Tracks: Wild Jungle//Congo Mulence //Kenya //Oyeme //Holiday //Cannonology //Frenzy //Blues a la Machito //Conversation //Tin Tin Deo //Minot Rama //Tururato
With spring in the air and the global superpowers on the verge of becoming banana republics, it seems only appropriate to welcome a little mambo to the blog. Not to imply by my introduction that Kenya is artistically impoverished. Machito is one of those rare few individuals to whom one could accurately apply the term “mambo visionary”, and his music displays a dazzling breadth of imagination; so much so, in fact, that half of his songs stop midway and change into different songs entirely. Thus, we get an album that comes across like the coked-up lovechild of Herb Alpert, Tito Puente, Esquival and Fela Kuti. Not that I’m complaining.
The title is accurate, anyway. Machito fuses American big-band styles and a sense of bop jazz improvisation with Cuban and African popular forms, and you end-up with a great dance album. On my personal favourite, “Oyeme”, you get a hypnotic hand percussion-and-bass introduction on a five note pattern that could be right out of a Lee Perry dub number. It suddenly bursts into what sounds like African High Life music, with a series of tense, escalating riffs on the brass section, and then a wonderful sax solo right out of bop comes squealing along in the right channel, basically preempting John Coltrane. It’s great. The overall impression is of the sort of music that James Bond might have had a car chase to in Dr. No. If you ever found yourself longing for more songs like Yoko Kanno’s “Tank”, this is the place for you. Well, actually “Frenzy” is the place for you, as the intro is more or less identical to “Tanks”. Aptly named number, too, and with one hell of a drum break.
However, not all of the songs are as good. The slowerer numbers tend to sound a bit syrupy. The title track is just sort of tedious, the sort of whimsical horn you’d expect to hear soundtracking a bad comedy Western, while “Holiday” is pleasant but very much in the tradition of the Tijuana Brass. None of the songs are outright bad, but they do tend to blend together after a while. What saves them are the interesting introductions to several of the tracks, and the tendency for the orchestra to cut out at points and lead into sudden, expansive Afro-Cuban percussion solos that must have set the dance floors on fire at the time.
So, a really good album. For a guy whose prior experience with Latin music of the 50s had mostly been Doris Day and the Grace Chang musical Mambo Girl, this was a pleasant surprise. It never really gets dull, although after the first listen the novelty might wear a bit thin. This is a party album and as a consequence not all th tracks bear great scrutiny. There are dozens of wonderful moments, however, which are more than enough to keep it interesting, and it benefits strongly from both having much better production than and being not quite like almost anything else on the list to this point. The arrangements are really quite interesting, hard hitting but lush and complex, and the way the horns and bass float over the watery drums is oddly precise, but wonderful. It's great stuff. I guess I was wrong when I said there wasn't much exotica on the list. I can't wait for the Yma Sumac.
8/10
Download: Machito - Oyeme Mp3
And for no real reason, here is Grace Chang singing a song:
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