Jazz Review : Quintero Sets High Standard With Cross-Cultural Sound : The Colombian-born guitarist moves easily among genres while fusing styles ranging from boleros to cha-chas to funk.

Southern California is home to a large cadre of expatriateSouth and Central American musicians who are forming new, cross-cultural hybrids by combining the sounds of their homelands with American jazz and pop. One of the best of this lot is guitarist Juan Carlos Quintero.

Quintero’s first set Saturday at Randell’s showed the Colombian-born musician’s willingness to fuse styles ranging from boleros and cha-chas to funk and straight-ahead jazz. If this sounds like a soup with too many ingredients, think again. Quintero has a knack for moving easily among these genres, often in the course of a single song.

The unifying component to Quintero’s music is percussion, not just from the drummer Tiki Passilas and percussionist angel Figueroa, but from bassist Eddie Resto, keyboardist Joe Rotundi and Quintero himself.

At different times during the set, Resto and Passilas would put their instruments down and join Figueroa in a circle around the guitarist, coaxing rhythms from cowbells and various shakers while Quintero strung electric lines across the percussive swell.

Quintero himself often played in a percussive manner, striking clipped, rhythmic chords to set the music’s pace. He did just that in introducing the theme from Marcel Camus’ 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” a piece written by Antonio Carlos Jobim. This technique set the mood for all that followed.

An exchange of ringing bells and bird whistles greeted Quintero’s “Siempre,” while Figueroa added chatter from his congas and an African talking drum he kept slung over his shoulder. Quintero and Rotundi entered with rhythmic bursts before Resto’s improvisation on his skinny, electric Ampeg “Baby” bass, an upright instrument that resembles a double bass after several months of dieting.

Quintero’s “Medellin” explored an appropriately melancholy mood with the guitarist’s plaintive, flamenco-inspired play. From there it was on to “A Noche,” a bolero that found the guitarist using sustained, sliding tones that whined and cried, while Rotundi supplied spare, acoustic piano-toned accompaniment from his synthesizer.

Most revealing of Quintero’s approach was his arrangement of Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” which opened on a cha-cha riff before turning to a two-beat, Latin rhythm and later, in the middle of Quintero’s improvisation, to a strong jazz walk.

To complicate matters further, the guitarist strung together a series of Asian-inspired chords, of the sort heard in Japanese koto music, over the walk before returning to the cha-cha pace.

If all this sounds a bit complicated, it wasn’t. The transitions were seamless, due largely to drummer Passilas ‘ ease in shifting gears. Appropriately enough, Passilas was given solo space during “Song for My Father” and he filled his effort with a timbale-like attack that he decorated with cross-handed cymbal crashes.

Quintero will return to the county in June to play the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library’s Multicultural Performing and Visual Arts Series.