Considering the temperature was low and the pavilion audience sparse, Saturday night’s installment of Ravinia’s Jazz in June series did not have a lot going for it.
Except for some of the most accomplished Latin jazz artists on the planet.
To note that the third night of Jazz in June was its best would be an extreme understatement. This was one of the most viscerally exciting performances in the decade-plus history of Ravinia’s jazz mini-fest and a reminder of the remarkable artistic level that the Highland Park soiree can achieve.
In a three-attraction evening that had no weak points, the most thrilling music by far came from a sensational, relatively new band improbably called the Big 3 Palladium Orchestra.
One might not expect very much from any ensemble that has been playing for barely two years and is directed by not one but three leaders. Yet judging by Saturday night’s incendiary (though technically disciplined) performance, the Big 3 Palladium Orchestra already may rank as the most brilliant large Latin jazz ensemble this side of Havana.
The fanciful title refers to New York’s fabled Palladium Ballroom, which from the mid-1940s to the mid-’60s was a nexus for Afro-Caribbean music in the United States. Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez were the “Big Three” bandleaders who gave the Palladium a large measure of its glory, and their gifted sons recently joined forces to create an unusual ensemble specializing in repertoire of each of the three jazz legends.
If this sounds like a formula for disaster — with three competing egos pushing different songbooks and agendas — the opposite proved to be the case. For Mario Grillo (Machito’s son), Tito Rodriguez Jr. and Tito Puente Jr. have staffed this ensemble with Latin dance-band veterans who can dispatch this repertoire more authoritatively than any younger group of musicians might hope to do.
Moreover, the idioms that this band explores — from the “Cubop” orchestral showpieces of Machito to the medium-tempo mambo classics of Rodriguez to the orgiastic dance rhythms of Puente — probably have not been so authentically expressed since the original bandleaders themselves were in their heyday.
From the outset, Grillo established the technical prowess, stylistic credibility and creative vitality of this group, for this ensemble (conceived by Grillo) addresses this music in fundamentally different ways than bands less steeped in the tradition.
For starters, Grillo and friends took pains to lay bare the layers of rhythm on which this music is built. Piano and percussion laid down the multiple “clave” patterns that more often than not these days are buried in a blur of orchestral sound.
With Grillo revisiting Machito’s repertoire, the rhythmic impulses of this music rightly were placed at the forefront, just as it is to this day in ensembles in Cuba, where Machito grew up (he was born Frank Raul Grillo). And the tempos that the younger Grillo chose — gently but inexorably pushing forward — were ideally suited to this music.
When Rodriguez Jr. took over, the very character of the band seemed to change, with great brass choirs and florid, call-and- response vocals suddenly taking prominence.
To hear so many virtuoso instrumentalists and vocalists producing so much contrapuntal sound — all of it propelled by extraordinarily seductive backbeats — was to savor the splendor of this band.
If the young Puente enjoys re-creating his father’s antics at timbales, the audience clearly welcomed the chance to revisit the spirit of the music of “El Rey” (“The King,” as the elder Puente was known). Yet this was no nostalgia show, for the band once again reaffirmed the perpetual freshness and creative possibility of this music.
Source: Chicago Tribune • Review by Howard Reich