Yosvany Terry: Today's Opinion

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Gonzalo Rubalcaba (p)
Osmany Paredes (p)
Yunior Terry (b)
Yosvany Terry (as woodblocks, bells)
Pedro Martinez (perc)
Michael Rodriguez (t)
Obed Calvaire (d)

Label:

Criss Cross Jazz

July/2012

Catalogue Number:

1343

RecordDate:

October 2011

Yosvany Terry is currently a member of the Eddie Palmieri band. Born in central Cuba, he studied at the prestigious National School of Art and the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory. For the past 13 years, he's lived in New York and this is his first jazz album as leader since Metamorphosis (Kindred Spirit) in 2006, which really impressed this writer. Today's Opinion is a giant step forward. It's not a typical Criss Cross album, but it's so much more than just another latin jazz record. The opening track is perhaps the nearest to that category, but as it progresses and deepens, you know this record is going to be something special. This is an outstanding complex jazz record by the finest Cuban musicians in America. Yosvany, who has worked with, among others, Roy Hargrove, Dave Douglas, ‘Tain’ Watts, Avishai Cohen, the legendary Columna B, Dafnis Prieto and Steve Coleman, is a brilliant alto and soprano player (no slouch on tenor, either) and the band – with its strong African, Cuban and American influences – is in the same class as Coleman's own Five Elements. His compositions – harmonically influenced by great modern classical composers like Bartók and Prokofiev as well as the giants of modern jazz and rhythmically by what he grew up with and what he's heard on his travels – are as highly sophisticated as any jazz charts around today. His front-line partner Michael Rodriguez (brother of pianist Robert, whose 2006 Rodriguez Brothers Conversation CD on Savant was so strong), also with the Palmieri band, is as good as almost any of the current top US trumpeters. The rhythm section has a strong two-handed pianist (Paredes), Yosvany's younger brother Yunior, now a formidable, strongly grooving bassist and the excellent Obed Calvaire (sometimes with Sean Jones' group) on drums, who sounds like a polyrhythmic mix of Dafnis Prieto and Chris Dave. A jazz band of Cubans who play with magnificent musicianship, passion aplenty with its heart on its sleeve, interpreting striking scores that sound even more interesting every time you listen. I repeat, it's so much more than a Latin jazz record. It's a great jazz CD.

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