Five incredible Latin Jazz legends will heat up the Blue Note stage at the Winter Latin Jazz Festival from January 19 to 31. The festival will start with jazz flutist Dave Valentin and conga legend Candido from Jan. 19 - 20. Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and his Latin jazz group will finish up the week from Jan. 21 - 24. Argentinian saxophonist Gato Barbieri will play from Jan. 25 - 27, and percussionist Poncho Sanchez will finish up the festival from Jan. 28 - 31. Don't miss it!
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULEDave Valentin with Candido: Tuesday, January 19 - Wednesday,
January 20
Arturo Sandoval: Thursday, January 21 - Sunday, January 24
Gato Barbieri: Monday, January 25 - Wednesday, January 27
Poncho Sanchez: Thursday, January 28 - Sunday, January 31
COSTDave Valentin with Candido: $25 @ table / $15 @ bar;
Arturo Sandoval: $35 @ table / $20 @ bar;
Gato Barbieri: $35 @ table / $20 @ bar;
Poncho Sanchez: $35 @ table / $20 @ bar;
WHERE The Blue Note; 131 W 3rd. St, New York, NY 10012. Doors open at 6pm. There is a $5 food/beverage minimum.
BIOS Reknown Latin jazz flutist, DAVE VALENTIN, was born of Puerto Rican parents in 1952 in New York City. His love for music started quite early; playing bongos and congas before he was 10 and even working Latin clubs in New York by 12. His talent and interest took him to the well respected High School of Music and Art in New York City, where he began studying percussion.
Valentín changed to flute and complemented his formal education at school with private classes under master flutist Hubert Laws. The early influences on Valentín's development as a flutist came from Latin artists such as Richard Egues but was tempered by American jazz musicians including
James Moody, Frank Wess,
Joe Farrell and, of course, his mentor, Hubert Laws.
Valentín soon began working as a professional musician in Latin bands, developing an unusual technique that featured blowing in a manner that sounded like percussion. Other unique developments by Valentín included singing into the flute and using non-standard flute instruments such a bass flute and a variety of flute developed in Colombia. He applied his techniques to a wide variety of music genres, ranging from jazz and R&B to salsa and merengue.
The fusion of jazz and Latin rhythms was a process begun by famous Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo and American jazz icon,
Dizzy Gillespie, in the 1940's. Arrangers like Machito and Mario Bauza helped that development, giving rise to a new jazz style that has attracted many loyal fans and talented artists such as Valentín.
Despite the fact that the market for Latin jazz artists was not very good when Valentín was trying to establish his professional career, he persevered and pursued other avenues. He made a name for himself in the Far East, Australia, and Europe as well as the United States, based on his extraordinary and evident talent.
Valentín released his debut album in 1977 with Ricardo Marrero and also appeared on a recording by
Noel Pointer. He was the first artist to sign with the GRP label, respected for its talented pool of Jazz artists and technical leadership in digital recording techniques. Valentín produced 16 recordings for GRP, and became the best Latin jazz instrumentalist in the market.
His more recent recordings were released on other record labels, such as Primitive Passions in 1996 on RMM Records. That album was followed by Sunshower in 1999 on the Concord Jazz label, and featuring more smooth Latin jazz, such as Reunion, which shows the great influence of Hupert Laws.
To his artistic credit, Valentín is also a composer, arranger, and band leader in addition to being the most celebrated Latin flutist today. He won a Grammy nomination in 1985 and the kudos of jazz fans with his selection as the leading jazz flutist by Jazziz magazine readers for seven years running.
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So well known and respected, his first name, alone -- CANDIDO -- is all that is necessary for jazz aficionados to know who he is. Credited with being the first percussionist to bring conga drumming to jazz, Candido Camero is also known for his contributions to the development of mambo and Afro-Cuban jazz. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1921, Camero first began making music as a young child, beating rhythms on empty condensed milk cans in place of bongos. He worked for six years with the CMQ Radio Orchestra and at the famed Cabaret Tropicana.
