 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2017) |
Mezcla is a music group from Cuba.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2017) |
Mezcla is a music group from Cuba.
Mezcla has been a part of the Cuban music scene for the past twenty-five years.
Mezcla was featured in the Smithsonian Institution's documentary on Latin Jazz La Combinacion Perfecta. [1]
The band has participated in festivals throughout Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. At the jazz club La Zorra y el Cuervo, they have performed with musicians who are visiting for the Havana Jazz Festival. These musicians include George Benson, Felipe Cabrera, Steve Coleman, Roy Hargrove, Giovanni Hidalgo, Wynton Marsalis, Dafnis Prieto, Orlando Sanchez, Yosvany Terry, and Chucho Valdés. [2]
A review at All About Jazz said that the band's album I'll See You in Cuba combines jazz, blues, soul into a celebration of Cuban song and dance. [3]
Born in Oakland, California, guitarist Pablo "Mezcla" Menéndez is the son of blues and jazz singer Barbara Dane. As a resident of Cuba since 1966, he has worked with the Nueva Trova movement (Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés), the jazz world ( Gonzalo Rubalcaba), and Afro-rock group Síntesis (with Carlos and Ele Alfonso). He founded Mezcla in 1989.
When Mezcla's visas were denied in 1993, U.S. public opinion and some members of Congress protested.[ citation needed ] Among the protesters was guitarist Carlos Santana, who stated in an interview with the San Francisco Examiner that Mezcla was his favorite band from Cuba.[ citation needed ]
In 1999 he wrote two songs with Bonnie Raitt as part of the Bridge to Havana songwriting workshop. At the end of the week a concert was performed in which Menéndez performed the song "Cuba's Way Too Cool" with Raitt, actor Woody Harrelson, and guitarist Rey Guerra.
In 2005 Menéndez released a solo album, Havana Blues Mambo. [4] He has led a Cuban All Star band at venues in the U.S. In January 2009 he was invited to perform with Larry Coryell and John Stowell at the Jazz Guitar Summit in Olympia, Washington.
Arturo Sandoval is a Cuban-American jazz trumpeter, pianist, and composer. While living in his native Cuba, Sandoval was influenced by jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1977 he met Gillespie, who became his friend and mentor and helped him defect from Cuba while on tour with the United Nations Orchestra. Sandoval became an American naturalized citizen in 1998. His life was the subject of the film For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story (2000) starring Andy García.
The music of Cuba, including its instruments, performance, and dance, comprises a large set of unique traditions influenced mostly by west African and European music. Due to the syncretic nature of most of its genres, Cuban music is often considered one of the richest and most influential regional music in the world. For instance, the son cubano merges an adapted Spanish guitar (tres), melody, harmony, and lyrical traditions with Afro-Cuban percussion and rhythms. Almost nothing remains of the original native traditions, since the native population was exterminated in the 16th century.
Latin jazz is a genre of jazz with Latin American rhythms. The two main categories are Afro-Cuban jazz, rhythmically based on Cuban popular dance music, with a rhythm section employing ostinato patterns or a clave, and Afro-Brazilian jazz, which includes samba and bossa nova.
Son cubano is a genre of music and dance that originated in the highlands of eastern Cuba during the late 19th century. It is a syncretic genre that blends elements of Spanish and African origin. Among its fundamental Hispanic components are the vocal style, lyrical metre and the primacy of the tres, derived from the Spanish guitar. On the other hand, its characteristic clave rhythm, call and response structure and percussion section are all rooted in traditions of Bantu origin.
Barbara Dane is an American folk, blues, and jazz singer. She co-founded Paredon Records with Irwin Silber.
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban jazz emerged in the early 1940s with the Cuban musicians Mario Bauzá and Frank Grillo "Machito" in the band Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. In 1947, the collaborations of bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and percussionist Chano Pozo brought Afro-Cuban rhythms and instruments, such as the tumbadora and the bongo, into the East Coast jazz scene. Early combinations of jazz with Cuban music, such as "Manteca" and "Mangó Mangüé", were commonly referred to as "Cubop" for Cuban bebop.
A descarga is an improvised jam session consisting of variations on Cuban music themes, primarily son montuno, but also guajira, bolero, guaracha and rumba. The genre is strongly influenced by jazz and it was developed in Havana during the 1950s. Important figures in the emergence of the genre were Cachao, Julio Gutiérrez, Bebo Valdés, Peruchín and Niño Rivera in Cuba, and Tito Puente, Machito and Mario Bauzá in New York. Originally, descargas were promoted by record companies such as Panart, Maype and Gema under the label Cuban jam sessions. From the 1960s, the descarga format was usually adapted by large salsa ensembles, most notably the Fania All-Stars.
