CUBAN BOP:

O'Farrill Brings the Roots of Latin Jazz to Life (WILL FRIEDWALD, January 15, 2007, NY Sun)

During the opening riff to Dizzy Gillespie's classic composition "Manteca," the legendary trumpeter-composer usually had the members of his band chant "I'll never go back to Georgia" over and over. It was an extraordinary thing that the single most important figure in the development of the medium now known as Latin jazz was not Latin himself but rather a black man from the American South; it was as if the creator of Viennese waltzes had come from Shanghai or the originator of the Argentine tango had been born in New Jersey.

Gillespie's contributions to the medium were the subject of a tribute concert Friday and Saturday night at Rose Theater by the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, which is the Latin wing of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Titled "Cubana Be, Cubana Bop," after one of the Gillespie band's breakthrough works, the concert was directed by the pianist Arturo O'Farrill. Mr. O'Farrill is the son of the late Chico O'Farrill, one of the most distinguished composerarranger-bandleaders in all of Latin jazz and, not coincidentally, one of Gillespie's closest collaborators. [...]

Mr. O'Farrill began with "Tanga," a composition frequently cited as the first true work in the nascent Latin jazz idiom, composed for the bandleader Machito by the trumpeter Mario Bauzáá. The song had a profound influence on Gillespie, who put his own Latin pieces together in the late 1940s, adding Latin elements to his big band while encouraging a new wave of Latin bandleaders to add jazz soloists to theirs. Latin jazz was Gillespie's next step following his crucial role in the bebop revolution. By fusing Cuban music and bop, he created a new medium that was, in a move largely new to both of its predecessors, equally at home in concert halls and dance clubs. [...]

The central piece of the evening, though, was Chico O'Farrill's "Second Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite" of 1951, a brilliant work that is obscured in favor of its predecessor, the famous original suite from three years earlier that featured Charlie Parker -- and also because, perhaps, the composer didn't bother to give it a more memorable title. The 1951 suite is striking in its use of classical elements, opening as it does with a mixture of oboe, flute, and bass clarinet over congas (from a time when those instruments were rarely used in jazz), and also including a remarkable, non-Latin interlude that seemed inspired by Woody Herman's "Four Brothers."