He came to the United States in 1946 with the dance team
Carmen and Rolando, and very soon after was playing with
Billy Taylor, who wrote in 1954, "I have not heard anyone who even approaches the wonderful balance between jazz and Cuban elements that Candido demonstrates."
By the early 1950s, Camero was a featured soloist with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, with whom he toured the U.S. playing three congas (at a time when other congueros were playing only one) in addition to a cowbell and guiro (a fluted gourd played with strokes from a stick). He created another unique playing style by tuning his congas to specific pitches so that he could play melodies like a pianist. He became one of the best known congueros in the country, appearing on such television shows as the
Ed Sullivan Show and the
Jackie Gleason Show.
He has recorded and performed with seemingly everybody in the jazz field, including such luminaries as
Tony Bennett,
MiLes Davis,
Dizzy Gillespie,
Lionel Hampton, Slide Hampton, Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery,
Gerry Mulligan,
Charlie Parker,
Sonny Rollins, and
Clark Terry, among others. Among his many awards are the Latin Jazz USA Lifetime Achievement Award (2001) and a special achievement award from ASCAP as a "Legend of Jazz" (2005).
The subject of the 2005 documentary, Candido: Hands of Fire, Camero (now in his 80s) continues to perform throughout the world. - NEA
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Arturo Sandoval is fluent in at least four musical languages. He can burn through an Afro-Cuban groove, tear up a bebop tune, soar over a Mozart concerto and sooth you with a luscious ballad; with equal power and grace
Granted political asylum in July 1990 and US citizenship in 1999, Sandoval and his family now call Miami, Florida home. A protégé of the legendary jazz master
Dizzy Gillespie, Sandoval was born in Artemisa, a small town in the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, on November 6, 1949, just two years after Gillespie became the first musician to bring Latin influences into American Jazz. Sandoval began studying classical trumpet at the age of twelve, but it didn't take him long to catch the excitement of the jazz world. He has since evolved into one of the World's most acknowledged guardians of jazz trumpet and flugel horn, as well as a renowned classical artist, pianist and composer.
Sandoval was a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning group Irakere, whose explosive mixture of jazz, classical, rock and traditional Cuban music caused a sensation throughout the entertainment world. In 1981, he left Irakere to form his own band, which garnered enthusiastic praise from critics and audiences all over the world. Sandoval was voted Cuba's Best Instrumentalist from 1982 to 1990.
Arturo Sandoval has been awarded 4 Grammy Awards, 6 Billboard Awards and an Emmy Award. The latter for his composing work on the entire underscore of the HBO movie based on his life, "For Love or Country" starring
Andy Garcia. He is one of the most dynamic and vivacious live performers of our time, and has recently been seen by millions in the Grammy Awards performing with pop-phenomenon
Justin Timberlake as well as on the Latin Billboard Awards with the gifted
Alicia Keys, where he was awarded his 6th Billboard Awards for "Best Latin Jazz Album".
Not only is Arturo a tenured professor at Florida International University, but he works nationally and abroad with innumerable institutions and their music departments offering several scholarships, exercise books, clinics and seminars, and has rendered a considerable amount of time working with the NARAS educational program. Furthermore, Hal Leonard Publishing has not only released additional educations books with recorded CD's that include original exercises by Sandoval, but has published various big band, combo and marching band charts from his award winning albums.
Arturo Sandoval maintains one of the most extensive educational programs in the industry.
Sandoval is also a renowned classical musician, performing regularly with the leading symphony orchestras from around the world. Arturo has composed his own "Concerto for Trumpet & Orchestra", which can be heard on "
Arturo Sandoval: The Classical Album." Also, he has been chosen to perform with the foremost orchestras on primetime television, and was asked by
John Williams to record on Williams' original Trumpet Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra. His classical artistry has earned him the respect and admiration from the most prestigious conductors, composers and symphony orchestras world-wide.
