NG La Banda Shows Why It’s Cuba’s Best Dance Band

NG La Banda is the last of the great Cuban dance bands to reach Los Angeles, but the highlights of the group’s stirring performance Sunday night at the Hollywood Athletic Club confirmed that NG is the best of the bunch--at least these days.

In the opening “Los Sitios Entero,” a tune from the group’s landmark 1992 “En La Calle” album, NG started off with such high energy that you wondered how the group could maintain the pace for more than two hours. Unfortunately, it couldn’t.

This is a marvelously precise band that is sometimes too ambitious for its own good. NG La Banda deserves praise for not relying on traditional salsa’s charms. It’s a pity, though, that the search for new textures--an extra touch of syncopation, extended jazz soloing and even a dash of rap--leads at times to a scattered, monotonous approach.

Halfway into the show, the band took a stab at reinterpreting a Chick Corea standard from his “Return to Forever” days. It was a clever idea, but it suffered from extended soloing at a time when the crowd just wanted to dance.

These occasional, distracting moments, however, didn’t squash the spirit of the evening. When the band, in typical Cuban fashion, jumped to the floor and danced with the audience, the excitement climbed back to the level of the opening moments. It was a fitting climax for a concert that resembled a roller-coaster ride in its power to both excite and annoy.