Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca is doing with the music of his homeland what US pioneers like Robert Glasper are doing with jazz – drilling down into the roots of the music, examining the influences that created the current generation, but doing it without nostalgia or slavish imitation.
Instead, there is a thrilling sense of immediacy, of different currents converging on the present, and of a musician who is organically connected to his roots.
Fonseca – as well connected, spiritually and literally, to the Cuban piano tradition as it's possible to be – casts his net wide, touching on Afro Beat, Keith Jarrett, samba, hip-hop, R&B, funk and disco, but the heart of ABUC (read it backwards) is a vivid exposition of all that is alive and intoxicating about the Afro-Cuban tradition.