Machito was a Latin jazz musician who helped refine Afro-Cuban jazz and create both Cubop and salsa music. He was raised in Havana with the singer Graciela, his foster sister.
Prudencio Mario Bauzá Cárdenas was an Afro-Cuban jazz, Latin, and jazz musician. He was among the first to introduce Cuban music to the United States by bringing Cuban musical styles to the New York City jazz scene. While Cuban bands had had popular jazz tunes in their repertoire for years, Bauzá's composition "Tangá" was the first piece to blend jazz harmony and arranging technique, with jazz soloists and Afro-Cuban rhythms. It is considered the first true Afro-Cuban jazz or Latin jazz tune.
Dionisio Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro, better known as Bebo Valdés, was a Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger. He was a central figure in the golden age of Cuban music, especially due to his big band arrangements and compositions of mambo, chachachá and batanga, a genre he created in 1952. He was the director of the Radio Mil Diez house band and the Tropicana Club orchestra, before forming his own big band, Orquesta Sabor de Cuba, in 1957. However, after the end of the Cuban Revolution, in 1960, Bebo left his family behind and went into exile in Mexico before settling in Sweden, where he remarried. His musical hiatus lasted until 1994, when a collaboration with Paquito D'Rivera brought him back into the music business. By the time of his death in 2013, he had recorded several new albums, earning multiple Grammy Awards. His son Chucho Valdés is also a successful pianist and bandleader.
Israel López Valdés, better known as Cachao, was a Cuban double bassist and composer. Cachao is widely known as the co-creator of the mambo and a master of the descarga. Throughout his career he also performed and recorded in a variety of music styles ranging from classical music to salsa. An exile in the United States since the 1960s, he only achieved international fame following a career revival in the 1990s.
Irakere is a Cuban band founded by pianist Chucho Valdés in 1973. They won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Recording in 1980 with their album Irakere. Irakere was a seminal musical laboratory, where historic innovations in both Afro-Cuban jazz and Cuban popular dance music were created. The group used a wide array of percussion instruments like batá, abakuá and arará drums, chequerés, erikundis, maracas, claves, cencerros, bongó, tumbadoras (congas), and güiro.
Arturo "Chico" O'Farrill was a Cuban composer, arranger, and conductor, best known for his work in the Latin idiom, specifically Afro-Cuban jazz or "Cubop", although he also composed traditional jazz pieces and even symphonic works.
Francisco Aguabella was an Afro-Cuban percussionist whose career spanned folk, jazz, and dance bands. He was a prolific session musician and recorded seven albums as a leader.
Mario Rivera was a Latin jazz saxophonist from the Dominican Republic. Besides saxophone, Rivera played trumpet, flute, piano, vibraphone, congas, and drums.
Trova[ˈt̪ɾoβa] is a style of Cuban popular music originating in the 19th century. Trova was created by itinerant musicians known as trovadores who travelled around Cuba's Oriente province, especially Santiago de Cuba, and earned their living by singing and playing the guitar. According to nueva trova musician Noel Nicola, Cuban trovadors sang original songs or songs written by contemporaries, accompanied themselves on guitar, and aimed to feature music that had a poetic sensibility. This definition fits best the singers of boleros, and less well the Afrocubans singing funky sones or even guaguancós and abakuá. It rules out, perhaps unfairly, singers who accompanied themselves on the piano.
Havana Jam was a three-day music festival that took place at the Karl Marx Theatre, in Havana, Cuba, on 2–4 March 1979. It was sponsored by Bruce Lundvall, the president of Columbia Records, Jerry Masucci, the president of Fania Records, and the Cuban Ministry of Culture.
José Curbelo was a Cuban-born American pianist and manager. Curbelo was a key figure in Latin jazz in New York City in the 1940s and helped to popularize Mambo and the cha cha dance in the 1950s.
"Chanchullo" is a danzón-mambo composed by Cuban bassist Israel "Cachao" López. It was first released as a single in 1957 by Arcaño y sus Maravillas. It was the third single released on Cuban independent record label Gema and has been covered by multiple artists including Tito Puente, Típica '73 and Rubén González. Puente himself reworked the song as the successful "Oye cómo va", later recorded by Santana, for which Cachao received no credit. Instrumental versions of the song have been recorded variously under the titles "Mambolandia" and "Mambología", often credited to Peruchín.
Zoho Music is a Latin jazz independent record label based in New York, founded by Joachim Becker in 2003. In 2005, the label expanded to blues, R&B, Southern and classic rock on the Zoho Roots imprint. The catalog consists of over 180 CD releases, which includes three Grammy Award-winning albums and three Latin Grammy Award-winning albums.
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