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CARLOS MAZA

Fidelidad
(CD Emarcy 016 109-2)

This sixth album by Chilean multi-instrumentalist and composer Carlos Maza  his second for  Emarcy  is a new chapter from the same dream, and it is the most Cuban of his recent recordings. Not that Cuban music was totally absent from his previous discography, but Carlos Maza, who has been a Cuban resident for twenty years, decided here to “give back to Cuba, in my own way, what the country gave to me.”
Freed of the constraints that arise when recording frequently at close intervals, Maza devoted himself exclusively to the project and acquitted himself with honours, going deeper into the vein and translating the musical complexity of it abundantly, making a new story. The work here covers a decade (1993-2001), and its stages have been scrupulously written down and translated into an ample music constructed with breathtaking inventiveness. It is the revelation of a labour of love nourished with the ethics of rigour; an intricately-woven net of flowering compositions; a wealth of singular, combinatory forms dispensed by musicians  all of them also multi-instrumentalists  who form one body with the musical material.

For example :

Serpentina. Introduced by the tres as a traditional son quickly exhausted by the breaks, the theme drops into a danzon-cha before swooping back up in a calypso, rebounding with audacious effects that never abandon melodic legibility. A juxtaposition of sound and rhythm landscapes in movement.

With Santiagos (Santiago de Chile and Santiago de Cuba), Carlos places a muffled prelude on the guitar before patiently setting out the theme. Over a 6/8 infrastructure set by the bata drums, the trumpet disseminates a light chorus that announces the flamencoesque solos which Maza develops in little kicks from his guitar. The playing is sober and dense. Reggae comes in obliquely with a tres in the rhythm-guitar role, before a repeat in the coda.

Guanabacoa. A special aroma exhaled by the piano clasped by the bata drums before everything is pushed headlong down the slope in a carnival conga where Mateu Herro, an old Abakua friend of Maza, recites a concentrated, limpid text with the voice and diction of a Nicolas Guillen. An ode to the history-laden suburb in eastern Havana which welcomed Carlos at the age of seven.

A superb illustration of the almost never-used ordering of “string and wind instruments from South America and the Caribbean”, Del altiplano en aeroplano opens with a call from the Andean charango, launched  or so we believe  in a celebration of some splendid, unique ceremony; but then, as if by accident, the tres comes in to install the east-Cuban son in stops and starts. A mad scramble that’s original, with a sense of the elliptic that forms the foundation for another temporality.

Del deber y las estrellas. A soothing danzon in which Carlos gives voice with an agreeable timbre and phrasing à la Nueva Trova Cubana (Pablo Milanes, Silvio Rodriguez). The pretty poem is a bonus.

Fidelidad, which gives the album its title, opens in a Creole quadrille with upstrokes and downstrokes, flute, violin and… tuba  an unorthodox instrumental format  before settling into a straightforward danzon.

No hay fantasmas. A detailed, walking bass account out of which spring breakneck metrics on the cymbal, brisk and as if suspended over an uncoiling merengue/perico ripiao from the tambora and tumbadora combination. The piece is spanned by a lazy, mischievous development of the melody led by Carlos  as an inspired colourist  on piano and flute. The theme, playing on the connective modes and flexible shadings that are proper to Maza’s compositions, suddenly snorts into a carnival conga (with Chinese cornet in support) over which the composer plays a thoughtful “call and answer line”. “This is the least personal tune. I think we each have an occupation, but it’s important for it to be useful to society. Music must also be useful to society, in my opinion. I don’t believe in the musician seeking only beauty, or art for art’s sake. There’s something that goes beyond music,” stresses the young artist.

To resume, this is highly-organised, richly-arranged music, and it undeniably invites a certain receptivity when listening to it. Listed with the most meticulous care  and a distance that is remarkable  the paradigms of the genres weave slim links (through the vision and determination of their original composer) to form a network of meanings.

It is a recording full of junctions and diversions, with a great mobility in the rhythmic linkages and a quite uncommon diversity of sound textures. The work has multiple entries that reveal handsome qualities of colour and dynamics, served by a virtuoso musicians’ collective that is equal to the orchestral task. Exactness of execution for shared invention. A kind of “act of faith.”

Courtesy of:
Jazz Musiques Productions
ph: 33.(0)4.67.59.74.97
fax: 33.(0)4.67.59.72.84
e-mail: jimp@jmp.fr
http://www.jmp.fr

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