Jack's Blog:
March 23rd 2010
Pedro Cartas Group at Bella Italia:
Gil-and-Cartas's names have been linked together and spoken in one breath ever since we got to San Miguel - and now they are history. Gil Gutierrez is off touring with Doc Severinsen - and you can't blame him for seizing the opportunity. Pedro Cartas, who may be the world's greatest pop violinist, is holding down their old slot at the Bella Italia, now with his own new band. We walked by and put our heads in the door one night, and it sounded so good we made a reservation for the following Thursday to hear the whole show. I said in my last post that we don't get out much - I was lying...The Bella Italia's food and service are not currently up to some of the other Italian restaurants in town - the Trattoria Antigua, Vivoli, La Grotta, and Mare Nostrum all are a neck ahead - but Bella Italia's the only one with a great band (Vivoli has good local musicians, but not quite in the Gil-and-Cartas class perhaps). The prices went up and the service down at some point after Doc Severinsen joined the Gil-and-Cartas band and the hordes arrived; now Bella Italia has to compete more on merit. But I'm reviewing the band...
Pedro looks and sounds happy. The new band is violin, accordion, acoustic bass and percussion, and it's a very refreshing blend. Beto Gonzalez (bass) and Miguel Favero (percussion), the sidemen from the most recent incarnation of the Gil-and-Cartas band, are back on the stage, (the Doc-and-Gil band, appearing elsewhere in SMA for two nights between touring dates, is all new) and Camille the French accordionist is there as "special guest". Camille has had various configurations of a tango band called "Rio Negro", which included Beto on bass for a year or so, and the repertory is recognizably split between Gil-and-Cartas tunes and Rio Negro tunes. The brand-new-ness of the band is evident, but Camille has never had such a band (the guitar players he worked with didn't complement his sound very well) and Pedro is clearly much happier than he was during his couple of years of being drowned out by Doc's trumpet. We get the full sweet sound of his violin (he trained in the great Russian/Cuban classical tradition before he bailed out of Cuba and became a jazz player). Playing with Doc left a mark on him though - Pedro is being a more extroverted showman than we ever saw before, jumping round the stage and cutting loose with bravura cadenzas to end the tunes.
By all means go check it out. Reservations are recommended. Thursday through Saturday - I'm not sure about Sunday.
March 5th 2010
Blanco:
We caught Billy White's show last night at the Angela Peralta. (We don't go out to hear others musicians much these days, we're usually playing somewhere ourselves.)Billy - aka Guillermo Blanco for a while, and now just "Blanco" - is one of San Miguel de Allende's several Flamenco guitarists, and definitely the most hip and progressive of the lot. We remember his Flamenco shows at Finnegan's years ago - remember Finnegan's? That was, for a time, San Miguel's most happening place to see and be seen, and also to hear a number of great musicians - Gil and Cartas were there, too, just launching their "Gypsy Jazz" show which had a four year run at Bella Italia afterward.
Bill has deep roots into a lot of different musical styles, and is one of those musicians who won't just stay in the box. Last night's concert was light years beyond anything we had heard him do before - this has obviously been brewing for a while. The core element was his very, very skillful use of a sequencer, which he used to layer live tracks in elaborate compositions. He played oud, saz, guitar(s), and a variety of hand drums, accompanied at times with an electric drone box; picking up each instrument in turn, he would layer percussion and melody tracks in turn. The sequencer is a modern technical gimmick, much abused... we didn't really expect to hear compositions of the moving and imaginative quality that we heard. I enjoyed it to the point of deciding to shut my eyes and NOT to watch the technical details of how he was doing the sequencing, and just appreciate the compositions. However, the live sequencing was an element of showmanship much appreciated by the audience.
The music is rhythmic and modal, drawing on Flamenco, Arabic, Turkish, Indian and African influences and not at all on Western Classical or Jazz styles. The rhythms are intense: Billy plays odd-number meters flawlessly with none of the clunky and contrived qualities that we sometimes hear with that stuff. I did have to count - what is going on here? The rhythms were too good not to give some attention to the technical details. But again, the beauty of the compositions was ultimately more impressive than the technique. As another musician friend commented afterwards, "I can be impressed without being moved, and in that case I might just leave... I've been impressed a lot already..." (he didn't leave, and we all went down to the after-show party at "The Restaurant" - I can't believe it's really called that - on Diez de Sollano. "The Too Expensive For Us Restaurant", anyway. But the food was great.)
Congrads, Billy, you deserve the success.
Download the record here.