Latin Jazz Fest Packs a Solid Punch

Maybe the prospect of watching Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad in the “Fight of the Millennium” was just too tempting. How else to explain the modest turnout for the Third Annual “Con Ritmo y Sabor Latin Jazz Festival ‘99” Saturday night at the Watercourt at the California Plaza?”

With a solid lineup, an attractive venue and a reasonable ticket price, the place should have been jammed and jumping. But it wasn’t. And with rows of empty seats beckoning, the promoters quickly decided to invite the standing-room-only crowd on the second level into the reserved area. That made the event an even greater bargain for those who had bought standing-room tickets. But it was a shame that such a measure was necessary, since the program, for the most part, was a marvelous extravaganza of Latin jazz and Latin jazz-nuanced music.

Defining the program, pianist-composer Jesus “Chucho” Valdes, as he has done so often in the past, illustrated the many subtle ways in which jazz can be blended with Afro-Cuban rhythms. His rendering of an eclectic set of tunes, ranging from “Rhapsody in Blue” to “Embraceable You” to “El Cumbanchero” was tinged with traces of Art Tatum, Errol Garner and Bud Powell, underscored by his own uniquely rhapsodic jazz style.

And when he drove into one of his killer tumbaos, the flow energized by the free spirit of jazz and the body-moving propulsion of Afro-Cuban rhythmic drive, it was hard to understand why the aisles weren’t filled with dancing couples.

The four-trombone front line and surging rhythms of Manny Oquendo’s Orquesta Libre produced sounds that were equally stimulating and, if anything, even more danceable. The veteran percussionist has been leading a similar instrumental group for years, and he clearly has the formula figured. With a set of numbers that included New York salsa, Cuban danzon and, remarkably, a mambo-guaguanco rendering of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” Oquendo and his effervescent players brought an irresistible sense of musical joy to the evening.

The same is true of veteran Cuban guitarist-singer Eliades Ochoa. Best-known to American audiences for his work with the Buena Vista Social Club, Ochoa has been a celebrated performer of son in Santiago for decades. Wearing a black cowboy hat, playing his eight-string guitar, singing songs that harken to an earlier musical era, he was an instant hit with the Watercourt audience, the only performer to generate a standing ovation and a chanting demand for an encore.

By the time the stage was revamped for the closing set appearance of Lalo Schifrin, performing his “Latin Jazz Suite” with a big band, however, the audience had substantially diminished. The much-touted work is a six-movement suite reflecting Schifrin’s views of various Latin music locations--from Cuba and the Caribbean to Argentina and Brazil. In performance, it had a lot more to do with packaging than it did with content, reflecting Schifrin’s skill at skimming the surface of musical trends.

When the musicians weren’t reaching for, and not finding, the sound of Chico O’Farrill’s superb big band Latin jazz, they were referring, sometimes even mimicking, familiar numbers like Sonny Rollins’ “St. Thomas.” The most attractive moments were provided by the consistently engaging saxophone work of David Sanchez and the atmospheric trumpet lines of Jon Faddis.