Arturo Sandoval's versatility can be heard on recordings with everyone from
Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Woody Shaw,
Michel Legrand, Bill Conti, and Stan Getz to
Johnny Mathis,
Frank Sinatra,
Paul Anka,
Rod Stewart and
Alicia Keys amongst many others. He has performed with
Celine Dione at the Oscars,
John Williams with the Boston Pops, and in the Super bowl with Tony Bennet and
Patti LaBelle. His playing can also be heard on Dave Grusin's soundtrack for "Havana", in the "Mambo Kings" soundtrack with his Grammy nominated composition "Mambo Caliente", in the soundtrack of "The Perez Family", was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to compose the music for the ballet of "Pepito's Story" choreographed by
Debbie Allen, and, as mentioned above, he was awarded an Emmy for his composing work on the entire underscore of the HBO movie based on his life, "For Love or Country" starring
Andy Garcia.
Arturo Sandoval reaches beyond the scope of mere effort. His struggles while in Cuba and since his defection have given him more energy and strength, urging him to accomplish and surpass his childhood dreams. Filled with a virtuoso capability, he desires nothing more than to share his gift with others who feel the same intense adoration for music as he does. One frequently speaks of
Arturo Sandoval's virtuoso technical ability or his specialty in high notes, but he who has seen him on the piano, lyrically improvising a ballad, or has had the opportunity to enjoy the diversity of his music, through his compositions from the most straight ahead jazz, Latin jazz or classical, knows that
Arturo Sandoval is a prominent musician, and one recognizes that Arturo is one of the most brilliant and proliferous musicians of our time.
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Mystical yet fiery, passionately romantic yet supremely cool...You hear those first few notes from that instantly recognizable tenor and know you're in the unique musical world of GATO BARBIERI.
His legend continues on his most recent and 50th album "The Shadow of
The cat"(Peak/Concord PKD-8509-2). Released in September 2002, "Shadow" won Billboard's prestigious 2003 Latin Jazz Album of the Year and garnered a Latin Grammy nomination. Beginning professionally as a teenager playing alto sax in Buenos Aires clubs, Barbieri's five decade career has covered virtually the entire jazz landscape, from free jazz (with trumpeter Don Cherry in the mid-60s) and avante garde to film scoring and his ultimate embrace of Latin music throughout the 70s and 80s. He began playing tenor with his own band in the late 50s and moved to Rome with his Italian born first wife Michelle in 1962, where he began collaborating with Cherry. The two recorded two albums for Blue Note, Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers, which are considered classics of free group improvisations. Barbieri launched his career as a leader with the Latin flavored The Third World in 1969, and later parlayed his Last Tango success into a career as a film composer, scoring a dozen international films over the years in Europe , South America and the United States . From 1976 through 1979, Barbieri released four popular albums on A&M Records, the label owned by trumpet great
Herb Alpert. The Shadow of
The cat is a reunion of sorts for the two, with Alpert playing trumpet and trumpet solos on three songs.
Barbieri officially took up the clarinet at age 12 when he heard
Charlie Parker's "Now's The Time", and even as he continued private music lessons in Buenos Aires, he was playing his first professional gigs with
Lalo Schifrin's orchestra.
Barbieri credits his learning of musical discipline to his years working with Don Cherry while living in Europe . While collaborating with Cherry in the mid-60s, the saxophonist also recorded with American expatriate Steve Lacy and South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand. Other associations during Barbieri's free jazz days included time with Charlie Haden, Carla Bley and the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, as well as dates with
Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira, Chico O'Farrell, and Lonnie Liston Smith. He had recorded a handful of albums on the Flying Dutchman label in the early 70s and then signed with Impulse where he recorded his classic Chapter Series Latin America , Hasta Siempre, Viva Emiliano Zapata and Alive in New York . While at Impulse, Last Tango hit, and by the mid-70s, his coarse, wailing tone began to mellow with ballads like "What A Difference A Day Makes" (known to Barbieri as the vintage bolero "Cuando Vuelva a tu Lado") and Carlos Santana's "Europa". Many smooth jazz radio stations later adopted "Europa" as their theme song, indicative of the vibe of the "new" format, which launched in the late 80s. Most of Barbieri's A&M recordings of the late 70s-including the brisk selling 1976 opus Caliente!-featured this softer jazz approach, but early 80s dates like the live Gato...Para Los Amigos had a more intense, rock influenced South American sound.
