Codes - Ignacio Berroa | Jazzbo Notes

May

14

Codes - Ignacio Berroa

≡ Category: 2000s, Post Bop, Reviews, Worth A Listen |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

WORTH A LISTEN

Rating:

With a cast of characters like bassist John Patitucci, David Sanchez on tenor, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and drummer Ignacio Berroa, I couldn’t very well afford to ignore Codes, the debut of drummer Ignacio Berroa as a leader.

On Codes, Ignacio Berroa is not content to do the usual thing Latins do when playing jazz, which is to overlay a Latin rhythm on top of a jazz composition and blow. Ignacio Berroa is trying to something a great deal more ambitious. He wants to pry into the musical DNA of jazz and Cuban music and fuse the two together. Sometimes the results are worth the effort and sometimes they are not.

Chick Corea’s Matrix is an example of a fusion that works. When I first heard it, I didn’t even recognize it. Berroa deconstructs the harmonic rhythm of the head, fusing it to a Latin beat. Occasionally, he brings back the original fast swing of the original. Ignacio Berroa’s version of Matrix will spin your head around the way it shapeshifts from Latin to jazz and back again. The playing by everyone concerned is exemplary. David Sanchez kills on tenor and Berroa gets his licks in, too.

Ignacio Berroa’s original, Jaoa Su Merced, is another winner. Above the mysterious and fecund groove, Philbert Armenteros raps in Spanish. Armenteros’ vocal timbre compliments the instrumentals and adds flavor to the track. Gonzalo Rubalcaba has a spacious, limber acoustic piano solo on this one.

Partido Alto creates tension by contrasting the balladic melodic line against a bubbling groove beneath it, which strains to break away like a dog on a leash.

Berroa finally gives the listeners a rest with a ballad, Realidad Y Fantasia. Gonzalo Rubalcaba begins the tune with a rubato piano solo. I didn’t much care for his halting, deconstructionist take. When the band joins in, things become more conventional. Felipe LaMoglia plays the melody straight on tenor. When Gonzalo Rubalcaba gets to have his say, it’s a relief when he’s back to his usual sparkling single note runs, which he constructs with care and attention to the spaces between the notes.

The date starts to go wrong with Berroa’s dissection of Wayne Shorter’s Pinocchio. I wish people played Pinocchio more often, and goodness knows this band could have done it justice. At first, we think the interpretation is going to be a triumph, but Berroa is determined to be clever. He slows down the melodic line by half, while maintaining the original tempo, albeit Latinized. It’s a terrible idea. He compounds his error by repeating the melody over and over, the way the Miles Davis Quintet did, instead of improvising over the form. Berroa ruins the tune, despite a committed performance from his band.

He tries a similar trick with Dizzy Gillespie’s Woody ‘N’ You and trashes that tune, too.

Berroa doesn’t do any favors to La Comparsa either. He tries to wed the lilting melody to a busy, persussive background. It just doesn’t work.

It’s hard to know what to make of a recording like Codes. Clearly, Ignacio Berroa can play. He attracted stellar musicians to this project. He has the temerity to take on standards and attempt to deconstruct them. And sometimes, as in the Matrix, it even works. But more often, it doesn’t, which I put down to lack of taste and judgement. Somebody should have whispered in Berroa’s ear that his interpretations of Pinocchio, Woody ‘N’ You, and La Compresa were just flat out embarrassing.

So, how to rate Codes? The musicianship is superb throughout, but three out of eight songs are fatally flawed conceptually, to the point that they make me cringe. Giving Codes the benefit of the doubt, I’ve awarded it 2 1/2 stars and a Worth A Listen rating. Consider yourself warned.