Jazz breaking news: Leo Blanco thrills with solo Afro-Latin set
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Back here at The Forge in March, British pianist Robert Mitchell closed his inspired Leftitude festival with a grandstand display of piano-as-percussion.
Now with seamless continuity his Venezuelan counterpart Leo Blanco virtually picks up where he left off, drumming the wooden casing around the keyboard and stamping his feet to create a dizzying backbeat before a conventional chord can fill the air. Blanco then slaps his thigh and adds a fizzing scat line to develop a simple but energetic polyrhythm as his left hand darts into action to produce the first of an array of dynamic phrases that fall under the large umbrella of Afro-Latin music. When he addresses the audience about a quarter of an hour into the set, the genial Berklee graduate, whose new release is a live solo piano recording, Pianoforte, states that the rhythms of the ‘motherland’ that have invigorated south America are the lifeblood of his music.
Pieces such as ‘Peru Lando’ bear this out. Yet the performance also sees Blanco push his creativity with meter and form towards more abstract territory with a lengthy improvisation in which sharp, stark changes of key and a chain of several short, pithy motifs set in aggressively punched eighth notes make the music unsettling without it ever losing its sense of élan. Earlier Blanco had shown considerable guile when, reaching inside the piano, he strummed rather than plucked the strings to produce distinctly Arabic, quasi-oud like effects, which made sense as a Moorish-Spanish continuum also marked songs that lean to flamenco. Inevitably, given that reference, Blanco at times recalled Chick Corea in the verve of his ascending lines and tightly drilled phrase endings. But when he went into lyrical mode, as in the quite gorgeous ‘Tonada De La Luna’, he also loosely evoked the misty sensuality of Michel Camlio. Impressive as this solo offering was, it would be interesting to see Blanco lead a band as engagingly as he does on his two excellent studio sets Roots & Effect and Africa Latina.
– Kevin Le Gendre