Customer Reviews

Danzon De Moises

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We've got Jewish & Western (Tim Sparks), hillbilly Jewish (Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys), Jewish soul-jazz (Steven Bernstein), Jewish soul-blues (Paul Shapiro and Midnight Minyan), Jewish avant-garde (John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz, Eric Friedlander), Jewish gonzo jazz (Jamie Saft)--Why not Jewish Afro-Cuban, danzon, and son?

Indeed, why not?

There's a small but vocal Cuban Jewish community, with their own Jewish traditions and sensibilities, who've come in contact with and slyly incorporated into their own musical understandings the expansive music of the African diaspora, as experienced in Middle-Passage Cuba.

As far as I know, El Danzon de Moises represents the first-ever disc seeking to capture this unique music.

And what a disc it is!

Featuring the usual Downtown suspects--such brilliant players as Mark Feldman (viola), Craig Taborn (piano), Ted Reichman (accordion), Marcus Rojas (tuba), Matt Darriau (clarinet, trompeta China), Peter Apfelbaum (soprano sax), and the great Susie Ibarra (percussion)--this discs cooks with an easy swinging groove, effortlessly linking two disparate but remarkably similar musical traditions: Afro-Cuban and Klezmer.

It's entirely amazing to me how easily and naturally these two traditons match up. It's almost as if they were meant to combine (as perhaps they were!). What astounds about this music is its insane naturalness, almost to the point of duh: Jewish swing melding seamlessly with African sensibilities.

My own view is that some of the most exciting music is happening at the fringes of traditional musics--musicians like Omar Sosa, Adam Rudolf, Dhaffer Youssef, Claude Chalhoub, Royal Hartigan, Cyro Baptista--and R. J. Rodriguez. Anyone at all interested in further exploration of the frontiers of jazz and world music should not hesitate to pick this up.

I love Cuban music. I love Klezmer music. Give Cuban music to expert Klezmer players, and you have superb music. You have this album. Sad, touching, inspiring, moving, beautiful, joyful, alive, passionate, most of all fun. What music should be about.

"EL DANZON DE MOISES" is a beautiful instrumental Cuban-Klezmer fusion music, unique and I think unprecedented, the fusion of Cuba's traditional "Danzon" and "Klezmer" musics. As a Cuban born, Cuban music fan, I was delighted to discover it and I want to congratulate Roberto Juan Rodriguez & His Ensemble for such a wonderful creation. I highly recommend this album with an album title song "El Danzon de Moises" or "Moses Danzon" worthy of its contents and creation. A must have for both Cuban and Klezmer music fans, I guarantee they will be delighted when they listen to this outstanding fusion and this unique creation. This album is definitely the musical voice of Cuba's longtime small but not forgotten jewish community "our polacos" as we called them, which is the title of the first song of this compilation. I am glad that through this great album they are letting their presence known to the world. Those of us who lived there and shared with them the wonderful things of our old times island always remember them as part of our culture.