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!). .....