Victor Feldman - Latinsville
© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Judging by the number of sessions it took to complete, the original Latinsville! album seems to have been a rather difficult project. Now we get a better sense of the album's gestation with the inclusion of five tracks recorded at a pair of previously unknown sessions. A quintet gathered at Contemporary's studios over two days in December 1958, to begin work on Feldman's second album for the label. Producer Les Koenig got as far as assembling an album side before a decision was evidently made to abandon the material and start over with an explicitly Latin feeling. A search of our vaults for bonus material for this reissue yielded nothing usable from the 1959 sessions, but it did uncover that assembled reel, along with the December session tapes. The tape boxes themselves divulged dates, song titles and engineering credits. Contemporary's original ledger books supplied the final part of the puzzle by revealing the names of the musicians who were paid for the dates.”
—STUART KREMSKY, tape vault archivist
Although Latin rhythms are fairly common in Jazz today, they were still finding their place in the music in the 1950s.
The pace of acceptance was certainly accelerated by the big bands of Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente, Prez Prado, Xavier Cugart and Machito and the Mambo dance craze that they help to initiate in New York and throughout the country in the 1940s and 1950.
These burgeoning Latin rhythms were reflected in the Jazz big bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton and Shorty Rogers, the quintets of Cal Tjader and George Shearing, respectively, and in thematic recordings such as the Miles Davis - Gil Evans collaboration on Sketches of Spain.
Jelly Roll Morton claimed that the “Spanish tinge” has been an influential undercurrent in Jazz since its inception.
And while that may have been true melodically, it took a while before Jazz was actually set to Latin rhythm sections with an emphasis on the clave beat.
Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver’s Quintet, The Jazztet and other East Coast based groups and composers such as Hank Mobley, J.J. Johnson and Sonny Clark all had tunes that they played with a Latin Jazz “feel,” but few Jazz groups soloed over Latin rhythm sections which emphasized the clave beat, preferring instead to switch to the more metronomic 4/4 time after the Latin-inflected theme was stated.
Perhaps because all of the the instruments that he played were percussive - drums, vibes and piano - the late Victor Feldman was always interested in playing in authentic Latin Jazz modes which are generally categorized as mambo, rumba, samba, and tango and the more hybrid forms of these rhythms generally grouped as Afro-Cuban, Salsa and Latin Jazz Fusion. He even dabbled with some of the more specialized Latin Jazz rhythms such as the Venezuelan Joropo with its emphasis on 6/4 time.
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