Siobhán Longfinds Roberto Fonseca is in a league of his own
Roberto Fonseca: The Sugar Club, Dublin
We've been spoilt by the lush, louche rhythms of Cuban music in recent years: its distinctive languid pace offering us a perfect aural escape hatch from the often rabid rhythms of daily life.
Roberto Fonseca came billed as an able successor to Ibrahim Ferrer, and a next generation Buena Vista Social Clubber, but in fact this boy's in a league all of his own.
Fonseca's quintet embodies much of the geometric precision of Manhattan jazz, yet their music thrives on the back of elastine Latin rhythms. Bearing unquestionable kinship with one of his heroes, Herbie Hancock (particularly in his willingness to kick against the traces in the happy pursuit of an esoteric rhythm pattern), Fonseca still glories in the rich Afro-Caribbean melange that is Cuban music.
Piano and double bass lock horns with unimaginable sensuality, and congas creep in beneath the pair with a whisper on Llegó Cachaíto, Fonseca losing himself in the improvisation, but returning to the fulcrum of the melody line with almost military precision. His classical training serves him well on Clandestino, percussion and piano batting their conversation back and forth like a table tennis ball, each revelling in the wit of their repartee.
Javier Zalba, on saxophone, clarinet, flute and percussion, after Fonseca, was the discovery of the evening. Scattering low-key, serpentine trails of moon dust across the clarinet-drenched Suspiro and the flute-infused Zamazamazu, he stretched the quintet past any boundary more usually associated with Cuban music, which in itself has never been shy of mixing it up with Spanish, African and Caribbean infusions over the years.
It's not difficult to see how Fonseca's charisma has helped propel his music into the main frame, and his unforced communication with his audience would leave many of his jazz idols in the ha'penny place, but this was a fusion of five musicians utterly at one with one another and with their music. Rumbling towards a premature conclusion with El Neijo, their cap doffing to the late Ibrahim Ferrer, and a glorious interpretation of South African pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim's Ishmael, Fonseca and his compañeros left a startlingly fresh collection of Cuban music at our feet, to be savoured and digested long after the lights went up.
