JAZZBO NOTES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED RECORDING
Rating: 
Time and Chance is the only Caldera recording available, other than their eponymously named debut, which I don’t particularly recommend. Not that the debut, Caldera, is bad.
It’s just that it is was their bid for commercial success, so they tamped down their Latin soul and accentuated a sort of lite, Spiro Gyra-esque funk (they were produced by Wayne Henderson of the Crusaders).
By the time Time and Chance came out, they had fully embraced their Latin roots. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Success didn’t come when we pimped ourselves. Let’s show these bastards what we can do. And if they shut us down, at least we can say that we went down fighting.”
Sure, there have been other Latin Jazz outfits, and other fusioneers such as Weather Report and Return to Forever were aware of and used Latin styles in the music, but Caldera was the only fusion outfit that approached the music as Latin first, jazz second, including elements of Afro Cuban, Flamenco, Salsa, Samba and Peruvian folk music.
Perversely, Caldera is one of the few bands that became LESS commercial as they went along. (Dreamer, which is unavailable on Amazon.com, is even less conventional, and stronger than Time and Chance.)
As if Caldera’s enthusiastic welding of Latin music and jazz/rock fusion weren’t enough, the featured soloists, Jorge Strunz, Eduardo del Barrio, and Steve Tavaglione all have major jazz chops. Strunz was the first person, as far as I know, to use acoustic guitar in an electric fusion setting, four years ahead of John McLaughlin’s Belo Horizonte (which, to be sure, has a very different sound). He just tears up the joint. Eduardo del Barrio provides a variety of sonic textures that infinitely enrich the proceedings, but he can rip off tasty single note lines with the best of them. Steve Tavaglione has kind of a Coltranesqe approach without the altissimo honks. He’s kind of buried in the mix and sweetened half to death, but if you pay attention, he sounds a lot like Steve Marcus, who played with Larry Coryell on some memorable dates.
Speaking of which, that’s a bone I have to pick with Time and Chance (and indeed with their other recordings as well). The production style is too slick by half. They balance and sweeten everything with reverb and echo and chorus within an inch of its life. That may make it sound prettier, but it tends to obscure the sophistication of what they were up to. And besides, it didn’t help put money in their pockets anyway. None of Caldera’s records ever sold worth a damn, and only the first one has been reissued on CD.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention. Time and Chance is only available on LP, and as of this writing, there is only 1 copy left, so I’d jump on it if I were you. This is one of the reasons you need to own a turntable (for more reasons, see my post Why You STILL Need to Own a Turntable).