After many years of limited musical activity due to the passing of his first wife Michelle (also his closest musical confidant and manager) and his own triple bypass surgery six weeks later, Barbieri return
Ed Stronger than ever with the 1997 Columbia offering "Que Pasa", the fourth highest selling Contemporary Jazz album of the year.
Live From the Latin Quarter"It's the melody," he continually says. "The melody is the most important thing, and something I very much love. When I play the saxophone, I play life, I play love, I play anger, I play confusion, I play when people scream; all of these aspects of the world I inhabit become naturally important to me. It's exciting that people are still moved when I play, and I consider myself blessed to have had fans that have listened to me for such a long time. They still do, and I'm still having fun. When I start recording, I am playing for me, but when I play a concert, I play for me and them. It is not a "show", but it is a musical message. They understand where I am coming from.
Since "The Shadow of
The cat", Gato has continued to play festivals, concerts and clubs around the world. One reviewer, who first saw Gato live in 1972, and then reviewed Gato live again in 2004, said of his 2004 performance (May 15, 2004, Washington, PA), "Gato's show that night was nothing less than consummate artistry by a true master of the jazz idiom. If this is what his performances are like these days, then everyone should see him while he still has the energy to play like this. He is one of the rarest musicians in any style because he has created a sound unique to himself that is timeless. His music sounds every bit as powerful, vital, and refreshing as it did in 1972," when this reviewer first saw him perform in Princeton , NJ .
There have been several recent highlights in Gato's life:
In July of 2003, Long Island University and WLIU combined to give Gato a Lifetime Achievement Award. In September of the same year, Boston Symphony Orchestra's Tanglewood Jazz Festival headlined Gato Barbieri at the Ozawa Concert Hall. The performance was broadcast live by Boston 's WBGH and New York 's WBGO; it was the beginning of the fledgling NPR station network as the concert was simulcast over eight stations from New England to Pennsylvania to Chicago .
In late August, 2004, Universal Music released four new compilation CD's in their world renown "20th Century Masters" series: SARAH VAUGHN,
Charlie Parker,
Carmen McRae and GATO BARBIERI. This association with other jazz icons only serves to once again confirm BARBIERI's legendary status both within the music business community and to the entire world.
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If music were about pictures, percussionist PONCHO SANCHEZ's music would best be described as a kaleidoscopic swirl of some of the hottest colors and brightest lights to emerge from either side of the border. At any given show, on any given record, fragments of Latin jazz, swing, bebop, salsa and other infectious grooves collide and churn in a fiery swirl, with results that are no less than dazzling.
All of these sounds and more come together in Psychedelic Blues, Sanchez's twenty-fourth recording on Concord Records. "The last couple records have gone a little heavy on the soul music, which has gone over really well in our live shows, but we wanted to do more of a straightahead Latin jazz record this time - something in the tradition of our earlier Concord records that we made back in the '80s."
With that strategy in mind, Sanchez enlisted guitarist Andrew Synowiec to change up the sound on a few tracks. Synowiec, a regular member of the L.A.-bas
Ed Gordon Goodwin Big Phat Band, landed the gig about five minutes into his audition. "He came through the door with just a guitar and an amplifier," says Sanchez. "No effects pedals or other gadgets. He plugged and started to play, and I said, 'No more auditions. We're using this guy.'"
