[TR24][OF] Roberto Fonseca (ft Dayme Arocena, Trombone Shorty, Eliades Ochoa etc.) - ABUC - 2016 (afro-cuban, piano jazz, world fusion, post-bop)

Источник: арт-дайджест «Солонеба»
Роберто Фонсека – один из ведущих пианистов кубинской джазовой сцены. Влияние Фонсеки на современный кубинский джаз и джаз в целом неоспоримо, но его творческие горизонты не ограничиваются тонкостями только этого жанра. Богатая музыкальная палитра Фонсеки полна контрастов. Последнее время он развивает концепцию, объединяющую электронную и аналоговую музыку в сочетании с африканской и кубинской стилистикой. Фонсека покоряет публику не только сильнейшей харизмой и сумасшедшей энергией, но и виртуозной техникой исполнения. Он успел заявить о себе еще в составе легендарного коллектива Buena Vista Social Club с Ибрагимом Феррером и Омарой Портуондо, с которой в 2014-2015 годах с триумфом облетел полпланеты. Стиль Фонсеки уходит корнями в традиции латиноамериканской и кубинской музыки.
Как и большинство кубинских исполнителей, Роберто занимался музыкой с раннего детства. Он родился и вырос в музыкальной семье: отец – барабанщик, мать – профессиональная певица (ее вокал можно услышать на нескольких альбомах сына), братья Эмилио Вальдес и Хесус Вальдес-мл. – перкуссионист и пианист соответственно. Поначалу, как и отец Роберто осваивал ударные, но в возрасте восьми лет он пересел за фортепиано. Несмотря на то, что главной страстью юного музыканта были клавишные, свою первую работу он получил в качестве ударника в группе, создающей кавер-версии хитов группы Битлз.
В возрасте 14 лет Роберто начал писать собственную музыку, черпая вдохновение в афро-кубинских корнях. Его появление как пианиста в возрасте 15 лет произвело фурор на престижном международном джазовом фестивале Jazz Plaza в Гаване. Свой успех Роберто захотел подкрепить хорошим образованием и получил степень по классу музыкальной композиции в известном кубинском ВУЗе Instituto Superior de Arte. А в 1996 году Роберто решил расширить рамки своего творчества и опробовать свои силы в других музыкальных стилях. Ради этого он совершил тур по Италии в компании итальянского исполнителя Августо Энрикеса. В рамках тура состоялся концерт на национальном итальянском канале RAI. Далее в течение нескольких лет музыкант работал над созданием своего дебютного альбома и в 1999 году выпустил пластинку Tiene Que Ver, благодаря которой стал лауреатом национальной музыкальной премии. Сегодня на счету Роберто Фонсеки 8 сольных альбомов, один из которых Yo (2012) был номинирован на премию «Грэмми» как лучший альбом латинского джаза.
http://soloneba.com/roberto-fonseca-fatoumata-diawara-transatlantic-meeting/

Roberto Fonseca (born 1975, Havana) is a Cuban jazz pianist. From an early age, Fonseca was surrounded by music: his father was a drummer, his mother, Mercedes Cortes Alfaro, a professional singer (she sings on her son's most recent solo album, Zamazu), and his two older half-brothers, Emilio Valdés (drums) and Jesús "Chuchito" Valdés Jr. (piano), are also two young musicians of great international prestige.
After an early interest in drums, Fonseca switched to piano at the age of 8, and by 14 was experimenting with fusing American jazz and traditional Cuban rhythms; he appeared at Havana's Jazz Plaza Festival in 1991 when he was just 15.
Fonseca studied at Cuba's prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte, where he obtained a master's degree in composition, even though he often says that he was a really bad student. After earning his degree, he left Cuba to find his sound.
His first album, En El Comienzo, which he recorded with Javier Zalba and the group Temperamento, was awarded Cuba's Best Jazz Album in 1999. This success encouraged him to work on two solo records: Tiene Que Ver and Elengo, combining Latin jazz, drum and bass, hip-hop, urban music and Afro-Cuban rhythms.
