Caribbean Project Delves Beyond Traditional Roots

The melting-pot music of the Caribbean Jazz Project at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater on Saturday night was a singularly multicultural musical experience, and one of the most entertaining jazz events of the season.

The Caribbean Jazz Project may not be precisely the right name for the creatively stirring, rhythmically effervescent group.

This is a band whose music far surpasses the unemotional implications of the word “project.” And this was a program that was bursting at the seams with a full range of musical passions.

Nor, for that matter, does “Caribbean” completely encompass the stylistic reach of the band’s music.

The presence of Cuban saxophonist-clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera and steel pan player Andy Narell certainly lent a Caribbean perspective to the proceedings. But D’Rivera, despite his Cuban roots, is a world musician in the truest sense, and Narell has taken the steel pans (also called steel drums) far beyond their Trinidad roots.

Add to that the multicolored sounds of Dave Samuels’ vibes and marimba, the contributions of Argentine pianist Dario Eskenazi, Peruvian bassist Oscar Stagnaro and American drummer Mark Walker, and the work of the Caribbean Jazz Project might more appropriately be called Jazz of the Americas. (Samuels, in fact, acknowledged the band’s hemispheric origins by humorously introducing Walker as a native “of Central America--Chicago.”)

Given the various origins of the players, it was appropriate that the group’s performance had a uniquely democratic character. There was ample solo space for everyone, and Narell, D’Rivera and Samuels--despite their high jazz visibility--performed with constant awareness of their roles as ensemble players as well as upfront leaders.

The music--much of it from the group’s two albums on Heads Up Records--was dominated by the subtle, combined timbre of steel pans, vibes and marimba, with D’Rivera’s woodwinds linking together with Eskenazi’s piano lines to dart through the lush harmonic textures. Solos emerged, not simply as theme and variation but as expressive voices rising through the background sounds like dolphins surfacing through ocean waves.

But there also were occasional, and almost always impressive, showcase numbers. Narell and Samuels played a stunning duet on a classic line, “Pan Night and Day,” by the great calypsonian, Lord Kitchener. D’Rivera’s clarinet and Stagnaro’s bass were extraordinary in the rhythmic variations on Ernesto Lecuona’s “Suite Andalucia” (with D’Rivera playfully tossing in some quotes from such familiar Lecuona melodies as “Malaguena”). And a lengthy exchange between Eskenazi’s piano and Walker’s drums that flowed out of a piece titled “Valse Triste” was an object lesson in how to keep a drum solo within the overall context of a group’s performance.

D’Rivera describes the Caribbean Jazz Project’s music as “a melting pot of a melting pot, throwing together south of the border rhythms from Latin America, Brazil, the Caribbean, Cuba, and slowing it up for a waltz or two.”

The ensemble’s performance at Wadsworth was all that and more.