Cachao season is in full swing. We can expect homages to the late master bassist/composer who passed away last month, including a major one later this year, which was meant not as conmemorative concert but one in which the Cuban maestro would perform.
Friday night's Orchestra Miami en concierto con Nestor Torres for a small but enthusiastic crowd at Miami-Dade Countyt Auditorium, ended in a Cachao tribute, which was fitting for a flutist who often performed with the late artist. Cachao was a major force in Cuban music. While Cachao was a mostly ignored sideman in Miami he was the object of reverence by the mostly Puerto Rican New York salsa community.
For the first half of the concert, however, Nestor Torres and the orchestra concentrated on classical music. Alas, though the pieces were zesty crowd-pleasers, the orchestra lacked fire and precision, even in Ernesto Lecuona's Malagueña, arguably the ultimate chestnute of the Latin repertoire. They picked up a bit with one of Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas, with Torres soloing on flute. And dropped it again with another lively Spanish piece, Joaquín Rodrigo's Dos Danzas Españolas.
Curiously, when Torres came out to perform Jacques Ibert's Concerto for Flute, a classic of the instrument, Orchestra Miami came miraculously alive with this more challenging piece. Even then, there was a false start and Torres had to stop the orchestra -- it was a very laid-back concert, as Torres himself observed during it, and the fumble did not have the terrible effect it might in a stiffer presentation.
Torres attacked the breakneck-speed passages of the first movement with brio, and he continued in a display of virtuosity that may have surprised those who know him merely as a smooth-jazz performer. Even better, by the second movement Orchestra Miami was properly warmed-up, and for the finale it sounded like a true symphony orchestra, overcoming the limitations of its relatively small size.
After intermission the orchestra turned into a kind of symphonic salsa band, augmented by Latin percussion. Beginning with one of Torres' Latin-fusion numbers -- co-authored by the Grammy-winning flautist -- Orchestra Miami showed great flair for this kind of music.
They did the most famous danzón of all, Almendra, with the right mix of elegance and funk.
The danzón is the point in Cuban music in which European and African techniques and attitudes meet, embrace and, as history proved, live happily ever after. An orchestra this size is beautifully suited to the genre.
Danzones and fusion pieces alternated, culminating in Isora Club, a Cachao composition, where Torres played the guajira melody as if extracting guarapo from sugarcane. Before setting off in a fusion direction, Torres was a gifted flautist in charanga bands, the kind of violin-and-flute ensemble needed for playing Afro-Cuban music from the danzón to the cha-cha-chá. For decades charangas were popular in the Latin dance circuit, all the way into the salsa era, when greats like José Fajardo, Eddie Palmieri and Johnny Pacheco would play them at clubs like New York's Corso -- at the concert Torres asked for a show of hand of those who had partied at the Corso.
The concert featured the debut of a Cachao danzon, Arcano al bate, which the eponymous bandleader under whom the bassist and his brother Orestes Lopez created the mambo, never played because it was too difficult, as Cachao told Torres. Indeed, the beat was double-time and the first flute solo was a fast passage of Mozartian complexity. Eventually, though, the tune settled into a good-time dance piece, foreshadowing the finale, when the orchestra exited, leaving Torres' rhythm section to jam with him as Cachao's daughter, Maria Elena Lopez, led the audience in song.
