Street scenes (David Sanchez) #NNR5
To hell with the gloom! David Sanchez’s lively Street Scenes gives us just enough time to catch our breath before we’re literally overwhelmed by notes, each one more colorful than the last (“Casas negras”). Because that’s exactly what it’s all about with his jazz, which is steeped in Puerto Rican influences and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and this album, which presents itself as a series of snapshots of urban life (“Urban Frequency,” “Street Scenes Downtown”). In the mid-1990s, following the years of the Young Lions alongside Wynton Marsalis and a return to acoustic roots, the New Yorker manages to capture what an entire generation is trying to convey about the contemporary world around them: the intersection of cultures, tensions, loneliness, but also unexpected, even incredible, encounters, and moments of poetry, for those who take the time to listen, observe, and feel.
David Sanchez speaks this hybrid language, and that’s why Street Scenes naturally belongs in our “No November Rain” column, which, now more than ever, encourages us to look up from our screens and become more open to the life around us. You don’t have to be a jazz enthusiast to appreciate this album, which isn’t a treatise but rather a powerful call for freedom, discovery, and collective movement. Get out there and dance, for heaven’s sake!
Of course, the Coltrane legacy is immediately apparent in the flights of fancy of his saxophone, even though Sanchez remains very accessible to those unaccustomed to such soaring passages. One can also sense the influence of the master Davis in the ensemble’s coordination, while maintaining that constant sense of improvisation. Yet David Sanchez moves away from hard bop; he doesn’t merely throw open the windows to these musical legacies (though there is a very successful interpretation of Thelonious Monk’s “Four in One”), but instead takes to the streets to breathe new life into themes of true modernity and often unexpected accents, the flavors of the cultural fusion that defines the Big Apple, all while openly rejecting the “Latin jazz” label, in a conscious effort to claim his place within jazz in the broadest sense, to breathe new life into it, and even to shatter the unnecessary barriers that confine it. This third album on Columbia is undoubtedly the one where the artist will step away from this balancing act to assert, in a sense, his distinctiveness.
To bring about this revolution, which has gone largely unnoticed outside the world of jazz (and that’s a real shame!), David Sanchez has assembled an admirable lineup: throughout this 51-minute album, Danilo Pérez on piano (who would later join the Wayne Shorter Quartet), Larry Grenadier, the brilliant double bassist of the future Brad Mehldau and John Benitez trio, Cuban drummer Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, backed on percussion by Milton Cardona, as well as several prestigious guests, from Cassandra Wilson, who lends her bluesy voice to “Dee Like the Breeze,” to Kenny Garrett on alto saxophone on “Los Cronopios” and “The Elements,” a former collaborator of Miles Davis, a pillar of the new generation, and a self-proclaimed heir to Coltrane, to whom he dedicated the essential album Pursuance: The Music of John Coltrane in that same year, 1996.
Just like the colorful cover of this Street Scenes album, and the palette of emotions through which David Sanchez invites us to journey, 90s jazz, through just a few albums and a handful of artists, took a step aside that was both deeply intense and transformative, a sound worth revisiting in this rainy month of November. Street Scenes is like learning to decipher the world on the colorful walls of the Bronx: the school of real life, where things rustle, leap about, struggle to find the right words, and suddenly you’re hit square in the face with a wave of wonder, because you finally feel, deep inside, not just one presence, but dozens, all invited to the grand banquet of emotions. So give it a try right away!
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