“What makes a great suite great? The way the pieces in it relate to each other,” says Joe Chambers about his new album “Dance Kobina”, on which he fuses jazz with influences from South America, the Caribbean and Africa. The focus is on four original compositions by the now 80-year-old drummer, who can also be heard on the album as a vibraphonist and percussionist and also acted as arranger and producer. There are also two pieces by the Canadian pianist and co-producer André Vial. There are also refreshing new interpretations of songs by the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson and the Austrian guitarist Karl Ratzer (two musicians Chambers has worked with throughout his long career) and a classic by Kurt Weill. Each of these tracks was infused with rhythmic elements of Afro-Cuban guaguancó (a variety of rumba) by Chambers and his fellow musicians, sometimes more powerfully, sometimes more subtly. “For me, all of these pieces are connected,” Chambers says, “in many ways.”
“I’ve always had a fondness for Afro-Cuban, rumba, guaguancó – that sound,” says Joe Chamberswho was once a member of the various incarnations of Max Roachs acclaimed percussion ensemble M’Boom was. “It’s in my blood. I’ve been listening to this music since I was little and growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs. I’ve always been drawn to Cuban guaguancó, as has jazz.” Some pieces of the repertoire refer explicitly to the Guaguancó and related traditions, others more implicitly, but the feeling basically runs through the whole album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=/2kXGWn5w3cg
Which is all the more fascinating given that Chambers recorded the recordings with two different ensembles in New York and Montréal. He recorded six of the nine numbers with Pianist Rick Germanson and bassist Mark Lewandowski up, the musicians of his current New York trio, which occasionally includes the Cuban percussionist Emilio Valdes Cortes and alto saxophonist Marvin Carter joined. The remaining three recordings were made in Montréal with the help of pianist André Vial, alto saxophonist Caoilainn Power, vibraphonist Michael DavidsonBassist Ira Coleman and the percussionist Elli Miller Maboungou, who plays ngoma drums from the land of his Congolese ancestors. Indirectly Maboungou is also responsible for the album’s “double pegged” title: because in the Bantu language Lingala, spoken in the Congo, “kobina” means something like “dance”.
