A new beat: Carcasses moves Cuban music forward
Posted on Mon, Jul. 21, 2008
BY JORDAN LEVIN
Cuban pianist/composer/bandleader Roberto Carcasses wants to move Cuban music forward, past son tradition and timba formula.
''We want to do a musical investigation, really create something new,'' he says, sitting in a friend's Miami Beach apartment, where he's been staying while visiting here from Havana. ``It's to mess with your head. We're really trying to do something different. And since Cuba isn't really part of the commercial market, that leaves us free to investigate.''
Miami got a live taste of Carcasses' musical investigations at Little Havana's Manuel Artime Theater on Thursday night. The most successful songs took off from the deeply entrenched Cuban traditions of propulsive energy and complex rhythmic patterns, blending them with funk and rock, and, yes, salsa and timba, in the style of Carcasses' famed Havana ensemble Interactivo. They got much of the crowd of about 500, mostly young or young-thinking exiles hooked into and hungry for contemporary Cuban culture, dancing and cheering enthusiastically.
Carcasses was backed by a pick-up group of some of Miami's best younger expatriate musicians and singers, notably Descemer Bueno, the virtuoso bassist, composer and longtime compatriot of Carcasses who recently launched a band, Cubiche, that's a kind of Miami version of Interactivo. Altogether they made the evening a celebration of the fusion scene that's hot in Havana now.
''They're going to be the future,'' said Eva Silot, who defected in 2001. ``They bring something different to this country, a fusion of Cuban music with world rhythms. This is going to happen.''
But the first half of the concert, largely drawn from a recently recorded Carcasses album of mostly soft romantic music, was not bold innovation, but pale and musically mushy versions of Latin or American pop and soft jazz fusion. The world doesn't need a cover of Bruce Hornsby's The Way It Is.
Carcasses is an impressively versatile and skilled pianist, and he made his instrument sing on a cover of the Beny More classic Bonito y Sabroso, expanding its sly, sensual spirit with jazz harmonies. In one jam, his piano astonishingly stood in for a whole timba rhythm section. But his voice sounded thin and just this side of whiny on largely cliched soft jazz-pop ballads.
Much better were the dance numbers where Bueno's agile, muscular bass meshed with Carcasses' equally supple piano. Drummer Armando, the youngest of three famed ''Pututi'' Cuban percussionist brothers, and guitarist Jorge Amarales filled out the quartet. Vocalists like Gema, of the famous duo Gema y Pavel, rapper Haka, Luis Bofil -- whose rich, classic voice has been a draw at club Hoy Como Ayer for years and who lit up the stage on Que No Cierre El Club -- and Pepito, a recently arrived singer who led the ending jams, fit in easily.
It's that kind of vibrant musicality that has earned Carcasses' ensemble Interactivo a central place in a Cuban musical scene that has fractured considerably since the explosion of timba, whose driving energy and ferociously complex rhythms set Cuba -- and many international Latin dance music lovers -- alight in the 1990s. But the style's popularity spawned too many formulaic bands and eventual fatigue.
Now, says Carcasses, only the top dance bands continue, while rap, reggaeton, rumba and fusion jostle for attention. And with U.S. and Latin American pop music readily available in Havana, musicians are incorporating outside genres. That can take the form of imitating reggaeton, or the more sophisticated use that Carcasses and fellow artists like Habana Abierta's Kelvis Ochoa, another star of the Cuban fusion scene, make of genres like funk, R&B, hip-hop and rock.
''An Interactivo show doesn't have to be one genre,'' Carcasses says. ``You can dance to rock, to swing, to funk. And to jazz improvisation.''
A graduate of the National School of Art and son of Bobby Carcasses, a famed musician and founder of the Havana Jazz Festival, Roberto formed two experimental jazz groups, Estado de Animo (with Bueno), in the early 1990s, and later Columna B, with saxophonist Yosvanny Terry and drummer Dafnis Prieto. With Interactivo, Carcasses mixes timba rhythms with, among many other things, jazz structures. ''It's fun,'' he says. ``And it's popular in Cuba. I don't know if it's commercial.''
It was also popular at the Artime. The crowd could find the clave, the backbone Cuban dance rhythm, in just about anything. And they were clearly hungry to dance to it, whether as timba, fusion or anything else.
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