Jazz breaking news: Chucho Valdés And The Afro-Cuban Messengers Play Canary Wharf
Monday, October 3, 2011
On the first of a two-night run at Boisdale Canary Wharf, Chucho Valdés played at the Docklands venue for the first time on Friday, marking a new phase at this ambitious supper club with the visit by the great Afro-Cuban pianist and composer and his band, the Afro-Cuban Messengers.
Valdés, who is 70 on Sunday, brought his Afro-Cuban Messengers that featured traps drummer/percussionist Juan Carlos Rojas Castro, and two other percussionists: Dreiser Durruthy Bambolé in shades with a 120-watt smile on bata drums and vocals; and the band’s anchor conguero the brilliant Yaroldy Abreu Robles at the back. The bassist, Lázaro Rivero Alarcón, playing double bass early on and then electric bass later (driving the band’s fine version of ‘Birdland’ reconfigured as ‘Zawinul's Mambo’) was also a strong highlight of the Friday show. Tenor saxophonist Carlos Miyares Hernández provided the declarative function (the trumpet of Reynaldo Melián Álvarez more for harmonising) as did the conguero and bata player when they sang. But the guest singer Mayra Caridad Valdés, Chucho’s sister, really got the well-heeled city crowd singing ‘Besame Mucho’ back to her quite effortlessly and very early in the set provided some much needed energy from a crowd that needed some and were settling down to eat and listen.
If this had been a different kind of venue many in the audience would have been up and dancing beside their tables or over to the left of the stage if there had been a bit of room there. But it was a very strong performance by Chucho Valdés, dazzling with his consummate grasp of compound rhythms and intuitive improvising especially on danzón and in montuno sections. There were plenty of musicians in the house, including leading conguero Robin Jones and fine young pianist Jonathan Geyevu who last year jammed with Wynton Marsalis at the Vortex, holding his own.
Open since May the music room at Boisdale is within a very large upscale Scottish restaurant on one of its floors, featuring a long bar stocked with a huge number of expensive bottles of rare whisky on the right hand side, and plenty of space for diners. The room is so long and wide, with windows on the left that look out to some large corporate office-block towers, that the musicians can seem quite distant from the back but the sound is pretty good. Miles Ashton, who used to be behind the sound desk at Ronnie Scott’s, is now at Boisdale, and a former manager at Ronnie’s, Geoff Todd, is general manager at BCW, booking the bands and looking after the venue on behalf of Boisdale, a public limited company that runs the smaller jazz-friendly restaurants bearing the name in Belgravia and Bishopsgate.
– Stephen Graham