In 2001, Fonseca went to Japan to record No Limit: Afro Cuban Jazz. He also toured with the Buena Vista Social Club the same year and has worked with Rubén González, Ibrahim Ferrer, Cachaito, Guajiro Mirabal and Manuel Galbán.
A Buena Vista Social Club tour spanned the world, with over 400 concerts, promoting Ibrahim Ferrer's records next to great legends such as Cachaíto López, Manuel Guajiro Mirabal and Manuel Galbán, among others, and playing at the most prestigious venues, such as the Frankfurt Alte Oper, Palais des Congrès (Paris), Albert Hall (London), Beacon Theatre (New York), and the Sydney Opera House (Australia). Not a single review of Ibrahim's concerts, from South America to Asia, would fail to mention Fonseca's talent and his magnetic stage presence.
That period of intense work, touring round the world, led Fonseca to realise that his music was ready for creating his own project. He dug deep to compose each of the songs that form Zamazu, the result of the integration of all his influences: Afro-Cuban music, jazz, classical music and traditional Cuban music. In the words of one reviewer, his recording, Zamazu, is "a deftly varied and well-sequenced set that leaves a strong impression of who Fonseca is and promises plenty for the future."
2008 was a year full of work and experiences that have inspired Fonseca's new compositions, one being Columbia Pictures choosing the track "Llego Cachaito" from the Zamazu album for the Will Smith film Hancock.
With his 2009 album, Akokan, Fonseca wanted to bring the magic, strength and improvisation from a live show to the studio. With a quartet formation and accompanied by his band, the one that he had been playing with for the past 12 years, Fonseca as the record's producer encouraged creativity and chemistry amongst the musicians.
There are also two very special collaborations from artists that Fonseca admires, artists that have very different styles: Mayra Andrade, the Cape Verdean singer who wrote the words and sings on "Siete potencias", and Raul Midón, the American guitarist, who wrote "Second Chance". On this track Fonseca did the arrangements and Midon accompanied him on guitar.
In 2010 Fonseca was the support act for Omara Portuondo's USA. After the summer his album Roberto Fonseca Live in Marciac was released. It includes a bonus DVD which features footage of the festival's 2009 show.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Fonseca

#777Roberto Fonseca: ABUC
With the release of ABUC it has become eminently clear that everything Roberto Fonseca has been writing and performing, and capturing on disc has been leading up to this proverbial watershed moment writing his personal Cuban story as well as his own chapter into the history of Afro-Cuban music. Fonseca, more than any other young pianist of Cuban origin, with the possible exceptions of Omar Sosa and Elio Villafranca, has clothed his persona in the African origin of music, following his ancestral grandmasters – Bebo and Chucho Valdés – of course. But in every respect: technique, expression and dynamic, as well as in his reverence for what you might consider the summation and perfection of tradition, Roberto Fonseca is his own man – graceful, passionate and a force of nature.
The Afro-Cuban contribution to contemporary music, especially to Jazz, has been seminal from the earliest days of the 20th century; probably even before that if you consider that the African influence came many years before even Louis Moreau Gottschalk came to Cuba in the middle of the 19th-century. Later, it was Dizzy Gillespie, who probably helped popularize the music with his legendary association with Chano Pozo, and the contributions of Machito and Mario Bauzá that ignited the fuse which led to the explosion – the tremors of which we still feel today. However, what remained in Cuba was a complex tradition coded in Santeria that evolved from Yoruba culture, indelibly imbued from the motherland. Melded into this was the inevitable influence of Spanish traditional dance music. If this seems like an over-simplification of the Afro-Cuban paradigm it is because a much larger space would be required to present a true dissertation of the musical diaspora. But like his musical ancestors Roberto Fonseca has also written several musical narratives into the modern history of Afro-Cuban music one chapter at a time throughout his impressive discography.
