GRAMMY® Award-winning jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and GRAMMY® and Latin GRAMMY®-winning vocalist Aymée Nuviola present a collective mastery in their latest collaboration, Live in Marciac, out May 27 via 5Passion Records. Live in Marciac captures an evocative and timeless live concert, full of Latin jazz classics and some originals, this duo was part of a tour in 2021 that includes the Marciac Jazz Festival (France) at the Chapiteau Concert Hall.
Childhood friends from Cuba, Rubalcaba and Nuviola first united as musical collaborators in 2020 with the release of Viento y Tiempo – Live at Blue Note Tokyo. The record was hailed for its celebration of Afro-Cuban jazz influence, receiving a 2020 GRAMMY® nomination in the Best Latin Jazz Album category. Now with the release of Live in Marciac, the illustrious duo returns in glory, incorporating a superlative blend of masterpieces that defy musical trends. Live in Marciac follows a banner year for both master musicians; Rubalcaba just won a GRAMMY® for his jazz trio album, Skyline, the first Latin American musician to do so as a leader in the Best Instrumental Jazz Album category. Nuviola was nominated this year as well for Best Tropical Latin Album for Sin Salsa No Hay Paraíso, and performed during this years’ telecast.
Eager to perform live in a post-lockdown world, the duo seized an opportunity in 2021 to embark on a multi-city duo tour throughout Europe, which included a performance at the Jazz in Marciac Festival in late July in the Southwestern corner of France. For Rubalcaba and Nuviola, these live performances represented a dignified restoration to their musical relationship. “To play live again is to come back to life. It is to live again as we know how to do it, and doing it with Aymée is divine,” Rubalcaba reflects.
Throughout the pandemic, Rubalcaba and Nuviola began their duo work together, eventually materializing as what Nuviola describes to be a “totally genuine and unique” musical relationship “with all the rigor that Cuban music deserves.” One aspect of this relationship is the overarching message on Live in Marciac: emotional memory.
With their animated Cuban rhythm and flavor, Rubalcaba and Nuviola create a sound that connects audience members to their past experiences. They achieve this through some stunning performances of jazz classics, including “Lágrimas Negras” and “El Manisero,” two arrangements that played momentous roles in their musical adolescence and growth. Other tracks on the recording, like Nuviola’s original composition “Nada es para ti” balance the repertoire while embracing an intimacy typical of a vocal-piano duo offering.
Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a virtuoso musician and considered one of the leading artists in Afro-Cuban jazz. He has received worldwide acclaim from outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Downbeat, the Chicago Tribune, and others. He has been nominated for 18 GRAMMY® and Latin GRAMMY® Awards collectively and has won five in total.
Aymée Nuviola, who has been nicknamed “La Sonera del Mundo,” has effectively fused timba, jazz, son and salsa throughout her impressive musical career. In 2020, she won the GRAMMY® award for Best Latin Tropical Album for her album A Journey Through Cuban Music and in 2018, she won the Latin GRAMMY® award for Best Tropical Fusion Album, for her album Como Anillo Al Dedo.
Two accomplished, international music forces unite on Live in Marciac, a breathtaking display of music’s power to unite, heal, dream, merge and elevate our spiritual capacities. On this impressive collaboration, Nuviola and Gonzalo are found as expressive and mesmeric as ever, proving that music can create a community no matter where it comes from and travels to.
Track Listing:
1. Bésame Mucho 07:54
2. Lágrimas Negras 08:34
3. Mi Mejor Canción 05:08
4. Bemba Colorá 05:16
5. Dos Gardenias 05:00
6. El Ratón 08:17
7. Nada es para ti 04:38
8. El Manisero 09:51
9. El Ciego 07:02
Personnel:
Gonzalo Rubalcaba: piano
Aymée Nuviola: vocals
Recorded July 3, 2021, at the Chapiteau Concert Hall (Marciac Jazz Festival), France
Review:
There is not too much music that can stir the soul like Afro-Cuban music – especially the languid magic of the bolero and son, and other dance forms – and there are very few musicians performing today who would stir the depths of the soul as Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Aymée Nuviola. [Although one mustn’t forget that Omara Portuondo is still with us]. These absolutely magical duets on Live in Marciac which these great artists have here provided us with [on the disc] are inimitable benchmarks in a manner that would be hard to reach or even humbly attempt to replicate.
Friends and classmates from childhood, Miss Nuviola and Mr Rubalcaba share a unique bond and it is evident in the powerful undertow – the nuanced melodic, harmonic and rhythmic waves that ebb and flow on the musical interpretations they create on this album. These are all classic Latin American standards, but you might as well be discovering them afresh as you listen to them as deeply as Pauline Oliveros would like you to. There are new and more dramatic twists and turns in the narratives of this music – on “Bésame Mucho, “Lágrimas Negras” and “El Manisero”, for instance, swirling spirals of sound that appear to come out of nowhere but thin air.
And where the music is newer – as in Miss Nuviola’s own “Nada para ti” – there may not be the same dallying theatrical effect as in the other charts, but there is, with all the beauty of Miss Nuviola’s caresses of the lyric and Mr Rubalcaba’s shadowing of her vocalastics, an intriguing edginess, or just a subtle hint of it in some of the nooks and crannies of the song. Both Miss Nuviola and Mr Rubalcaba treat these songs as [essentially] a series of beautifully and sharply delineated sound paintings.
But the contrast between the pianist’s and the vocalist’s sculpted inventions could not be more different from each other – and therefore, full of surprise. Mr Rubalcaba starts off the songs in a sedate, almost stately manner [and you wonder – rightly so – when he is going to cut loose]. This he does in his own inimitable style, when he has the spotlight: his fingerwork is dazzling – vaunted arpeggios interspersed by noble harmonic changes and punctuated by mystical labyrinths invented on the fly, leading you on into a shadowy world full of mysterious hopes and depths.
Mr Rubalcaba knows when to turn the spot onto Miss Nuviola and then we are treated to some of the most eloquent vocalastics. Miss Nuviola rises to the occasion, matching the inventions and inversions by the pianist by manipulating her magnificent contralto. She is the equivalent of a belcanto singer, aceing eighth notes and sixteenth notes with stunning legato, without missing a beat.
If she were singing an aria, then what she does with the gliding changes in melodic invention and articulation – from throat voice to diaphragmatic breathing, smoky seduction to lofty, whirling and twirling of the lyric; a diva nourishing the lyric of the song and, indeed the very air around you, with finely modulated melisma and coloratura. “Mi Mejor Canción” and “Dos Gardenias” are certified – and instant – classics of a romantic kind.
The pairing of Mr Rubalcaba and Miss Nuviola – after the two live recordings they have captured on record – is a match made in heaven. It’s exciting to wonder what might be next, if they can be in the same place at the same time: a slew of recordings, perhaps? One dares to dream.
Raul da Gama (Latin Jazz Network)
