IDEAL OF GRANADA - FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4 1998
Jazz

Tremendous Nardy

JUAN JESUS GARCIA - GRANADA
Nardy Castellini Quintet.
Santa Fe.
Full.

The Jazz Festival ended as it had begun, with a full house and with a sax. This year's festival will be remembered for both things, for a continually full house (the box office was only 200 tickets short of being totally sold out) and for the wealth of sax players, with a lineup of five concerts. There wasn't even enough room to carry out the simultaneous activities, the all-nighters were crammed with people, and the movie showings had to be done in double sessions to accommodate everyone. In quantitative terms this year's events have been a complete success. Tremendous festival.
 

Leonardo Castillo is one of those superb musicians that keep arriving from Cuba attesting to the extremely high musical level of the island. For this performance he managed to put together a group of fellow countrymen that deserves its own proper name. Amado and Miguel live among us, Moisés Porro came down from Madrid, and brought with him as a guest player the stupendous pianist Ignacio Herrera. They were not the ones scheduled, but it was a tremendous band.

Habitual side dishes in numerous performance menus, Nardy and his companions are a spectacular show when they are the ones writing the script -even when they adapt it: the assembling and disassembling they subjected Parker's Anthorpology to, cubanizing it, was particularly worthy of note. Castellini is an ardent, torrential sax, a passionate, enthralling volcano before whom one cannot remain indifferent, he does not just play, he machineguns at dusk. To his left, Nachito should be denounced to the instrument protection society for the third degree to which he subjected his piano, extracting the whole truth from it, in addition to a few impossible statements… more than one of us was reminded of Michel Camilo in habanera version. As for the three players in charge of the rhythmics, they contrived a support that was powerful and boundless in possibilities that kept the soloists on an unavoidable upward thrust. The term Cubop or Latin Jazz ought to be preceded by hyperbolic qualifiers if it is to come even close to what we were able to listen to at the closing of the Festival. The exact opposite of what Rubenito and his group had to offer us: in contrast to the slow paced, full-of-wisdom octogenarian classicism of the latter, these other Cubans come out with the blazing impetuosity of a youth (also sonorous) that is boundless and ceilingless. Tremendous sound.

Except for the abovementioned Charlie Parker theme and a piece by John Coltrane (Giant Steps) the entire program was of their own making, composed by sax and pianist, themes that are robust and cross-style, with a strong ambiance component and accented sinuosity, which occasionally (Raro) even possessed psychedelic potential. A concentrated Caribbean session, with ballads full of emotional, evocative power -almost cinematographic- and brutal returns to the more physical and body breaking side of these Conga pa ti put an end to any desire to ask for more. It was not enough, it was excessive. Tremendous compay discharge.