“Jazz, blues, I love you. Mexico, oh how I love you” – Tino Contreras brings the beats back to Casa Azul

The Mexican jazz drummer Tino Contreras was meant to be in London, headlining the La Linea Latin Music Festival. Instead, London, and the rest of the world, went to him. Which seemed fitting: at 97-years-old, having written jazz ballets and shared stages with Dave Brubeck, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, and with interest freshly piqued by his 2020 Brownswood album La Noche de los Dioses (The Night of the Gods), Contreras is a bona fide legend. Like the Oracle at Delphi, or Charlie Parker at Birdland, seeing him in situ, inside the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, felt epiphanic, a privilege.

“Jazz, blues, I love you. Mexico, oh how I love you,” said Contreras in Spanish, to camera. Having begun his career in the 1940s, Contreras has long melded the drumming patterns of the Tarahumara people of his native Chihuahua with Latin influences, global sounds, psychedelia and free jazz. Here, seated at his kit in a turquoise shirt and shades, he delivered 12 self-penned tunes that referenced everything from the nightclubs of Mexico to the sun’s role within Aztec culture, mouthing the rhythms (’Ba ba!’) as he directed a louche but intricate polyphony of interweaving melodies from flanked by seven pandemic-mask-wearing musicians including his electric bassist son, Valentino Contreras. Saxophonist Luis Calatayud blew a conch shell and a crocodile-shaped ocarina; Delhary Galindo, her dark hair decorated with Kahlo-bright flowers, shook rattles made from seedpods; Carlos Icaza, on microtonal harp – played with sticks on ‘El Sacrificio’ – added mystical shimmer to a set heavy with ancestral meaning.

Contreras directed with nods, sticks and eye contact, dialoguing with outstanding keyboardist Jaime Reyes on the astral, out there ‘Máscaras Blues’, bringing feisty Santamaria-style boogaloo to ‘Nina Yatel’, slow brushing his skins on the soft, rustling ‘Malinche’. Closer ‘Yúmare’, with its chants and fluttering bongos, was all subterranean decadence. Somewhere, Frida Kahlo was smiling.