Album Notes

A true jazz musician is just like a master chef - mix in a bit of this, blend in a bit of that, lift an ingredient from another recipe - and soon something very tasty emerges.  Imagine those first jazz musicians 100 years ago sampling the music brought to the southern US with the West African slaves, most of whom had spent time in the Caribbean and South American countries before being shipped to the US.  There was plenty of time for those African pulses and rhythms to fuse with the spicy music of Spanish gypsies and troubadours, and Afro-Latin music boiled up in the pot.  Early jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Gottschalk and Scott Joplin caught a whiff of that heady aroma and incorporated it into their music.  So did Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The new concoction was on the menu.  But it was Dizzy Gillespie's hiring of Cuban conguero Chano Pozo in 1947 that forged the ultimate fusion of "Latin and Afro- Cuban" jazz. Today, there's no end to the cross-pollination of jazz and Latin. Hearing a jazz quintet moving from son into 4/4 is no more unusual than a salsa band horn section riffing in the finest big band tradition.  Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz is everywhere. Winnipeg's Papa Mambo has been delivering the musical goods since the late '80's. Papa - Rodrigo Muñoz - is the driving force behind this combo, one of Winnipeg's most popular musical ensembles. Even a sojourn of a few years in his native Chile did little to dispel the band's "papa"-larity.  Papa Mambo had left its mark on the Winnipeg scene. So when Rodrigo and Carol Hutchinson returned in 2001, there was a great anticipation that some great musical things were about to happen.  The core of Papa Mambo was still there: Rodrigo on percussion, Carol had never stopped singing, Dave Lawton had become the man to call for a trumpet gig, Ken Gold's saxophone was omnipresent in Winnipeg and Gilles Fournier had become bassist numero uno (Gilles doesn't play on this recording though). There were some spots to fill - talented trombonist/keyboard player Jeff Presslaff brought his impressive US jazz background to the group, while the percussive section was filled out with some new younger names like conguero and percussionist Scott Senior who had studied in Cuba, percussionist Daniel Roy fresh from expanding  his horizons with a stint in New York, guitarist and tres player Victor Lopez ( yes, a tres player in Winnipeg) and the baby of the bunch, wunderkind pianist William Bonness.  The ingredients were there for the perfect five-star Afro-Cuban, Latin-Jazz feast. And the band doesn't disappoint on Amanecer, the first CD recording by Papa Mambo (hard to believe it's taken this long!). .....