The music of ABUC marks the crest on his musical wave as it hits the shore with a thunderous crash, frothing and foaming in sun-splashed ecstasy. In his elaborate and absorbing notes that accompany the disc, one is struck (but not surprised) by the depth of Roberto Fonseca’s spirituality and also (again, not surprisingly) by his reverential approach to the Afro-Cuban tradition. It is true that he appears in dazzlingly virtuosic form throughout the disc, and that he is joined here by a galaxy of stellar musicians including Eliades Ochoa, Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabel, both from the legendary Buena Vista Social Club, and Rafael Lay Bravo and Roberto Espinosa Rodríguez from the equally legendary Orquesta Aragón, as well as young sensations, vocalist Daymé Arocena (another one of many talented artists fostered by Canada’s “Havana” Jane (Jane Bunnett) and her producer/trumpeter husband Larry Cramer, whose love for and deep understanding of Afro-Cuban music has never received all the attention it deserves). Also included on ABUC are guitarist Munir Hosn, the talented Brasilian percussionist Zé Luis Nascimento, the silken-voiced Mercedes Cortés Alfaro, among others. But the stars are only as good as the ensemble that sends them up into the stratospheric realm and here, Roberto Fonseca leads this large ensemble with his two rhythmic pillars bassist Yandy Martínez and drummer Ramsés “Dynamite” Rodríguez who also act as the glue that holds it all together.
If it is true that the whole is invariably greater than the sum of its parts, it is also true that without a leader to spearhead the music and bring to it the right balance of poise and profundity this disc would not really become the mesmeric narrative written in a series of fourteen distinctive chapters. It’s hard not to be hypnotised right from the opening track itself; a sterling tribute to Latin Jazz with Ray Bryant’s “Cubano Chant” as interpreted twice by Roberto Fonseca (a lyrical elegy appears at the end of the disc). The music ignites like a fire that is stoked one song at a time. It smoulders through “Contradanza Del Espíritu”, burns with a blue flame through “Sagrado Corazón”, explodes like tightly bound sticks of dynamite in the short interlude, “Tierra Santa Santiago De Cuba” and smoulders again through “Habanera” and the glorious bolero, “Después” with the smoky vocals of Mercedes Cortés Alfaro and a beautifully translucent, muted trumpet performance by Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabel’s trumpet. At every turn Roberto Fonseca makes magical use of tone colour through his masterful use of the piano, constantly urging the other musicians to further explore their instruments’ capacities for harmonic complexity and haunting expression. Through it all, Roberto Fonseca is in particularly radiant form. Despite being the led voice throughout his arrangements – together with those by Joaquin Betancourt, Mark Mullins and Javier Zalba – are so imaginative that only occasionally does one become aware of the music being divided into several instruments.
Such is the dramatic effect of the music on the ear, that one is apt to find oneself quite breathless by the time the hypnotic “Velas Y Flores” comes around, complete with the drama and menace of spoken word and bottom-register-heavy tones and textures. The gorgeous exposition of Afro-Cuban roots concludes with a dazzling solo performance by Roberto Fonseca as he explores Ray Bryant’s “Cubano Chant” once again, this time with a completely different set of harmonics and a near-mystically fading rhythm at the end. A masterful performance such as this on ABUC is going to be hard to top. Nevertheless one waits for the next episode from Roberto Fonseca’s epic journey with bated breath.
https://latinjazznet.com/reviews/cds/roberto-fonseca-abuc/

Roberto Fonseca : piano & keyboards, vocals (2, 6)
Yandy Martínez : double bass
Ramsés “Dynamite” Rodríguez : drums
Inor Sotolongo : percussion
Eddy de Armas Camejo : trumpet
Lázaro Amauri Oviedo : trumpet
Yuniet Lombida Prieto : alto sax
Emir Santa Cruz Hernández : tenor sax
Joel Enrique Sagó Bell : trombone
Yoandy Argudin Feffel : trombone
Javier Zalba Suarez : baritone sax
Munir Hossn : electric guitar
Zé Luis Nascimento : percussion
Ben Ellman : baritone sax
Joe Gore : acoustic guitar
Yaroldy Abreu Robles : percussion
Policarpo “Polo” Tamayo : flute
Guests:
Daymé Arocena : vocals (2)
Trombone Shorty : trombone (1)
Eliades Ochoa : guitar, vocals (3)
Rafael Lay Bravo : vocals (7)
Alexey Rodriguez : vocals (10)
Manuel 'Guajiro' Mirabal : trombone (12)
Mercedes Cortés : vocals (12)