Latin Kick

Some people associate jazz with the vibrant, temperamental spirit of the passionate musician, while others perceive it as a laid-back, chillin’ music that relaxes you when you need relaxation and peace. Well, if you belong to the second group of jazz fans, this masterpiece by Cal Tjader will definitely suit your mood. Of course, there is passion in “cool” jazz and there is calmness in “hot” jazz, so this division is conditional, but some of it is true. Cal Tjader is a West-coast musician and he’s connected to the cool jazz scene of the West in many ways. After Dizzy Gillespie,  who worked mostly on the East coast (New York), Tjader was the  most important American musician in amalgamating jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms into an authentic and vital music. He became known as the most successful non-Latino Latin musician. Although often associated with the cool jazz idiom, his rhythms and tempos (both Latin and bebop) had little in common with the work of Los Angeles jazzmen Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, or Art Pepper. Beginning in the 1950s, Tjader's bands profoundly influenced the course of Latin jazz.

This delightful 1956 album, called “Latin Kick,” was recorded on three consecutive days in Los Angeles in May 1956 and released in the same year on Tjader's house label Fantasy. The album’s eleven compositions are thematically spread all over the world and include songs about Paris and Vermont, despite the album title. The record as a whole is not Latin at all, at least not in the classic sense! It is much more fond of that infant genre and soon-to-evolve craze called Exotica. The personnel on this release included Manuel Duran on the piano, Carlos Duran on bass, Brew Moore on the tenor sax as well as Bayardo Velarde on the timpani and Luis Miranda on the congas.