Combining jazz and world music was nothing new in the 1990s;
Jelly Roll Morton had done exactly that in the 1920s with what he termed "the Spanish tinge." Nonetheless, world music was something that still had great creative possibilities for jazzmen, and one innovator demonstrating such possibilities was
Andy Narell. Having recorded two excellent projects with the adventurous
Caribbean Jazz Project in the 1990s, the steel pan player linked jazz with the music of Trinidad, Cuba, and Brazil on the superb
Behind the Bridge (his ninth album as a leader). Only one of the songs, the haunting "Sea of Stories," is a
Narell original; the rest of the CD finds him interpreting songs by composers from Cuba (including
Ernesto Lecuona's "Al Fin Te Vi" and
Chucho Valdés' "Claudia") and Brazilian gems like
Ivan Lins' "Madalena" and
Pixinguinha's "Lamentos."
Bridge is unorthodox in a number of ways. First, steel pans have seldom been used as a jazz instrument. And second, they have rarely been used to play Brazilian and Cuban songs. At a time when jazz was often accused of having lost its innovative spirit,
Narell was still proving himself to be a very imaginative risk-taker. ~ Alex Henderson