Although born in Laredo, Texas, in 1951 to a large Mexican-American family, Sanchez grew up in a suburb of L.A., where he was raised on an unusual cross section of sounds that included straightahead jazz, Latin jazz and American soul. By his teen years, his musical consciousness had been solidified by the likes of John Coltrane,
MiLes Davis, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Wilson Pickett and
JAmes Brown. Along the way, he taught himself to play guitar, flute, drums and timbales, but eventually settled on the congas.
At 24, after working his way around the local club scene for several years, he landed a permanent spot in Cal Tjader's band in 1975. "I learned a great deal from Cal," says Sanchez, "but it wasn't as though he sat me down and taught me lessons like a schoolteacher. Mostly it was just a matter of being around such a great guy. It was the way he conducted himself, the way he talked to people, the way he presented himself onstage. He was very elegant, very dignified, and when he played, he played beautifully. The touch that he had on the vibes - nobody has that sound. To me, he was - and is, and always will be - the world's greatest vibe player."
Sanchez remained with Tjader until the bandleader's death in 1982. That same year, he signed with Concord for the release of Sonando!, an album that marked the beginning of a prolific musical partnership that has spanned more than 25 years and has yielded two dozen recordings.
Psychedelic Blues, the latest product of that partnership, opens with the simmering "Cantaloupe Island," a
Herbie Hancock composition recast in a Latin jazz groove. A number of soloists step forward here, most notably Torres on trombone and Synowiec on guitar - all weaving effortlessly above a firmly anchored rhythm section.
Premier Latin trumpeter
Arturo Sandoval - Sanchez's friend since their first gig together at a festival in Sardinia, Italy, some twenty years ago - makes a guest appearance via a rendition of Freddie Hubbard's "Crisis." The track showcases Sandoval's respect and reverence for the American bebop maestro who had passed away just a few months before the Psychedelic Blues sessions.
The title track is a fast-moving mambo, originally written by Sonny Henry and arranged here by
Francisco Torres, who attaches a surprise at the end of the track. "Francisco really souped it up," says Sanchez. "The song has some nice horn lines, and some great jazz riffs, and then it ends in a bolero. So the song burns almost all the way through, and then at the end it shifts into a ballad."
The intriguing centerpiece to the album is a Willie Bobo medley featuring "I Don't Know" (a Sonny Henry piece commonly associated with Bobo), the laid back "Fried Neckbones and Some Homefries" and the slightly more urgent "Spanish Grease." All three of these songs merge effortlessly to create a nostalgic nod to the revered Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz percussionist of the '60s and '70.
Further into the set, Sanchez and the band turn "Silver's Serenade" - originally a swing tune by Horace Silver - into a mambo with personality to burn, thanks in large part to solo work by
Francisco Torres. When Poncho himself steps forward to deliver some syncopated conga lines, the net result is an infectious groove.
The salsa-flavored closer, "Con Sabor Latino," is an old song by Rene Touzet, a native of Cuba who became a well known Latin bandleader in Los Angeles in the '50s and '60s. In many ways, the song is Sanchez's tribute to some of the musical memories of his childhood. "My older
Brothers and Sisters used to see Touzet play at the Hollywood Paladium," he says. "Back then, Chico Sesma was the only Latin disc jockey on the radio in southern California, and 'Con Sabor Latino' was his theme song."
Whether it's salsa, straightahead jazz, Latin jazz, or even elements of soul and blues, the mesmerizing array of sounds and colors from Poncho Sanchez's youth have telegraphed across the decades and continue to inform his creative sensibilities to this day. "There's room for a lot of different sounds in our music," he says. "I think people have come to know that that's what Poncho Sanchez is all about. We put it all together in a pot, boil it together and come out with a big stew. This isn't some marketing strategy to sell records. These are the sounds I grew up with. So when I play this music, I'm not telling a lie. I'm telling my story. This is the real thing." This biography is property of Concord Music Group, Inc.
For more information, please visit the Blue Note Stage at http://www.bluenotejazz.com/
