Personnel:
Martín Leiton (arr, dir, b), Iván González, Pol Omedes, Andrea Motis, Oscar Latorre, Pep Garau (tp), Rita Payés, Joan Codina, Víctor Colomer (tb), Darío García (b-tb), Marcel·lí Bayer (as, fl), Joan Mas (as), Gabriel Amargant (ts), Santi de la Rubia (ts), Joan Chamorro (bs), Toni Saigi (p), Dani Pérez (g), Pedro Campos (b), Ramon Prats (d), Juan Rodríguez Berbín (perc)
Reference: FSNT-539
Bar code: 8427328435390
"Catalonia-based bassist, composer and arranger Martín Leiton has worked in a variety of settings. He has led trios and quartets and now he is leading his own big band. He’s also released two albums under his own name; Medium (96k Music, 2011) and Poetry Of Sound (Underpool, 2015) with a quartet and a trio respectively. He’s worked with Kenny Werner, Jeff Ballard, Seamus Blake and Eric Marienthal amongst others plus fellow Iberian jazzers Perico Sambeat and Chano Domínguez.
Leiton’s big band project arose out of the vibrant Barcelona jazz scene and features some of its best known protagonists including Pol Omedes, Andrea Motis, Joan Chamorro, Santi de la Rubia, Dani Pérez and Pedro Campos. It has a conventional line-up of four trumpets, five saxophones, four trombones, plus guitar, piano, double bass and drums and the addition of a percussionist. This time-honoured configuration clearly pays dividends. Inevitable fuses different musical traditions, jazz, folk and Latin and the result is a dynamic and imaginative marriage of Afro-Cuban and Spanish numbers.
Several of the compositions are reliant on stretched-out grooves played over a bass figure, such as the longest track Canto Para Sanar, one of the three tracks on which Leiton himself plays double bass. Others, however, are more convoluted such as the complex and labyrinthine Rompescristales. There’s a lightness of touch to the arrangements too, elevated in part by the judicious deployment of percussion, as realised by the Venezuelan drummer Juan Rodríguez Berbín. From the fanfare opening and staccato-rich Bembe Lengue (deliberately rhyming with Merengue perhaps?) to the restated quotes from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on Visions, this is emphatically a superior big band outing."
Roger Farbey
Jazz Journal (February, 2017)
